From Cold War to Hot War:
Climate Change and Conflict in the 21st Century
A.
Climate Change Will Do More than Raise the Temperature
The half-century ideological struggle between capitalism and communism over
control of resources -- the Cold War -- ended in the early 1990s with the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Around the same time, scientists began reaching broad agreement that the
planet’s climate was warming at an unprecedented rate. Past evidence suggests that such
rapid changes in climate -- “Hot Wars” -- produce unique types and modes of conflict,
redefine the value of many resources, and create new challenges to maintaining social
stability. The Hot Wars will create their own ideological struggles and conflict linkages.
The warming climate in the 21st century will affect communities and nations in a
manner that will foster conflict. Changes in the climate baseline will alter natural
environments and human lifestyles. Impacts will vary, but in some areas, the changes
will threaten livelihoods and incite social tension. Tension will lead to conflict with the
potential to divide countries and spill across national borders.
The research idealizes and typifies trends in climate change and conflict case
studies, drawing from both the past and the future. The past offers an interesting tapestry
of cases to observe the ways that changing climate conditions can contribute to conflict.
The future suggests increasing tension and conflict as warming alters existing
calculations on resource access and use. Fortunately, the forecast time horizon offers
ample time to react. The conclusion suggests several policy responses to this looming
long-term crisis. These will be embodied in a in a series of battles to reverse trends in
temperature, forest protection, arable land, and fresh water. The sum of these battles is
the declaration of war on climate change.
There are at least four ways that climate change leads to conflict. First, a
changing climate leads to large-scale displacement of people and economy and such
chaotic events usually accompany violence. This can be either a long-term or a sudden
event. Displaced people will eventually stop and settle down and often this is in places
where other people already live. Shifting demography and economy patterns due to
climate change tends to force realignments in domestic, regional, and global power
relations. Climate change may cause resources to be more or less available, but they will
change the relative value to individuals and countries.
Second, climate change may also lead to conflict due to an increase in abundance.
Suppose a resource becomes more available because of climate change. For example, the
warming of extremely cold areas may allow resource extraction that was previously
uneconomic. Oil and gas fields in northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia are likely to
become accessible with warming and thus become economically viable. Competition
over newly available resources may lead to conflict, especially when these resources turn
up in places where boundaries are not clearly set.
Third, climate change may restrict general resources and lead to conflict due to
scarcity. Imagine if drying conditions and melting glaciers lead to loss of arable land,
impose extreme stress on vegetation and animal life, and precipitate a decline of fresh
water availability. Competition and conflict will increase as the availability of these
resources become relatively scarce.
Finally, changing climate will expose new areas of national interests and new
questions of sovereignty. Remote islands may submerge under rising ocean waters and
lose sovereignty. In other areas long buried under thick ice sheets, human habitation may
become possible.
The idea is that the changing relative importance of resources accelerates and
deepens with climate change. A change of a few degrees of temperature can make the
difference between a welcoming and an inhospitable climate. Likewise, a small relative
change in resource volatility may accumulate over time and subsequently produce much
higher levels of conflict over the long-term.
B.
What Is Known About Climate Change and Conflict
Climate change may precipitate a slow moving disaster and a period of gradual
and environmentally induced conflict. Nature in some instances can invoke rapid
changes in environmental conditions (earthquakes, tsunamis, and the like) that lead to
substantial casualty totals in a short period. The aftermath produces dramatic changes in
power relations and such situations invite “fast” conflict. Due to climate change, conflict
will gradually evolve and accumulate where the aggregation of consequences over many
years will measure its destructiveness. Many more will perish in the “slow” conflict.
The relation between climate change, human development, and conflict is old also
intrinsic to human history and evident through three examples. The first example focuses
on the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 35,000 years ago, when humans first ventured into
Eurasia where they encountered the Neanderthals, another hominid species. The two
came into conflict over control of and access to hunting grounds. Humans possessed
advanced weaponry and social and over time pushed them into the less hospitable north.
These northern lands had fewer resources -- especially animal protein -- and led to a
downward spiral for the Neanderthal. The eventual outcome was a rich new landmass for
humans and the extinction of the Neanderthal.
