The floating storage and offloading
unit (FSO)
SAFER is located approximately 4.8 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. Built
in 1976 and moored off Yemen since 1988 to receive, store, and export oil from
the Marib oil fields, SAFER has now become an existential
threat to a huge number of Yemeni coastal communities.
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| Location of FSO SAFER. Source: OpenDemocracy |
In 2015, in the early days of the Yemeni civil conflict, Houthi rebels seized control of Hodeidah port as part of their rebellion against President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. FSO SAFER is moored just outside of Hodeidah, and in an effort to pressure the government to the negotiating table, the rebels began to limit access to the unit and its approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil. The oil onboard SAFER is estimated to be worth in excess of $80 million, making it a powerful bargaining tool for the rebels and a potential source of future income to help fund the war effort should they find a way to extract and sell its contents. However, the rebels have lacked both the resources and skills to continue maintenance on SAFER, and as the war raged on, the decaying vessel slowly became more and more unstable.
Now the United Nations is calling for urgent action
to stabilise SAFER and ensure the security of its contents. Should the vessel spring
a leak, it risks spilling four
times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska. The Exxon Valdez
disaster was the worst recorded oil spill in history until the Deepwater
Horizon spill in 2010, but 30 years later pockets of crude oil remain off the
Alaskan coast and continue to affect maritime habitats and fishing activities
in the area. 1,300 miles of coastline were affected, hundreds of thousands of
seabirds, otters, seals, and whales were killed, and the estimated economic
cost of the spill was $2.8 billion. It should be noted again here that Exxon
Valdez occurred off the coast of Alaska, and so immediate response was possible.
Access to a spill site off the coast of Yemen during an ongoing conflict would
be significantly more difficult.
And SAFER threatens to spill four times that amount of oil
if it is not secured soon.
Yemen is already suffering the world’s worst
humanitarian crisis. After six years of war, some 24 million people, or 80%
of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance. The UN Humanitarian Office
(UNOCHA) puts the current death toll of the conflict at 233,000, the majority
of which have come from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services,
and infrastructure. The crisis has been exacerbated by the world’s
largest cholera outbreak in epidemiological history, brought on by the
failure of water infrastructure as a result of the fighting, massive food
shortages as a result of interrupted agriculture due to conflict displacement
and a massive locust
infestation, and ongoing
barriers to humanitarian aid reaching the country. An oil spill of the size
SAFER is threatening would be a final
nail in the coffin for hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.
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| Source: Holm Akhdar, Yemeni Environmental Organisation |
As SAFER decays, the warring factions in Yemen have resorted
to blaming each other for the potential spill, before it has even happened.
Many groups, including the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, have stated that the
Houthis are withholding access to the tanker deliberately to force the
international community to acquiesce to their demands. Houthi groups have
responded by saying that the SAFER issue cannot
be addressed separately from other peace negotiations. This is to protect one
of the only bargaining chips they have to shore up their position in achieving concessions
from the Saudi-led coalition they have been fighting against. Given the latest sanctions
imposed on the Houthis by the Security Council, maintaining control of the
wealth stored aboard SAFER is a major priority for the rebel group.
With both sides digging in and refusing to compromise, many observers are now calling
for the UN to take a harder line in negotiating access to the vessel, and
even to use force in order to take control of the area surrounding SAFER. An authorised
use of force would allow the UN to intervene militarily to secure the tanker
and conduct its assessments. But this would require the UN Security Council
(UNSC) to invoke Chapter
VII of the UN Charter, which allows the UNSC to "determine the existence of
any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and to
take military and nonmilitary action to "restore international peace and
security".
The chances of a robust UN intervention without all parties
agreeing to the terms are remote. UNSC member states are far from in agreement
on how best to proceed with regard to the Yemeni conflict. Several permanent members
of the Security Council are heavily
involved in the arming and training of belligerents, particularly the UK,
USA, and France. Meanwhile, Russia has
been working closely with the Saudi-backed Hadi government to facilitate
peace talks with the aim of extending its own soft power in the region, and China,
rounding out the five permanent members of the UNSC, also finds
itself backing the Hadi government. Although this represents a rare case
where the five permanent UNSC members are largely aligned in their geopolitical
interests in a conflict zone, this does not mean that a resolution on the SAFER
container is guaranteed. Since the weight of the international community sits
largely behind the Hadi government, the Houthi rebel group are distrusting of
UN motives in the region, complicating negotiations and harming the image of
neutrality required to secure access.
