Countdown to Environmental Catastrophe - The SAFER Oil Tanker

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.

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.

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.

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.