The end of the Ice Age opened one area for habitation but closed others. The
Sahara at the end of the Ice Age was a temperate expanse with abundant plants and
wildlife. This was probably a temporary phenomenon due the melting of the vast glaciers
in Europe. After the great melt off, drying conditions created the vast desert and forced
humans out of the interior of Northern Africa and into urban centers along large rivers
like the Nile. These urban centers coalesced to become the country of Egypt. After
consolidation of these initial cities into a primordial state, Egypt went onto to conquer
other centers of population and create an empire in Africa and Asia. Egypt’s attempts to
conquer Sheba, in modern Sudan, meant to maintain mastery of the Nile River water
resources in a changing climate. Access to Nile River resources remains core to Egypt’s
foreign policy to this day and a reason for war.
As in Egypt, in Mesopotamia clusters of people clung to outposts along the
Tigris-Euphrates River system and over time slowly built city-states. The city-states
were not self-sustaining. In particular, they needed enormous amounts of wood imports
because forest cover was extremely limited. This wood built the temples and houses and
brought the charcoal used to heat the houses and furnish them. Wood was the most
important resource of the day and it was worth a fight. The Epic of Gilgamesh, a
document pre-dating the Bible, tells the story of Nebuchadnezzar who launched wars of
conquest for the main purpose of owning and removing these forest resources, especially
cedars. The combination of forest cutting, further warming climate, and introduction of
ungulates such as goats and sheep that feasted on young saplings, turned the Fertile
Crescent into a scrub desert.
A second example is the 500-1000 AD warming period. Historians refer to the
warming period as the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO). The MCO created a period
of sustained progress, especially in Europe, in the aftermath of the Dark Ages.
It was extremely warm in the Northern Hemisphere and the temperature (along
with some new sailing technologies) “invited” the Vikings to migrate into North
America. This westward flow produced exploration via island hopping. Viking
explorers traveled to the Faroe Islands, onto Iceland, and settled into the alluringly named
island known as Greenland. Pressing west, to what is today Newfoundland in Canada,
they encountered Native American peoples (probably a branch of the Algonquian tribe)
who also moved in to claim the rich lands. Conflict with them, the end of the warming
period and the onset of a much cooler period (the Little Ice Age), coupled with the onset
of bubonic plague in Europe, put an end to the Viking expansion around 1500.
The same warming era produced a different impact in Central America. The
climate warmed the distribution of rainfall suddenly found themselves in near drought
conditions. The drier climate could only support a smaller population, and disparity in
ecological carrying capacity contributed to internecine warfare and the eventual collapse
of the Mayan Empire. Warming created differing impacts in differing regions. Areas
with poor soils, as in tropical forests, where heavy rains tend to wash out nutrients, were
most vulnerable.
A world away, rainfall totals fell in China during the years 700-900 due to weak
summer monsoons that failed to develop in the Pacific Ocean. Gerald Haug and other
researchers concluded that these failing rains led to the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in
China just as it had led to the failed states in the Mayan Empire during this time.1
A third example of climate change on conflict has to do with cooling conditions
and the onset of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Scholars differ exactly on how long the LIA
lasted, but do agree on its existence and the disasters it produced.2 Brian Fagan thought it
lasted from 1300 to 1850. Agriculture records from the period show that wine growing
gradually disappeared from England and the cultivation of oranges in some parts of north
China was no longer possible. The movement of crop zones suggests patterns of climate
change.
As growing seasons became shorter in the LIA, people moved from colder areas
to warmer areas. Famine spread during an especially cold period around 1690.
Combined with worsening economic conditions, thousands of Scots moved south to
Ireland due to famine. The same scene also played out in the Baltic area, and many
starved to death in Estonia. The cold climate especially affected Sweden by increasing
death and emigration and greatly weakened the state. During the Great Northern War,
and an extremely cold period (1700-1721), Sweden lost most of its empire to Denmark,
Poland, and Russia.
There were sharp extremes in temperature in the LIA. These extremes, coupled
with an extreme geologic event, produced a dramatic and drastic case in 1816 or “the
year without summer”. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 in modern day
1
2
Gerald Haug, et al, Nature, 2007.
Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age, Basic Books, 2000.
Indonesia increased the cold trend by belching an enormous amount of debris into the
atmosphere that obscured global sunlight for some years. A foot of snow fell in Canada
and New England in June and crops failed across Northern Europe. Food riots erupted in
England and France. There was widespread famine in Central Europe, especially around
Switzerland.
Climate change can produce short-term, volatile conditions. The LIA experienced
periods of climates extremes that had an immediate impact on conflict. The sudden and
violent summer storms in 1588 doomed the Spanish Armada. The year 1812 was one of
the cruelest Russian winters and helped decimate Napoleon’s army.
