This article was first published by the Organization for World Peace on October 30, 2017. The original article can be read here.
Introduction
Climate change and its role in humanitarian crises across the world is becoming an increasingly urgent topic. It is safe for us to presume that this urgency will only grow in the future, as climate change is likely to worsen. It is becoming clear that climate change poses a subtle threat to human security, but it is one that is no less dangerous than traditional security threats such as nuclear proliferation or terrorism.
The threats from climate change on the international system can be both direct and indirect. Directly, climate change destroys ecosystems that people rely on for their livelihoods. Indirectly, dwindling resources and ecological mismanagement leads to increases in social tensions and the endangerment of human lives.
The consequences of climate change are very long-lasting. To mitigate the damage requires conscious mitigation efforts and effective policy coordination from world leaders. Failure to effectively manage climate change will result in unchecked environmental degradation. The resulting unchecked environmental degradation will further escalate conflicts and cause more severe humanitarian crises in the future.
Mechanism
The Importance of Natural Resources
Numerous mechanisms exist that translate ecological change into social instability. Despite claims to the contrary, it is clear that human society still very much depends on nature. No matter how technologically advanced we become, society still relies on natural resources to produce the goods and services that humans need to survive.
Access to natural resources is vital to the livelihood of the entire world’s population. Most of the world’s agriculture still cannot be divorced from river basins and fertile soil. Similarly, advances in synthetic materials still cannot replace the raw minerals mined from the earth. For populations whose livelihoods depend on nature with less with no technological substitutes, the result of climate change is ruinous. Even today, farmers and fishermen in some of the world’s least developed countries are extremely vulnerable to environmental changes that can significantly decrease their output.
The consequences of resource constraints will not be restricted only to food producers and other low-tech industries. Even technologically advanced industries such as pharmaceutical manufacturing still rely on a wealth of natural resources. Due to this reliance on natural products, environmental damage affects these industries’ productivity. The resulting fall in the production of food, medicine, and other necessities due to climate change inevitably leads to inflation and lowered living standards. The poor and the marginalized may be the first to feel the “pinch” of inflation and declining health. But if the world does not stop environmental degradation, poverty and declining health would inevitably affect populations living in more affluent areas as well.
Tensions and Violence
There is a positive relationship between economic decline and violence. Economic decline often leaves more people with more mouths to feed with fewer resources. The result of such unmitigated economic decline is the buildup of social tensions. The outward expressions of societal tensions can take the form of anger against the established political order, and against a society’s marginal identifiable groups.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of increased violence resulting from economic deprivation. The Panel traces the cause of the deprivation to environmental mismanagement, natural resource over-exploitation, and human-induced climate change. The resulting food riots and conflict over diminished productive resources are a logical extension of diminished resources available to the community. Ultimately, communities will turn on each other over diminishing resources, such as water, farmland, fishing areas, and forests.
The violence that stems from climate change will not remain on the local scale. The violence and instability that environmental degradation induces can manifest globally, even if the environmental damage is only local in scale. Migration is one clear symptom of the knock-on effect of climate-induced instability. Increasingly, people are moving from the impoverished areas of the world move to the affluent zones, where climate change has yet to have a major impact. As economic opportunities at home are exhausted, people move to areas where resources are still sufficient to support themselves and their dependents.
Climate Change, Humanitarian Crises, and State Conflict
One recent example of climate-induced instability that has a global impact is the Syrian Civil War and the resulting humanitarian crisis. Scholars have proposed that one of the reasons that tipped Syria into civil war was the unprecedented droughts that wrecked the country from 2006 to 2011. As the droughts devastated Syrian agriculture, it drove the population into a desperate state and made the country ripe for chaos. The subsequent influx of Syrian refugees to Europe incited a rise of nationalism and xenophobia in European politics. Therefore, the Syrian refugee crisis shows that even countries that are spared the worst effects of climate change will still feel its effect.
There are even state-to-state conflicts whose roots can be traced back to climate change. One example of such type of state-to-state conflict with climate change as the cause is the Mauritania-Senegal Border Conflict that raged from 1989 to 1991. In that war, Mauritania and Senegal fought over the agricultural lands in the Senegal River area. Similar to Syria, the conflict occurred after a series of droughts hit the region that destroyed the livelihood of many residents of the region. While the climate and environmental changes will not be the sole reason for future conflicts, they will certainly be a major factor in escalating national and inter-state tensions.
Global Inaction
Despite the threat posed by climate change, many governments and political actors have yet to take serious notice of this issue. The world is beginning to experience the consequences of environmental mismanagement on a scale never seen before. Phenomena such as climate-induced migration, dwindling water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, falling fishing stocks, and extreme weather patterns are appearing with increasing frequency. The effects are happening with more deadly consequences each time. Yet, the majority of the world’s leaders continue to either ignore climate change or point to superficial causes and implement band-aid solutions.
Even worse than inaction is the advocates who delight in the prospective “benefits” of a warmer climate. In more northerly countries of Canada and Russia, some people have even welcomed a warming climate with enthusiasm. These people like to rejoice in the claims of more arable land becoming available, or mineral resources becoming lucrative to mine, as the ground above thaws due to climate change.
These arguments are very short-sighted. Such arguments ignore places where climate change has already devastated the local economy and destabilized local societies. They also ignore the global security implications that climate change has already caused and will only exacerbate in the future. As the European migrant crisis and the subsequent rise of radical ideologies has shown, people and ideas will move in response to changing environments of their place of residence. Even if the warming climate only brings economic benefits to these northern countries, the desperate populations from the more affected parts of the world will seek to move to where the living conditions are less harsh. This movement will inevitably bring conflict, as it has done time and time again.
The Future
Climate change and social instability are inherently linked. Failure to address climate change will lead to the exacerbation of social tensions. It is also becoming evident that, in regard to climate, even the richest states in the world are not immune to climate change’s direct and indirect negative effects, as rising inflation and the number of migrants can attest. As climate change worsens, so will the likelihood of more frequent conflict, human displacement, and humanitarian catastrophes. As a truly global threat, the solution to climate change and the ensuing consequences would require a coordinated global policy framework and world leaders having to look beyond the immediate future.
References
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