Australia has also signalled its intention to broaden its treatment of the issue from one that is just environmental to one that draws on expertise from all arms of government, including defence and intelligence.
In Jakarta yesterday, the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Australia would use its spy satellites to monitor illegal logging in Indonesia as part of a push to ban or confiscate furniture and other products made from logs harvested illegally overseas.
Already, Australia's leading intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, is conducting its own detailed study on the security implications of climate change. The research began late last year.
The US proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass through Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever "national intelligence estimate" on global warming.
The effort would include pinpointing the regions at highest risk of humanitarian suffering, and assessing the likelihood of wars erupting over diminishing water and other resources.
The measure would also order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including "direct physical threats to the US posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes".
Experts say the increasing focus on global warming as a security issue could open new avenues of support for tougher efforts to limit greenhouse gases.
"If you get the intelligence community to apply some of its analytic capabilities to this issue, it could be compelling to whoever is sitting in the White House," said Anne Harrington, director of the committee on international security at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. "If the White House does not absorb the independent scientific expertise, then maybe something from the intelligence community might have more weight."
The global warming intelligence assessment would identify where nations or ethnic groups were most likely to fight over resources; where large migrations of victims would occur; how warming would affect global food supplies; and the increased risks of infectious disease.
The Australian initiative by the ONA - undertaken with other intelligence agencies - is understood to have proceeded slowly, and is some time from completion. It does not have the scope of the proposed US national intelligence estimate.
Graeme Pearman, a climate change expert from Monash University, said security had to be looked at in a broad sense, "the security of food, the security of water and fuel, the possibility of invasive species destroying our productive ecosystem".
In Jakarta, Mr Turnbull's Indonesian counterpart, Rachmat Witoelar, said Indonesia would be happy to use information "from sophisticated surveillance methods that Australia can provide and we really want to know where and who, so I would welcome this data sharing".
He said shops and manufacturers should not buy wood suspected of coming from illegal logging in Indonesia. Consumers should reject any suspect wood and the Australian Government should make greater efforts to combat the trade, he said.
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