Climate change can have quite specific implications for certain regions, especially
when joined with intrusive human activities. There are also examples of climate change
on a much more regional basis. Extreme drought coupled with intrusive agricultural
practices led to enormous economic and demographic upheavals in the American
Midwest in the 1930s (the Dust Bowl). The marginal zone of existence south of the
Sahara Desert -- the Sahel -- oscillates north and south over time. Its movements have
long brought pastoralists and farmers into conflict. The conflict in Darfur is in part the
result of extended drought. Figure 1 shows a timeline for recent temperature history and
relation to world historical events. It shows that today we are approaching historic
temperature highs for the last 2,000 years.
Figure 1:
Temperature Variations from 400 BC until Today
Note: The “0” mid-point is the average temperature for the year 1950.4
C.
What Do We Need to Know About Climate Change?
The research will rely on forecasts to create a climate baseline scenario for the
21st century. The scenario will reputable and reliable forecast sources -- primarily the
2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but also the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization, and other multilateral reports with extensive peer review -- as a
basis for imagining a climate for the future world. These forecasts center on two
dimensions. First, there is the geography of the forecast that is where these changes will
4
Richard A. Muller and Gordon MacDonald, Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes,
Springer-Praxis, Berlin, 2000, p. 3,
<http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html>.
occur. Second, there are the impacts of the change. The impacts focus on four types: (1)
precipitation and temperature, (2) arable land, (3) forests, and (4) fresh water.
What kind of changes can we imagine or appreciate as relevant to the changes on
our horizon? Cases of climate change from the past make it possible to imagine future
cases. The Inventory of Conflict and Environment (ICE), provides 200 categorical case
studies from which to draw from in finding relevant cases and support the research as an
additional manuscript resource. ICE includes existing case studies related to climate
change and the cases of the Mayans, Vikings, and the shifting Sahel, for example.5
How climate change through increasing temperatures and related changes in
precipitation patterns results in conflict is a many-layered prism of impacts (see Figure
2). The driver of change is the warmer temperature and related precipitation patterns.
Warming temperatures may mean that certain livelihood crops do not grow as well or that
there is less fresh water available to water them. Warming temperatures may also free up
previously cold-locked resources. These resources will have importance to the energy
and mining industries.
The dual impacts that decrease livelihood resources while increasing commodity
resources produce two deadly chains of impact. First, changes in general and specific
resources availability tend to exacerbate the conditions of climate change and create a
feedback loop that intensifies over time. Second, whether the cause is the push of low
resources or the pull of high resources, climate change will propel the migration of
people and national interests. The result will be conflict. The dynamics of climate
change and conflict can be captured in a casual model (see Figure 2).
5
The Inventory of Conflict and Environment (ICE),
http://www.american.edu/TED/ice/ice.htm.
Figure 2:
Climate Change Feedback and Conflict Linkages
The historic environment and conflict cases (in ICE) show a variety of
characteristics and trend behaviors. There is compelling evidence suggesting a historic
and intensifying “Tension Belt” that encircles the world near the equator. This turbulent
girdle identifies significant areas of climate, and conflict overlap.6 The Tension Belt
includes areas that have too much water (i.e., tropical forests) and too little (deserts). It is
also an area rich in resources such as oil and diamonds.
These general findings are also reflected by those of Nils Peter Gleditsch, “The
Future of Armed Conflict”, http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/feher6.pdf, accessed December 4,
2006.
6
Climate forecasts suggest substantial changes in the upcoming century. The
predictions suggest the greatest swings in future temperature will occur in the upper parts
of the Northern Hemisphere. This may cause the emergence of a Polar Tension Belt,
primarily in the Northern hemispheres. The new Tension Belt, unlike the current one,
will especially affect developed countries. In addition, climate change will exacerbate
and expand the existing equatorial Tension Belt that largely includes developing
countries. The equatorial Tension Belt will grow southward into Africa and extend deep
into central Asia.7
One emerging example of climate change and possible conflict is the warming
that has already altered temperatures in northern polar areas and made possible a limited
Northwest Passage in North America. This waterway had been the topic of intense
exploration for hundreds of years, without success. Due to climate warming, such travel
over sea from Europe to Asia is becoming possible. The reality of the passage has also
evoked questions of sovereignty.
Canada argues that its waterways are Canadian domestic waters and sovereign
territory. The United States believes these to be international waters. This dispute is
more than 40 years old, but only now does it really matter due to warming. As this transit
area becomes a reality, there will likely be some tacit agreement between allies such as
Canada and the United States. Other countries, such as China or Iran, could also claim
international transit rights in areas that become navigable because of climate change.
