Climate Change and Armed Conflict

Hot and Cold Wars

James R. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135211622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the evolution of the relationship between climate change and conflict, and attempts to visualize future trends.

Owing to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, current trends in climate change will not appreciably alter over the next half century even if drastic action is taken now. Changes in climate will produce unique types and modes of conflict, redefine the value of important resources, and create new challenges to maintaining social order and stability. This book examines the consequences of climate change and argues that it has and will produce two types of different types of conflict: 'cold wars' and 'hot wars'. Cold wars will occur in northern and southern latitudes as warming draws countries into possible conflict due to expanding interests in exploiting new resources and territories (inter-state conflict). Hot wars will break out around the equator as warming expands and intensifies dry areas, increasing competition for scarce resources (intra-state conflict). Conflict is not inevitable, but it will also be a consequence of how states, international institutions and people react to changes in climate. Climate change and conflict have always shaped human experiences. This book lays out the parameters of the relationship, shows its history, and forecasts its trends, offering future conditions and opportunities for changing the historical path we are on.

This book will be of great interest for students of climate change and environmental security, peace and conflict studies, and IR/security studies in general.

James R. Lee is a Professor in the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC and Associate Director of American University's Center for Teaching Excellence. He is author of several books on international relations, including, most recently, Exploring the Gaps: Vital Links Between Trade, Environment and Culture (2000).

1 The Climate Change War

The Cold War ended in the early 1990s. As the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, climate researchers saw signs of a planet warming at an unprecedented rate. These suspicions gradually accumulated and hardened over time as evidence became more clear-cut. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a team of scientists from around the world, provided the most definitive confirmation of these initial indications. The Earth was rapidly heating up, and human activity probably the major cause.

The Cold War was a 45-year global struggle. It was a slow-moving war between two great Powers, with conflict often indirect and fought out through proxies. Each side allocated enormous resources not only to gain military power, but also to obtain advantages in technology, culture, and science. It is fortunate that the Cold War stayed cold and nuclear catastrophe was avoided.

Just as in the Cold War, the threat from climate change has the potential for dire consequences – namely, armed conflict. What does the end of the Cold War have to do with climate change? John Ashton, UK Climate Change Representative, tied the two issues together:

There is every reason to believe that as the twenty-first century unfolds, the security story will be bound together with climate change…. The last time the world faced a challenge this complex was during the Cold War. Yet the stakes this time are even higher, because the enemy now is ourselves, the choices we make.

(Vogel 2007)

Alarm at the warming trend is shared by climatologists and others. Defense agencies see the link between climate change and conflict. A 2007 report by retired “senior admirals and generals” laid out a casual chain from climate instability to political instability. The latter opens the door for conflict and military involvement, and produces feedback that is a “threat multiplier” (CAN 2007: 1). The seeds of conflict will lie in massive migrations, border tensions, and disputes over essential resources.

At the urging of the United Kingdom, the United Nations Security Council debated the climate change and conflict link in April 2007. The argument was that climate change would exacerbate traditional and long-standing security issues. Six areas of linkage were identified: border disputes, migration, energy supplies, resource shortages, societal stress, and humanitarian crises.

The Cold War lasted nearly half a century. The Climate Change War will be a global period of instability that will last centuries. The period of greatest instability will be the twenty-first century. As in the Cold War, it will be a long struggle over core issues regarding rights and responsibilities in society. Throughout this period, there will be a new Cold War, and an existing Hot War that will intensify. Changes in climate will produce unique types and modes of conflict, redefine the value of important resources, and create new challenges to maintaining social order and stability.

The scientific community has reached broad consensus on the existence of climate change. Research on the relation to social instability and possible violent conflict has lagged far behind. Jon Barnett believes the linkages are largely indirect in nature:

As recent developments in environmental security research suggest, the concern with direct international conflict is misplaced, and the security impacts of environmental change will take less direct and more multifarious routes. Surprisingly, despite climate change being the most prominent and best-studied of the suite of environmental change problems, it has thus far received little systematic analysis as a security issue.

(Barnet 2001: 2)

The political context of climate change and conflict can be visualized on two political dimensions that intersect. One dimension for conceptualization is on the outlooks themselves. Are the forecasts faithfully considering a full range of options, and what are the implications of those not considered? At some point in forecasting, science gives way to beliefs on the course of history and the essence of human nature. How do optimists and pessimists view these forecasts?

The second conceptual area concerns the approach policy makers and people should take in responding to the climate change challenge. Some will argue that the state, acting in its national interest, is the best mechanism for dealing with an issue that will vary geographically in impact. Others believe that global norms and mechanisms need to be the basis for cooperation and progress. This dichotomy of vision creates realist and idealist camps.

Intensification of the climate change and conflict nexus has been unfolding for several millennia. The interaction between climate change and conflict has become much more rapid, types of conflict have grown, and territorial impacts have expanded. This book traces the history of the climate change and conflict relationship through the use of case studies, and examines how it will impact power and livelihood in the future.

