The Future of Climate Conflict

The current UK heat wave has left many of us hot, bothered, and ready for the weather to return to business as usual. The Brits are not known for their capacity to deal with prolonged hot weather, but it looks like it might be something we need to start getting used to. According to a recent report by the Met Office and Environmental Audit Committee, UK summer temperatures could regularly reach 38.5°C by the 2040s. Grimly, they warn that this could result in 7,000 heat-related deaths every year by 2050 if the government does not act on improving climate resilience.

Unusual weather patterns such as the current heat wave that has been affecting much of Europe this summer unfortunately have a much wider impact than simply raising ice cream sales. In the UK, just the last few weeks of hot weather have limited crop yields, with fruit and vegetable prices rising across the country due to limited supply. Farmers are often the worst-affected by droughts and heat waves, and whilst life may be a bit more difficult for those in the UK, in other parts of the world the effects of climate change and environmental degradation are having much more serious consequences.

A recent International Crisis Group report highlights the rapidly accelerating violence breaking out between herders and farmers in northern Nigeria. What began as a series of spontaneous attacks and land-grabs between the two groups, who compete for increasingly limited areas of fertile, arable land in the country, has now developed into systematic planned violence that has resulted in 1,300 deaths this year alone. This worsening conflict has already claimed six times more lives than the campaign against terrorist group Boko Haram, who made global headlines by kidnapping over 270 schoolgirls in 2014, and continue to engage in similar acts of violence across Nigeria. The fact that Boko Haram continues to steal headlines whilst this unchecked climate-related violence deteriorates across the country demonstrates the major issue that now faces us globally.

The Overseas Development Institute recently held an event that discussed the issue of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in fragile and conflict-affected states. One of the key issues raised by this discussion was the fact that currently the Sendai Framework, the UN framework for DRR makes no mention of conflict or violence. Natural disasters are considered to be non-political because they are not directly caused by people, and yet it has become clear that resilience to events such as droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes is in fact heavily influenced by politics. No event takes place in a vacuum, and we must consider the way that people will respond when they are forced to compete for increasingly limited resources. The violence in Nigeria paints a picture of what might be to come.

Droughts across Africa have cost millions of lives for decades now, but with global temperatures steadily rising the threat of them becoming longer and more severe is very real. This is already having huge geopolitical consequences across the continent. For example, although the River Nile is so often associated with Egypt, it actually runs through nine countries. The Blue Nile, the larger of its two tributaries, runs from Ethiopia through Sudan where it joins the White Nile to continue on into Egypt. However, Ethiopia, racked by drought and in need of hydroelectric power for its 102 million inhabitants, has begun construction of what will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, the Ethiopia Renaissance Dam. The project has been met with stiff resistance in Egypt, who fear it will cut their supply to the Nile and make their already precarious situation more dire. The fear of a “water war” between the countries is beginning to seem less and less like the plot of a dystopian sci-fi novel and more like something that should be seriously considered. On July 26^th 2018, two days prior to the writing of this blog, the project manager of the dam project, Semegnew Bekele, was found dead with a bullet wound to the head. Although there is no evidence of Egyptian involvement (and such an act would be extremely unlikely), the immediate reaction has prompted conspiracy theories from anti-Egyptian movements in Ethiopia, and will likely further strain the already-tense relationship between governments.

Whilst we rarely think of wars in the form of being about control of resources – they are usually discussed in terms of ethnic or religious differences, or ideological power struggles – the fact remains that often this is a leading cause of conflict. The European colonial campaigns of the 18^th and 19^th centuries were not about “civilising local peoples” or “spreading Western values” but about plundering resources from other parts of the world. Hitler’s advancement through Europe, though heavily couched in the terminology of race, was at-least in part focused on securing economic prosperity for Germany through the “Lebensraum” policy. Even the Cold War – that most ideological of ideological battles – largely concerned securing spheres of economic and political influence for the rival superpowers.

There has been much discussion about whether Syria is, or at least started as, a climate conflict. The argument was that heavy droughts in the years running up to 2011 led to a mass migration of people from rural areas, where they could no longer live off the land, into the cities. This migration exacerbated the difficult living conditions of the cities and led to the 2011 uprising. Whilst this linear, causal explanation is being challenged (and rightly so – there are many factors contributing to the development and severity of the Syrian conflict, as with all wars), it starts to demonstrate the complex interaction between people and the environment. As our environment changes, so will our behaviour.

The Global Footprint Network has named August 1^st as Earth Overshoot Day for 2018, the earliest the date has ever been set. This marks the point of the year where we have used up more natural resources globally than the planet can replace. In effect, as of this date we are working at a net loss to our global biocapacity. We are using resources that will not be replaced. As our pool of means for food, water, fuel, and other necessities dwindles, competition for those essentials will increase. If we want to prevent further violence like we are now seeing in Nigeria, we must reduce our environmental footprint, globally.

Acting sustainably and educating ourselves about our own environmental impact is more important now than ever. Combating climate change is an act of peacebuilding.