Conflict, Environment & Climate Change

IRAQ Near Basra: An oil fire rages just south of Basra near a former Iraqi military position, where depleted munitions canisters remain in a pile. US and British troops invaded Iraq on 20th March 2003 without United Nations Security Council agreement.
Photographer © Yola Monakhov / Panos Pictures

Geneva, 13 Oct. 2007. The International Peace Bureau congratulates the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore on the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The work they have done in waking up the world has been decisive” said IPB President Tomas Magnusson, “especially over the last 12 months - although the scientific work underpinning the case for radical steps to save the planet from climate disaster goes back several decades”.

Worldwide climate change is not only a peace question because of the risk of new conflicts that may follow, as stated by the Nobel Committee, but also on account of the enormous negative impact the military itself has on the environment – through pollution, use of scarce resources, and diversion of colossal sums of money away from sustainable development.

For Al Gore, under pressure to enter the US Presidential race, the challenge will be to live up to the widespread expectations generated by the new way of thinking, not only on climate issues, but also, for example, in withdrawing the American troops from Iraq.

The IPB is pleased to announce today the publication of a new IPB paper 'A Climate of War,' which addresses these issues*. In essence, the argument made in the paper is that there is a real danger that the growing competition for resources (resulting in part from climate change) may cause the leadership of the big powers to claim greater legitimacy for inflated military budgets - and even more dangerous weapons systems. This is absolutely not the way to go. The message of today's Prize is surely that we are all in the same boat and we had better develop peaceful ways of sharing our resources before the boat capsizes.

* The paper, together with a number of other related resources, is available here.

“The majority of the United Nations' work still focuses on preventing and ending conflict, but the danger posed by war to all of humanity and to our planet is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming… [the effects of climate change are] likely to become a major driver of war and conflict.”
- United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon. March 1, 2007.

From the deleterious effects of defoliants in the Vietnam War through the Nuclear Winter Scenario of the Cold War to the still largely uncatalogued effects of depleted uranium munitions, the negative environmental effects of militaries and wars have long been recognised. It is only since the 1990s, however, that links in the other direction, between environmental stress and insecurity, have begun to be clearly articulated. Since that time there has been a growing consensus that environmental problems can cause, exacerbate and contribute to conflict. Early work in the field focussed on resources, and thus on examples such as deforestation in the Ethiopian Highlands, the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and pressure on agricultural capacity in Rwanda, Honduras and El Salvador. Later work has looked at the issue of environmental refugees and internally displaced persons and their contribution to political instability and conflict. It is only very recently, however, that the focus has turned to Climate Change and recognition that its effects pose a major threat in the realm of both traditional and human security. It is the purpose of this first section to map out the evolution in thinking on environmental security and thus bring the reader up to date with the current position of the debate.

In the early 1990s it was thought that the impacts of Climate Change would be felt primarily in the temperate regions of the world – generally those best-equipped to deal with the effects. In addition, it was believed that the impacts would be felt slowly, giving the world time to adjust. It is now understood, both that the effects of Climate Change may be felt very rapidly, and that already vulnerable parts of the globe – tropical and equatorial zones – will bear a large proportion of the effects. In this section we will briefly discuss the nature of a number of Climate Change effects with particular relevance to future conflict such as desertification, changing rainfall patterns, sea level rises and increased storm intensity. We will continue by discussing the likelihood of these effects occurring under a number of different climate scenarios.

The third and major part of the study will be divided into two sections of equal size: Displacement of People and Pressure on Resources. In the first section we will examine the links between flows of displaced people and conflict. While it is true that only a small proportion of total numbers of displaced people (both refugees and IDPs) are directly involved in violence there are, however, important links between the displacement of people and conflict. Those we will discuss here include: the spread of arms, of combatants and of ideologies as well as the way in which the large-scale displacement of people can contribute to overall instability by altering the ethnic balance within states and increasing competition for scarce resources.
We will look at two case studies here. The first of these will focus on the potential for intrastate violence and the second on interstate conflict.

This second section will examine the impact of the different Climate Change scenarios discussed in part two on three key resource areas: Energy, Food Security and Water.

Energy:
We will discuss factors like the vulnerability of oil and gas supply networks and the way in which increased instability in oil producing regions could result in both a reduction in total supply as well as an increase in supply side inelasticity. We will look at the way in which resulting anxieties over access to supply may lead (and are already leading) to increased tensions and conflict. This is true of both inter and intrastate conflict. We will thus examine the potential for conflict within resource-rich states such as Nigeria and Venezuela as well as that between major states over resource-rich regions such as Central Asia and the Middle East.

Food Security:
We intend to look at factors such as projected reductions in available arable land as well as the increased instability of agricultural yields as patterns of rain and drought both change and become more irregular. We will then link these projected outcomes to conflict-causing factors such as inequality, resource scarcity, famine and national and regional instability. Many parts of Africa are obvious candidates for a case study here, as is much of the Mediterranean basin.

Water Security:
We will look at three projected effects of climate change: the reduction in total flows in some water catchment areas, the increasingly unpredictable flows in others as well as the effects of saline contamination on underground water-bearing strata. As with the sections above, we feel it would be interesting to link this discussion to specific examples, such as the fragility of agreements governing water supply in the Mekong, the Jordan or the Tigris river basins and the potential for future conflict.

While it is especially difficult in this field to make precise predictions, we intend here to map out several possible outcomes based on the Climate Change scenarios discussed in section two, and to point to the main policy implications. It is not our intention to duplicate any of the work done by the many scholars already working in the field; rather we wish to draw out the broad implications of the issue both for decision-makers and for civil society campaigners.

We will consider in particular the environmental impact of the military sector itself, and the costs of tackling Climate Change. Given the huge, and rising, levels of global military spending devoted to defence against threats of low or remote probability, the much higher likelihood of extreme impacts from Climate Change justifies, as Ban Ki Moon points out above, at least an equivalent response. This is a response that will necessitate both a redefining of the role of the military and the diversion of resources away from war preparations and towards investment in effective responses to the climate challenge. We will argue that such a priority shift will make important contributions in both main areas of concern:

* By this term we refer both to refugees that cross international boundaries as well as to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). [Back to article]