Climate Change and Conflict
As world leaders have gathered in Paris for the latest United Nations conference on combatting climate change, it is clear that the world’s changing climate is having a major geopolitical impact in many areas of the world. While there continues to be some debate over the causes of climate change, there should be no debate that the world’s climate is changing and that this is forcing populations in many areas of the world to react to these changes. Unfortunately, these reactions have often been hostile, as populations in areas being negatively impacted by climate change are finding themselves surrounded by, or involved in, conflicts over access to vital resources such as water and arable land. Moreover, most scientists agree that the world’s climate will continue to change in the years, decades and centuries ahead, and that this will increase the pressure on many populations to find suitable access to vital resources such as land and water, potentially leading to even more climate-driven conflicts.
There are many ways in which climate change can provoke or contribute to conflicts between rival states, ethnic groups or other agglomerations of people. Most important among these is the impact that a changing climate can have on the resources that societies (particularly those with rapidly-expanding populations) need to thrive, such as water and arable land. In the cases where climate change is leading to lower rainfall levels, water and arable land is becoming scarcer and this is leading to conflicts over the control of the dwindling water and arable land that is available in the impacted regions. In other cases, climate change could result in water, arable land and other natural resources becoming more easily accessible, such as when rising temperatures in very cold regions leads to more arable land becoming available, while once-frozen sea lanes become ice free. In both cases, such changes can lead to massive population shifts that provoke conflict, either by large numbers of people fleeing increasingly resource-poor regions or by large numbers of people moving to what were once resource- and population-poor areas of the world.
There are a multitude of examples of conflicts around the global that have been driven, in part, by the world’s changing climate. For example, Africa’s Sahel region is becoming increasingly arid, as low rainfall levels have allowed the Saharan Desert to spread southwards. As such, there has been a huge destabilization of this region in recent years, with conflicts such as the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, the Islamist and Tuareg rebellions in Mali and the conflict in Darfur being caused in no small part by the dwindling amount of water and arable land in the Sahel, forcing that region’s fast-growing population to battle one another for access to these resources. Meanwhile, an example of how climate change can create a new flashpoint can be seen in the Arctic, where warmer temperatures are leading to less sea ice cover in that region, potentially opening new shipping lanes and providing access to once inaccessible reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources. This, in turn, is leading to an arms race in the Arctic as countries such as Russia, Canada and the United States scramble to stake their claims to the region’s resources and shipping lanes. In fact, history is littered with conflicts and geopolitical upheavals that have been driven by major changes in the earth’s climate.
Looking ahead, there are growing fears that climate change will continue to accelerate and that this will lead to the number and intensity of climate-driven conflicts increasing in the future. For example, water resources in many areas of the world will continue to be stretched even further as populations continue to grow and this could spark serious conflicts, some involving major world powers. Moreover, changing weather patterns will deprive some countries of water and arable land, but could provide more of these needed resources to other countries. Likewise, rising sea levels could endanger many highly populated areas of the world (such an Bangladesh) and this could result in major population shifts that would destabilize the regions where these populations moved. With the potential for more large-scale population movements and the creation of new failed states growing significantly, the potential for higher levels of unrest and conflict in many areas of the world will likely continue to grow. Of course, we can already see some of these changes taking place, whether in the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa or in the recent migration crisis in Europe. What is certain is that a changing climate is going to lead to new geopolitical challenges over the course of the 21st century that cannot be ignored today.