Curtis Abraham
27 June 2008
analysis
Nairobi — When the Swedish Nobel Prize committee awarded their prestigious prize for peace to Prof Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist, in 2004 and then more recently in 2007 to former US Vice-President Al Gore, the committee was explicitly making the connection between climate change and global conflict.
But, has the scientific community proven a definitive link between the raving effects of climate change and armed conflict in developing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa? Or, are the environmental activists, prominent world leaders and influential Non Governmental Organisations making bold, unsubstantiated claims without the proper scientific evidence for their own particular agendas?
For example, some analysts believe that the roots of (and ultimate solution to) Darfur's troubles lie in the bolstering of its disintegrating ecology from drought and desertification.
Such sentiments about the role of environmental degradation and the carnage in Darfur have been voiced last year by, among others, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Dr Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute.
However, while environmental issues, particularly freshwater availability and arable land, are essential for sustainable socio-economic development in Africa and elsewhere, the truth of the matter is that a definitive link between climate change and conflict on the scale of Darfur or Somalia or Afghanistan has not been scientifically proven.
The conflict risk associated with climate change is often overstated given our current state of knowledge. The fact is that little is known to draw such very bold conclusions.
While there is now overwhelming scientific proof for human-induced climate change, there has been very little scientific research done on the social impacts. This notwithstanding, many doomsday scenarios (e.g. "water wars") have been prophesied in the media and elsewhere.
Marc A. Levy of CIESIN, Earth Institute at Columbia University, and his colleagues investigated the relationship between water availability and internal war outbreak in their 2005 publication Freshwater Availability Anomalies and Outbreak of Internal War: Results from a Global Spatial Time Series Analysis.
They concluded that, at the global scale, there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal wars. These experts say that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood that low-level conflict will escalate to high-level conflict approximately doubles.
Therefore the effects of climate change can, and do increase the general risk of conflict, but this does not mean that one can make the leap to saying that any particular conflict was caused by climate change.
"Although these findings are consistent with what we read about how drought exacerbated Darfuri-central government conflicts, it doesn't prove that the drought 'caused' the problems. It is seldom possible to ascribe causation in this kind of situation to a single root cause. There are always too many interacting forces at work," says Levy.
Other researchers such as Ragnhild Nordas and Nils Petter Gleditsch note that: "Despite the breadth of this security concern in the public debate, statements about security implications have so far largely been based on speculation and questionable sources."
These researchers also say that, "the causal chains suggested in the literature have so far rarely been substantiated with reliable evidence given the combined uncertainties of climate and conflict research, the gaps in our knowledge about the consequences of climate change for conflict and security appear daunting".
Clionadh Raleigh and Henrik Urdal, both of the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway (PRIO) say that there could be other more important factors.
In their paper, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Armed Conflict, their findings suggest that, "the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant".
Furthermore, they say despite the attention given to environmental factors as potential security threats; it appears that one cannot consider them in isolation from economic, political and social factors.
Ecological destruction, in the case of Darfur, is just one component in a very complex crisis that can not (and should not) be separated from other more important aspects such as the politics of the Sahara region, a militant Arab supremacist ideology, Islamic extremism, proliferation of firearms, Sudan's complex internal politics, land wrangles, British colonial policies or attitudes, the destruction of ancient institutions for conflict resolution, etc.
What we do know about Darfur is that a systematic attempt to ascertain early warning signs of genocide, from the historical data, found a number of factors that in general were associated with elevated risks of genocide. Prior to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan had a number of "alarm bells" going off on that list.
According to Professor Barbara Harff in her 2003 study, No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955, some of these early warning signs include the fact that almost all genocides of the last half-century occurred during or in the immediate aftermath of internal wars, revolutions and regime collapse.
This was certainly true for Darfur since the slaughter was taking place in the backdrop of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, signed in Kenya in 2005, which officially ended over two decades of civil war in the south.
Harff also emphasises that ideologies that mobilise potential revolutionaries can also incite ethnic hatred and provide incentives to kill real or perceived enemies of the new order. Other early warning alarm bells include potential perpetrators being agents of the state or rival authorities, for example, military or police units, or militias such as the Janjaweed.
The debate on the link between climatic variability and conflict in the developing world got some impetus from a 1994 essay titled The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. It was written by American journalist Robert D. Kaplan and first published as an article in the February 1994 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
The main focus of this piece was the various conflicts in West Africa at that time. According to Kaplan: "it is time to understand 'the environment' for what it is: The national-security issue of the early twenty-first century." Furthermore, Kaplan also warns Western powers that: "We ignore this dying region [Africa] at our own risk." Kaplan's story is considered to be one of the fundamental theses on the state of current world affairs in the Post-Cold War era.
The Bush Administration picked up on the theme of Kaplan's essay as well as other reports on the same theme and used them as one raison d'etre for the US to focus its "War on Terrorism" efforts in Eastern Africa, The Horn and the wider Sahara region generally.
Convinced of the linkage (or perhaps searching for justifications to increase its military expenditure), the US turned its sights not to West Africa (the focus of Kaplan's scorn) but to the conflicts and poverty in large parts of East Africa and Horn of the continent as the next potential threats to US national and international security.
Consequently, the Bush administration has designated the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) a front-line region in its global war against terrorism.
The consequences and implications of worrying too much about the link between climate change and conflict in these developing regions is obvious. Firstly, it lets despotic leaders and irresponsible governments in Africa and elsewhere off the hook from their responsibility for the socio-economic development of all their citizens.
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