As with any proxy war, the belligerent sides of the Yemeni
conflict have been co-opted by international actors to further their own ends,
with the Hadi government receiving widespread international support
despite the horrific
war crimes being committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its defence, and the Iran-supported
Houthi rebels receiving funding and resources from Saudi Arabia’s most
significant opponents in the region.
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| Map of Yemen Conflict Areas as of May 2020. |
In addition to these geopolitical barriers to a robust UNSC
response, the threat posed by SAFER is not one the UN is necessarily equipped
to respond to. As CEOBS
reports: “The UN Security Council has never approved the use of force to directly
address an environmental threat, and the chances of all of its permanent
members doing so now are remote. While Council resolutions have addressed
environmental issues, such as the role of natural resources in
fuelling conflict in the DRC, or the role of environmental degradation in
the Lake Chad crisis, this would set an entirely new precedent.”
This is a precedent that may yet have to be set.
War and the environment are inextricably
linked. Environmental degradation as a result of the changing climate is a
major contributing factor to conflict globally, with experts
suggesting that climate has influenced up to 20% of armed conflicts in the
last century, and that figure is expected to increase dramatically. Though we cannot
say that environmental degradation is the cause of conflicts, it is certain
that resource competition and displacement due to environmental causes
inevitably exacerbate tensions in conflict-prone regions. As the SAFER saga demonstrates,
conflict also increases the threat of further environmental damage.
And this is not unique to Yemen. The retreat of ISIS in Iraq
has
revealed a toxic legacy of pollution and environmental degradation as a
result of mismanagement of polluting factories and deliberate sabotage of water
supplies. In the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, decades of war have left the majority of the rural
population without access to clean water infrastructure. Conflict of all scales
directly
and indirectly damages the environment in myriad ways, and once that damage
is done it inevitably causes further strife in conflict-affected communities.
Environmental degradation forces displacement, and mass demographic changes,
poverty, and competition over resources breed further conflict. A disaster of
the scale expected should SAFER deteriorate further will inevitably exacerbate
the tensions driving the conflict in Yemen, and the people who will suffer the
consequences will be those already suffering the most.
The Yemen SAFER oil tanker situation is emblematic of the wider environmental crisis the world faces. As the tanker deteriorates and inches closer to environmental catastrophe, two warring parties fail to reach an agreement on the next steps. Meanwhile, an international community that lacks the teeth to make a meaningful impact fails to coerce or cajole either side to the table. The United Nations calls for sanity and urgent action to prevent a disaster, whilst member states jostle for power and influence over the long-term outcomes of the Yemeni conflict and continue to arm belligerents and provoke tension in the name of geopolitical goals.
This stark situation, the worst environmental threat from an
oil tanker the world has seen, threatening the lives of a population living
through the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet today, is the clearest example
of a global climate in which we all find ourselves.
In 2018, the IPCC announced that globally we had 12 years to take drastic action to prevent catastrophic climate change. As this rather depressing BBC article from 2019 notes, many experts believed that we actually only had 18 months to make significant political commitments to prevent a global warming of over 2 degrees Celsius. 18 months that have now passed. As the world inches towards climate collapse, we still do not have a unified agenda to tackle the greatest threat facing us today. For many, this threat is still an abstract future concern. Other, supposedly more pressing geopolitical and social challenges divert our attention as we clash over COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, rampant nationalist identity politics, and populist political movements sweeping much of the world. The world eyes the rising China as a superpower competitor, whilst Iran takes steps to drag Europe into its war of words and tit-for-tat missile strikes with the US. Britain continues to fumble its way through a messy Brexit as the EU trips up on vaccination across the continent. Political and social upheaval are impacting populations across the globe, and the globe continues to heat up.
The people of Yemen struggle to survive as the warring
parties fail to agree on a course of action to stabilise the SAFER oil container.
Many fear that a deal will not be reached until it is already too late.
This is a lesson we should learn, and an issue we should act
on whilst we still can.
As we squabble and kill over land and riches, a creeping
environmental catastrophe looms.