The major theme is that the impacts of climate change will differ by geography. As a result, it will produce varied types of conflicts in various parts of the world. Ragnhild Nordas and Nils Petter Gleditsch believe that climate change “effects would vary considerably both geographically and by sector” (Nordas and Gleditsch 2007: 634). This range of impacts is important to realizing the meaning of climate change, in that it will not be a uniform experience.

There is momentum, to some degree, of climate change because of historic emissions into the atmosphere. The rate of emissions will probably reach a maximum in the first half of the century before starting to level off in the century’s second half. Climate change will differ by time as well as place.

Climate change will do more than just raise the temperature

The path from climate change to conflict will not be a direct one. For that matter, most roads to conflict are indirect and lie in structural and behavioral patterns that make the path easier to travel. There are three structural pathways from climate change to armed conflict: sustained trends, intervening variables, and the need for conflict triggers.

First, conflict only emerges after a sustained period of divergent climate patterns. People can survive aberrant, short-term climate change through exploitation of saved resources, but this strategy has temporal limits. The issue is not one of surviving a particularly fierce rain or a harsh winter, but the accumulation of many rain events and many harsh winters. Human society is capable of enduring events and seasons, but as these events and seasons accumulate over many years or even decades, accumulated wealth begins to draw down and eventually dissipates. Without renewal of society’s wealth, human health and well-being decline, and over time the society itself may collapse.

Societies with few savings will be more vulnerable to adverse impacts from climate change. Societies that already heavily exploit their environment will be closer to possible conflict than those that do not. Brian Fagan offers a context for climate-induced conflict in places where people already live on the edge of survival:

In a telling analysis on nineteenth century droughts, the historian Mike Davis has estimated, conservatively, that at least 20 to 30 million people, and probably many more, most of them tropical farmers, perished from the consequences of harsh droughts caused by El Ninos and monsoon failures during the nineteenth century, more people than in virtually all the wars of the century.

(Fagan 2008: 235)

Second, climate change alone will not cause conflict, but along with other factors, will contribute to it and shape it. With sustained climate change, social wealth will decline and the social fabric will weaken with each passing year, becoming more vulnerable to future challenges. It is not to say that societies are incapable of responding to changes and adapting to create conditions for survival. Adaptation is not a linear survival strategy. Rather, adaptation is part of a complex network of social interactions.

The complex of human experiences embeds adaptation within a whole range of social experiences that contain a wide variety of intervening variables. Adaptation becomes part of the political system, religious customs and rituals, patterns of demography and economic subsistence, types of social structures, locations of settlements, and modes of habitation, to name a few. Jon Barnett describes these multiple impacts:

It has not been shown that environmental factors are the only, or even important factors leading to conflict. Other factors such as poverty and inequities between groups, the availability of weapons, ethnic tension, external indebtedness, institutional resilience, state legitimacy and its capacity and willingness to intervene, seem to matter as much if not more than environmental change per se.

(Barnet 2001: 6)

The complex network of intervening variables has an enormous impact on the transmission of climate change to conflict. In human history, climate change has been a factor that fostered important breakthroughs in technology. It has also been a reason for the collapse of civilizations in orgies of killing and widespread savagery. Ability to adapt may make conflict less likely, allow countries to suffer fewer adverse consequences, or alternatively may serve to avoid conflict altogether. On the other hand, a mistaken or errant adaption may actually hasten and exacerbate conflict.

It is not the point here to suggest or claim that there is a type of environmental determinism at work in the climate change and conflict relationship. The idea of environmental determinism was dispelled long ago, and there is no intention of giving it new life here. But within the mix of these intervening variables, climate change is a strong and potent factor in determining the destiny of societies, and may in some cases serve as an essential piece to explaining conflict.

Some argue that assertions of climate change as a threat to human lives are a simple extrapolation of Malthusian treatises. They are not. The two frameworks have a considerable difference in dynamics. Malthus saw conflict between the exponential growth patterns in human population juxtaposed against the linear advances in agricultural production. In climate change models, population growth is assumed to eventually level off and perhaps even decline. The former is a static model, the latter dynamic.

Third, climate change can create structural conditions for conflict, but a trigger is required to set off strife. Triggers have historically included assassinations, extreme natural events, or random acts of group violence. As climateinduced stresses are sustained over time, and as they mix with intervening variables to create a social construct, there still needs to be a spark that completes the link to conflict and sets off the fire.

Rwanda in the 1990s is one example of a spark that set off a brewing conflict. The country had a dense population of livelihood farmers. During a generally drier climate period, coupled with extensive land-use change, there was a sus-tained period of deterioration in the carrying capacity (the resources needed by people compared to those available).

Against this backdrop was a colonial legacy and a society divided along ethnic lines, between Hutus and Tutsis. Rapidly increasing populations needed fertile land, and there was little available. In this structural milieu, many events could have set off the conflict. The Rwandan genocide was sparked by the assassination of the country’s President, whose plane was shot down under mysterious circumstances.

Given the fulfillment of these three conditions (structural incongruity over time, intervening variables, and the existence of triggers), along with some delays in timing, conflict emerges with changes in climate. The manner in which conflict occurs is, however, a different matter. It is possible to imagine three differing behaviors that can lead from climate change to conflict: scarcity, abundance, and issues of sovereignty.

