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"The natural environment enjoys protection under Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions," Ban said. "But this protection is often violated during war and armed conflict. Water wells are polluted, crops torched, forests cut down, soils poisoned, and animals killed, all in order to gain military advantage."

Since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998, the conflicts have been rooted in struggles for control of natural resources such as water, timber, diamonds and other minerals as well as various political agendas.

"The United Nations attaches great importance to ensuring that action on the environment is part of our approach to peace," Ban stressed today. "Protecting the environment can help countries create employment opportunities, promote development and avoid a relapse into armed conflict.

discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.

most possibly destabilizing populations and governments: degradation of freshwater resources, food insecurity, natural disasters and environmental migration.

the number of world regions vulnerable to drought was expected to rise

The geo-engineering option provides the needed viable reason to do nothing about AGW now….

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

they simply omit the costs of many of the potential negative aspects of producing a stratospheric cloud to block out sunlight or cloud brightening

our early twenty-first century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond.

Today, our successes and problems flow from the extraordinary growth in the world economy over the last century.

While the economy is growing exponentially, the earth’s natural capacities, such as its ability to supply fresh water, forest products, and seafood, have not increased. Humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

"if geo-engineering studies focus too heavily on warming, critical risks associated with such possible "cures" will not be evaluated appropriately"

climate change is about much more than changes in temperature. So using temperature alone to monitor the effects of geo-engineering could be dangerous.

current climate models tend to underestimate the effects on precipitation of both greenhouse gases and of volcanic eruptions

Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using global food insecurity as a tool for political control.

rich countries are buying poor countries’ fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home.

“USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest and has little to do with humanism.”