Al Qaeda’s most recent failed attempt to destroy a Detroit bound aircraft on Christmas Day has led to increased interest in Yemen where it appears the would-be bomber linked with Al Qaeda before the attack. Yemen has increasingly been a hot-spot for violence and a new found haven for terrorism.

Recently the US and UK went so far as to close their embassies in Yemen based on terrorist threats. Many believe that as US and NATO forces increase pressure in Afghanistan forcing the areas along the Af-Pak border less comfortable for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, will they look to Yemen as a new headquarters and breeding ground. Critics claim US “efforts in Yemen are being constrained by a lack of in-house expertise and a fraught history with the country’s leader.”

Clearly, Yemen is an area of increased interest and a potential hotbed for terrorism and crisis; and an area where we could use better insights. We looked into our index at Recorded Future to see what information we could learn about the future of Yemen and the results are interesting – to start with, Yemen is attracting al-Qaida:

Senior al-Qaida figures moving to Yemen Country
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (UPI) — Veteran al-Qaida terrorists are leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan and are heading to Yemen, U.S. and foreign government officials say.

When we look at the history of Yemen, we see reoccurring natural disasters in the region. It’s obvious that Yemen is prone to repeat flooding, fierce storms, and drought.

An alternative way to view these results in Recorded Future is using our new timeline view (which is coming shortly). The continuous green bar represent events where natural disasters occurred throughout the year (or were described in year terms), and the dots or shorter bars show specific incidents or time points when a natural disaster event occurred.

These extreme weather conditions no doubt have impact on their agricultural production as we see from the hits below. These events foretell of famine and food shortages coming in 2010:

Humanitarian crisis looms in Yemen – Oxfam Country
Humanitarian crisis looms in Yemen – Oxfam. – …SANAA, (Reuters) – The international aid group Oxfam warned on Tuesday that Yemen could soon face a humanitarian crisis as a result of the escalation of fighting in August between government forces and…

Earlier this year we wrote about early warning sings of conflict. Many have argued that crop shortages and consequently famine are a red flag for unstable nation states. The rise in population combined with decreased grain production is particularly concerning:

Yemen: Integrating culture into development strategy for reproductive health (Local) Country
The population of Yemen now stands at 22.3 million, and is therefore expected to double by 2050.

There’s no shortage of speculation about Yemen’s future based on these opinions:

Yemen: We are on the verge of an Islamic Revival Country
2024… of the Islamic Caliphate and the role of youth Dear brothers and sister, I am speaking to you from Yemen at the moment and there are some similarities between Yemen and Pakistan, so when speaking about one, it is like speaking about the other.

Aid won’t fix the crisis in Yemen (Opinion) Country‘s donors believe stabilizing President Salehs regime will thwart the devolution of Yemen into a failed state and an al Qaeda safe haven. – U.S. aid proposed for 2010 is at the highest levels in years.

This article from the Yemen Post seems to have strangely disappeared:

It’s important to remember that Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world as well as a haven for Islamic jihadists. The Pentagon is spending over $70 million this year to train and outfit Yemeni military, but that doesn’t directly address the issues we’ve uncovered. Based on the information we’ve gathered we can see that Yemen will likely experience food shortages in and torrential floods in 2010. This combination of natural disasters, propensity for famine and malnutrition, and challenges with Islamic radicals and terrorists make it a top hot-spot for conflict in the future.

We’ve talked about environmental disasters earlier here – and it’s an interesting area to explore. Environmental issues/disasters have many impacts in both short and long term: economics, poverty, food/crop devastation, water supply, national security, and of course, the actual environment in itself.

Recorded Future collects environmental events from a variety of sources -  government sources, newspapers, blogs, etc. – and organizes them by date of publication as well as the date of the event in itself – which might be historical (an environmental disaster in the 70s), something happening right now, a water shortage just over the time horizon, or a conclusion on global warming in 2025.

The two current core event types for environmental analysis are Environmental Issue and Natural Disaster (inheriting from our friends at OpenCalais!). We can explore these by publication time and event time – the former being the date an article gets published and the latter being the actual date of say a natural disaster – last year, today, or perhaps impending next week.

Natural disasters by publication date

Let’s begin by reviewing natural disasters by publication date – as below – with the blue curve being the daily count and the red area being the 7 day moving average of natural disasters. You clearly see ebbs and floods (not trying to be funny!) in disasters, and by clicking the flags you can see recent events such as Earthquake in Sumatra, rains in Karnataka, Chinese earthquake, Taiwanese typhoon, etc. You also can find interesting connections such as piracy being expected to increase around the Horn of Africa following end of Monsoon rains.

Note that the graph is interactive – you can zoom it and click the markers. It’s also updated in real time as you refresh this page. X axis is time, Y axis is count.

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Clearly you’d like baseline this data and review cycles over long time periods. Alerts based on geographic areas going out of their normal cycle could also be highly helpful.