First, climate change can lead to conflict due to scarcity. Suppose drying conditions and melting glaciers lead to loss of arable land, imposing extreme stress on vegetation and animal life, and causing a decline of fresh-water resources. Competition and conflict will increase as these resources become increasingly scarce. This will be especially true as demand grows and exceeds a region’s carrying capacity.

Scarcity can also be broken down into four differing types. First, physical scarcity usually pertains to limits on the availability of finite resources. Second, geopolitical scarcity involves the distribution of resources between countries, both finite and renewable. Third, socio-economic scarcity describes distribution differences within countries. Finally, environmental security refers to the availability of renewable resources, like rivers and forests (Rees 1991).

Global warming can cause displacement of people. In extreme examples, a desiccated ecosystem may cause entire populations to evacuate an area. Displacement, however, can be either a prolonged or a sudden event.

The growth of the Sahara Desert was a prolonged trend over many millennia. Drying and desert conditions thousands of years ago slowly nudged people out of the inland region of northern Africa and into great river valleys like the Nile and the Niger. The current degree of climate change will again threaten the ecological and social stability of these great river systems and the people who live there. Incremental but prolonged rises in sea levels will also slowly uproot hundreds of millions of people.

Examples of sudden displacement are the 2005 hurricanes “Katrina” and “Rita” in the southern United States. Together, the two events forced millions of people to suddenly leave Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, with several thousand dead. Some researchers believe that climate change will lead to more severe extreme weather events, and cite Katrina as an example of things to come. Consider these hurricanes in a different geographic context. In 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh displaced two million people and killed 138,000.

Whether rapidly or slowly, persons displaced by sudden events will eventually stop and settle down. For most of human history, a reservoir of unclaimed lands served as a “pressure valve” that tamped down conflict. Today, this reservoir no longer exists except in the very least hospitable parts of the planet. Areas now largely uninhabitable because of cold temperatures may eventually become habitable due to warming. Displaced persons will move into these places, provoking conflict. In the first millennium, for example, invading Mongols pushed Germanic tribes further west in Europe, where their conflict with the Roman Empire was inevitable. Rapid climate change exacerbates migration trends.

Migration is, however, a complicated phenomenon. There are internal and external dynamics, as well as differences between patterns in developing and developed countries. Jon Barnet notes that “Most migration is not international but rather occurs within individual countries, and most international migration occurs between developing countries” (Barnet 2001: 9). Today, most migration is cyclical. In the future, it is more likely to be a permanent condition. Like conflict, causes for migration are complex: “People rarely migrate for environmental reasons alone. A range of factors, including economic opportunity, operate in unison, and these are in flux as a consequence of the economic and cultural effects of globalization” (Barnet 2001:9).

Migration of displaced persons on a short-term basis may not seem significant. However, as migrants accumulate over an extremely long period, perhaps half a century, there will be substantial demographic impact. Shifting demographic patterns due to climate change will eventually force realignments in domestic, regional, and global power relations.

Climate change may cause resources to be more or less available, thereby altering relative wealth of individuals and countries. It is during these periods of change in relative power, driven in part by climate change, that conflict is often more likely. Scarcity, therefore, is not an absolute calculus, but a relative one.

Second, climate change may also lead to conflict due to an increase in abundance. Again, this will need to be a relative rather than an absolute measure. Suppose a resource becomes more available because of climate change. For example, the warming of extremely cold areas may allow resource extraction that was previously non-economic. Oil and gas fields in northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia are likely to become accessible with warming, and thus economically viable. Both energy and mineral resources underlie Antarctica. Competition over newly available resources may lead to conflict, especially when these resources turn up in places where boundaries are not clearly set. New arable lands will emerge which will quickly become sought-after property.

Abundance will also impact migration, in this instance acting as a “pull” factor. New economic resources will create new jobs. The availability of fertile land for people whose only skill is farming may serve as an enormous enticement.

The idea is that the relative importance of resources accelerates and deepens with climate change. A change of a few degrees of temperature can accentuate the difference between a hospitable and an inhospitable climate. Likewise, a small relative change in resource volatility may accumulate over time and subsequently produce much higher levels of conflict.

Third, changing climate will invite national interest and issues of sovereignty. The Northwest Passage in Canada is becoming an ice-free corridor from Europe to Asia during summer months. Canada claims some portions as sovereign waters, while the United States argues that they are international waters. (The differences reflect average versus maximum distances between points of land.) The more the sea levels rise due to melting of glaciers and ice caps, the more international law (under the UN Law of the Sea or UNLOS Treaty) favors the American position. Canada also proposes extending the reach of its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) from 200 to 500 miles.

In polar areas now covered by thick ice sheets, human habitation may become possible. Warming may expose land areas on the continent or on offshore islands. The value of such small islands would not be in the small rocks that might arise a few feet above the ocean. Rather, the value would be in the EEZ around it. There are also disputes over continental shelves. Denmark claims large parts of the North Pole because it is allegedly on the same continental shelf as Greenland (BBC News 2004).

Rising seas will slowly dislocate people. Remote islands, especially in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, are at risk. These islands ...