Climate and conflict: the violent consequences of environmental crisis
Photo by Arka Roy on Unsplash
Christopher Soelistyo explores the devastating consequences of climate change beyond bush fires and rising sea levels, shedding light on how a hotter planet contributes to civil unrest.
Whether it’s wildfires in Australia, floods in Indonesia or avalanches in Kashmir, the dawn of the new decade has brought with it the grim omens of climate change. What’s more, these portents are not limited to natural disasters: whilst we rightfully fret over melting sea ice and the destruction of natural habitats, the impacts of climate change can also be felt lurking in the arena of armed conflict. The onset of 2020 has seen the Syrian Civil War take a truly ugly turn, with the Syrian-Russian assault on Idlib province threatening to drive one million refugees towards a hostile Turkey. With the War primed to escalate, an investigation into the possible links between climate change and conflict is very much overdue.
Highlighting parallels between climatic events and human conflict is not a new concept. For example, the El Niño weather pattern has been linked to both the French Revolution and China’s Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In more recent contexts, a 2015 study noted that, in the three years leading to the start of the Syrian Civil War, the Fertile Crescent region experienced “the most severe drought in the instrumental record”, exacerbated by “poor governance and un-sustainable agricultural and environmental policies”. Given long-term weather patterns, researchers concluded that a drought of this severity was more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system”. According to the study, the impact of the drought on rural agriculture drove as many as 1.5 million people to urban centres. This internal displacement, alongside the influx of refugees from the war in Iraq, put a severe strain on Syria’s resources. Poor infrastructure, overcrowding and a concurrent global increase in food prices combined to turn civil unrest into civil war.
Academic voices, however, are not uniform in drawing such strong causational ties. Francesca de Châtel, a journalist specialising in Middle East water issues, argues that focusing on external factors such as climate change is “counterproductive”. Instead, she places the blame on decades of mismanagement of resources by the Syrian government. These include the proliferation of export crops and monoculture, the overgrazing of fields, the destruction of soils by chemical fertilizer, the poor irrigation systems, and so on. One also cannot discount the possibility that the climate factor is overshadowed by more overtly political factors, such as the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy activists in 2011. Nevertheless, while there is no official consensus on the role of climate change in facilitating the Syrian unrest, the issue forces us to recognise potential crossover between climate change and conflict more broadly. Climate change has been linked to the increased frequency and severity of droughts, floods, and storms. These extreme weather patterns may induce migration and deplete the resources that all people depend on – and, if necessary, fight for. Apart from inducing hostility, scarcity can also make the weaponisation of resources – particularly food and water – far more devastating in the midst of an existing conflict. Again, the Syrian Civil War is a case in point.
In a potent article examining the function of food in warfare, Brent Eng and Jose Ciro Martinez note, “perhaps the most palpable way in which the regime weaponizes food is the purposeful destruction of infrastructure for producing and distributing the means of sustenance”. Specifically, “shell[ing] and bomb[ing] food stocks … in areas where rebels are active” and “block[ing] or damag[ing] transportation routes key to food shipments”. They attribute the frequent use of this tactic to “the erosion of the regime’s military capacity” through “attrition and desertion”, forcing it to resort to strategic bombing rather than contesting territory with ground troops. They add that by the winter of 2014, the production of wheat in Syria was already “52 percent below the 2001-2011 average”. The article also explores how international food aid has been transformed into a political tool for the regime. Until mid-2014, UN regulations restricted aid distribution to areas agreed upon with the Damascus regime. Not only did this leave millions outside the UN’s humanitarian net, but, more alarmingly, it also provided a welfare-propaganda boost for the government. “What humanitarians fail to understand, or cannot admit publicly, is that in Syria, nothing is apolitical, especially not food”.
It is impossible to predict when the next resource wars will occur. Perhaps it will be in Iran, where protests have roiled the streets of multiple cities since November 2019. These protests – the most severe since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979 – were sparked by a hike in fuel prices and discontent over economic mismanagement that sent inflation soaring. They have developed into louder calls for the end of the clerical regime as a whole and have been met with brutal repression by the authorities. It is a familiar story. Or, perhaps it will be in Pakistan, a country juggling a booming population and considerable water stress. Pakistan is, of course, no stranger to violence. It isn’t unlikely that resource conflicts amplified by climate change will intensify the sectarian and tribal violence that already grips the lives of Pakistanis every day. Returning to Syria as an example: the mass migration and resource depletion engendered by climate change is liable to intensify existing tensions simmering below the surface. Once a conflict begins, scarcity makes the weaponisation of resources such as food and water easier, which, in turn, leads to widespread misery and privation.
Perhaps these are the consequences of climate change that many in the developed world find easier to forget. In places like London or New York, starvation and civil war seem distant tragedies. However, they may well become the bleak by-product of life on a hotter planet. The consequences of climate change are coming, and they are coming fast. To deal with them may require a united humanity, putting species survival ahead of national or international disputes. Such a scenario now feels less “utopian pipe-dream” and more a case of necessity than ever before.