Environmental issues by publication date

Likewise we can explore environmental issues by publication date – as below. Now the peaks are much more driven (at least in this time period) by policy discussions. The big peak on September 22nd is a good example (big UN meeting). However – policy is connected to events – and natural disasters should be a good “connector”.

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Natural disasters by event date

We can also explore the actual date of events, rather than just the dates they were published (the power of Recorded Future!). Sometimes of course these two dates align, but in many cases they don’t. An article might cover disasters from last year, today, or that might go down next week. Review this visualization where events are displayed by their event date, stretching in 2010.

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The peak around October 1st, with earthquake in Sumatra and rains in Karnataka stands out again. The shapes of the natural disaster curve by publication date for the same time period is largely the same.

However – the interesting part obviously becomes to review the future. It would be a bit optimistic to find actual future natural disasters spelled out (although it happens), however we do find quite interesting content ranging from short term future to the very long term:

• Future changes of budgets and other short term policy actions to deal with disasters that just have happened (like in the Philippines)
• Indications of future water shortages – “Beijing faces a serious water shortage that cannot be alleviated before 2014 at the earliest”
• and all the way to “Here is the weather for 2080: floods, droughts and heatwaves”

Environmental issues by event date

Now, when we explore environmental issues the timeline and the overall information content is richer in the future – which makes sense since disasters tends to be more “point in time” whereas environmental issues are many times early indications of what’s to come.

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Here we can find issues from just around the corner until predictions into 2050 – and global warming plays a big role.

Conclusions

There are certainly some overlaps between natural disasters and environmental issues, in particular when you look further into the future beyond say the next 12 months – and in particular around global warming issues where the distinction between a “natural disaster” and an “environmental issue” certainly can be pretty vague. But interesting follow-on analysis would include

• Certain classes of disasters – e.g. hurricanes have cycles to them and lend themselves to predictions. How can we take advantage of that?
• Exploring for classes of events, say water shortage, how does what is initially reported as an environmental issue turns into an actual disaster – can that be modelled? Are certain sources more interesting than others in meaningful early indications?
• Can we build chains of events from early warnings through intermediate events (indications of water shortage) to outright hunger/draught to downstream violence?
• For what types of environmental and natural disaster data does open sources such as those covered by Recorded Future bring an edge compared to more classic say meteorological approaches?
• How can Recorded Future data be combined with other approaches and data to provide new edges in environmental analytics?

If you had a crystal ball and could look into the future the first thing you might do is head to Wall Street. After lining your pockets with cash you might turn your attention to more noble causes. You might use these predictive powers to avert disasters, mitigate threats, and quite literally save lives. Governments are tasked with protecting citizens and in many cases threats are unknown. If you could foretell destabilizing events or better understand emerging threats this information could help officials protect and improve the lives citizens around the world. Recorded Future may not be able to tell you exactly where the next terrorist attack will be but it can offer some very powerful clues to government analysts looking to better understand what the future may hold.

Environmental factors are often key contributors to destabilization

It has been reported, for example in New Scientist that food and water shortages may be precursors to civil unrest and ultimately war. The strongest data statement out of this article perhaps is “In a forthcoming paper, he [Marc Levy of Columbia University] and colleagues combine databases on civil wars and water availability to show that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles in the following year”. Just recently NYTimes published an article called Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security – on the same very topic. Likewise we could very recently read in the Financial Times about how water shortage leads to mass hunger in Kenya – in a recently very unstable part of world.

The idea is fairly simple: if the water runs out people may blame their government and/or migrate into the territories of other peoples. Either often leads to fighting in less stable areas of the world. So, the question becomes: where are the water shortages? In today’s modern age of satellites and senors scientist and analysts have numerous ways to spot drought, and other effects of climate change; that is if they happen to be looking in the right place, at the right time. A simpler or complimentary approach might be to listen for these signs in the daily interactions and conversations of people. Years ago this would have been done by wandering streets listening in on conversations or reading local news papers or interviewing individuals. However, today many of these conversations are conducted in public forums on the Internet.

As we’ve learned from the recent events in Iran, people around the world are Twittering, blogging and Facebook-ing about their situation. Recorded Future could be used to not only monitor these channels, but also to uncover people’s sentiment and thoughts on the future.

Exploring in Recorded Future

In it’s simplest form we can pose a query EnvironmentalIssue Next 30 Days to find places where near term Environmental issue of interest are “percolating” – such as this upcoming dry spell in Indonesia

Likewise looking at all Future environmental issue events on a Google Map allows us to find hot spots of upcoming environmental events

We look forward to allowing users to be alerted on future environmental issues in particular geographic areas and time periods – seemingly interesting to those in areas such as government analysis, NGOs, logistics, energy trading, energy exploration, etc.

As always, we welcome your comments below!

Christopher