Climate change has the potential to alter power relations, cause vast migrations of
people, and propel huge land use alterations. In addition, some crossover between the old
7
IPCC, http://www.ipcc.ch/, accessed December 4, 2006.
and new Tension Belts could occur, producing a dynamic impact. Refugees from the
expanding and deepening Equatorial Tension Belt might seek increasingly hospitable
lands in the Polar Tension Belt, but they may not always be welcome.
The map below shows the areas of the existing or ancient Tension Belt and the
new Belt that may emerge with climate change in the 21st century (see Figure 3). It also
shows areas where there are associated extreme conditions related to deforestation and
water scarcity.
Figure 3: The Old and New Tension Belts: Water and Forest Problem Areas
D.
How Can We Prepare for Climate Change and Conflict?
It is easy to convince individuals to think far in the future. It is not easy to
convince governments to prepare for conflict that will not happen for another 50 years.
The lifespan of a government and its planning horizon -- an election cycle -- is much
shorter than that of the individual. The thinking will need to change. The earlier there
are preventative actions to combat climate change and its implications the more likely it
is to be efficient and effective, in terms of both human lives and costs to global society.
There is an emerging field of research in the area of climate change and large
scale, social upheaval. For example, a recent study by Nicholas Stern for the government
of the United Kingdom posited a world of substantial climate change and forecast serious
problems of food production and water availability. These shortfalls may cause a long
period of economic recession and significant losses in incomes around the world. This
enduring recession will erode economies. Conflict is a probable result as peoples, and
nations, seek access to increasingly rare resources. Climate change will unleash a
multitude of livelihood conflicts8.
A livelihood conflict exists where access to resources is so limited that it is
impossible to maintain a healthy and secure family environment. The idea is that
desperation will force the need to take resources from someone else. Governments will
need to think more like people and plot out long-term strategies.
What solutions to climate-induced conflicts are possible? The answer depends on
the stage of conflict under consideration. A preventative approach would attempt to
curtail the structural roots for the conflict before they erupt. A mitigating approach
would attempt to contain or reduce violence that has broken out. An uncoupling
approach would focus on the trigger for conflict that lets loose accumulated stress
structural forces. Regardless of the stage approach chosen, solutions require an early
recognition of the important role that climate change has with respect to conflict.
At the top of the list of policy reactions is the need to reduce the human
contribution to changes in climate in four key areas. First, slowing the rate of overall
See Nicholas Stern, “Stern Review on the economics of climate change”, HM
Treasury, Government of United Kingdom, http://www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternrevi
ew_index.cfm, accessed December 4, 2006.
8
temperature change is the key to constructing good policies and this starts with reducing
greenhouse gases. Second, arable land remediation and recovery needs to coincide with
agricultural adjustment policies. Third, forests need protection from impacts of
livelihood and climate. Fourth, fresh water resources are under assault and require new
strategies for sustainable use.
To succeed in changing the future, solutions will require international commitments and
changes in international institutions. Reactions to this global problem will require a
global response and specific long-term, global policy initiatives and corresponding
international agreements. The scientific research up to this point has begun to lay out a
baseline of climate expectations. Much more is required to understand the consequences
of climate change, in particular the triggers of conflict.
Table of Contents
I.
The Environmental Century
A.
B.
C.
II.
Climate Change and Conflict in History
A.
B.
III.
The Polar Tension Belt
Future Cases of Climate Change and Conflict
1.
Temperature: The Dispute over Canada’s Northwest Passage
2.
Arable Land: The Long-Term Drought in Southern Africa
3.
Forests: The Decline in the Northern Amazon
4.
Water: Critical Shortages in Central Asia
These Conflicts are Not Inevitable
A.
B.
C.
D.
V.
The Equatorial Tension Belt
Historical Cases of Climate Change and Conflict
1.
Temperature: The Vikings and North America
2.
Arable Land: The Shifting Sahel
3.
Forests: The Cedars of Lebanon
4.
Water: Controlling the Nile in Antiquity
Future Climate Changes and Possible Conflict Outcomes
A.
B.
IV.
The Linkages between Climate Change and Conflict
Forecasts of Climate in the 21st Century
Trends in Conflict
Temperature: Controlling Greenhouse Gases
Arable Land: Rethinking Agriculture
Forests: National and Global Parks
Water: Project Desalinization
Conclusion: A Comprehensive Plan