Smoke rises after airstrikes on Aleppo's Castello Road in Syria, June 2. (photo: Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters)
How
Climate Change Can Drive Violent Conflict Around the World
By Chelsea Harvey, The
Washington Post
26 July 16
It’s
increasingly clear that the consequences of climate change won’t stop at just
heat waves and sea-level rise. Scientists expect numerous social issues to
arise around the world as well, such as food shortages, decreased water quality
and forced migrations. And many experts now say that violence, war and other
forms of human conflict may be driven or worsened by the effects of climate
change.
A new study, published Monday in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lends support to the growing
body of evidence behind this idea. The study finds that climate-related
disasters may enhance the risk of armed conflict around the world —
specifically in countries with high levels of ethnic divides.
“This
debate comes up time and again — is climate change really something like a
trigger for violent conflict?” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and senior author of the new
paper. “Some people say yes, others say no. There’s a heated debate about it.”
Many
studies in the past have addressed the question of whether climate events might
drive human conflict. Some of these have examined the issue on a global scale,
while others have zeroed in on specific events — for instance, several studies
have implicated drought as one of many factors that aided in the outbreak of
civil war in Syria. Overall, multiple studies have indicated a connection
between climate and conflict, although several have suggested that the link may
be weak. So the concept has remained something of a controversial topic.
The
new study seeks to help lay some of the debate to rest. The researchers
compiled a list of armed conflicts and a list of natural disasters around the
world between the years 1980 and 2010. They analyzed each disaster in terms of
the amount of economic damage it caused to the nation where it occurred. They
then conducted statistical tests to determine whether any of the conflicts and
disasters coincided.
“What
we do is not just correlational analysis, but so-called coincidence analysis,
which also looks at which event is coming first and then which other one
follows — so you get a certain causality,” Schellnhuber explained. In other
words, the tests help to indicate whether one event — say, a drought or a heat
wave — might have helped trigger an event that followed it, such as an outbreak
of war.
The
researchers also grouped countries in terms of other nation-specific factors
that might have influenced the outbreak of conflict, such as income inequality,
religious divides and ethnic divides.
Altogether,
they found a significant link between climate disasters and the outbreak of
violent conflict specifically in countries with high degrees of ethnic
fractionalization. Notably, the other factors did not seem to play an important
role — only when countries were examined in terms of their ethnic divides did
climate events significantly exacerbate the outbreak of conflict. This seemed
to be the case for climate disasters that caused both large and small amounts
of economic damage. In all, about 23 percent of armed conflicts in highly
ethnically divided nations coincided with climate-related disasters.
“We
cannot explain the full complexity of the emergence of violent conflict, but
here we have found something really robust, a factor that really matters,”
Schellnhuber said.
The
authors have emphasized that their results don’t necessarily suggest that
climate events are the root cause behind any given conflict. Rather, they
indicate that these events may increase the likelihood of violence erupting in
a place that was already predisposed to conflict, or potentially serve as the final
straw in an area where trouble was already brewing.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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