Introduction:
The brawl for access to, control over and benefit from the environmental resources is not a new phenomenon. Since the beginning of human civilisation, the environment has undeniably been offering the valuable essentials for survival, prosperity and advancement of humankind. However, the extraction of natural resources has been an inextricable part of advancement and growth. The existing ratio of human population growth, production and consumption frequencies and available natural resources to meet these uneven demands without disturbing the natural cycle of the ecosystem have led to the distinction of many species, environmental imbalances and scarcity of some of the irreplaceable natural resources.
The resource scarcity has time and again been considered a ground for violent clashes and impending war. There are, however, strategic gaps in the prescribed linkage of the environment to the armed conflict; confusion over the term of environmental conflict, ignorance towards social and political rudiments in the environmental factors that significantly affect the conflict determinants, and the inappropriate level of analysis that generalizes the environmental cause as a necessity to armed conflict (Gleditsch 1998). A group of environmentalists reviewed the broad range of literature and empirical practices and concluded that there are ‘distinctive patterns’ that relate the environment and security (Matthew et al. 2002). They further claim that in the countries with weaker institutions or discriminatory socioeconomic disparities, conflict tends to emerge over the resource control and distribution. As resource scarcity affects the livelihood options, livelihood security can fuel the tensions and consequently increase the vulnerability to disaster and conflict.
The level of awareness, arguments and concerns have been rising vis-a-vis the overuse of environmental resources and the changing patterns of war and violent conflicts since the end of Cold-War. As the war between and among the countries are dwindling, intrastate conflicts are covering the landscape, mostly in the fragile and poorer nations in the global South. Use of the latest technologically-advanced arms and other sophisticated means of conflict have added new challenges of environmental degradation which in some cases cause added violence (Francis & Krishnamurthy 2014).
Anthropogenic impact on the earth has resulted into a stage where the return to original status is next to impossible. A group of scholars and experts have realised the grave consequences of human behaviour on the environment and have identified nine planetary boundaries; climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone, biogeochemical nitrogen, phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, land system change and the remaining two; chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosol loading, are yet to be determined (Rockstrom et al. 2009). They further assert that the three boundaries; climate change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen cycle have already been infringed. The magnitudes of adverse environmental change are not merely limited to the countries with more fragility to climate change and conflict but also to the global warming and international security.
Discussion:
The article seeks to review the diverse theories and claims, backed by empirical practices, whether there is a through and linear link between environment change and violent conflict. I analyse the historical and contemporary arguments whether the environment can be separated from conflict or vice versa. If not, are there other factors being overlooked in the environment-conflict interface? The series of arguments begins with armed conflict and its link with the environment and assess the impact of armed movements on the environment. The second case, environment and security, examine the security concern due to the perceived threat from environmental changes. Population growth leading to resource scarcity and hostilities over accessing, manipulating and distributing the scarce goods will be appraised in the third argument, demography and environment conflict. The fourth and the last part, climate-induced migration, will review the rationalities whether there is an undeviating connection between climate change and migration or there are other variations in between.
1. Armed conflict and environment
Post-Cold War world witnessed new descendants of warfare, commonly known as ‘new war’ (Newman 2004). The ‘new war’ has two core distinctions (Gregory 2010). The first is the advanced and highly sophisticated transformation of state militaries, of the Northern and developed countries, which use the latest technology, and a combination of conventional and new tools and tactics. The second one is insurgents and guerrilla warfare, mainly in the global South and fragile countries, which depend on traditional and impoverished weapons and often adopt violence to disrupt the civilian population (Gregory 2010). The globalisation and neoliberal world order have, regrettably, promoted more partition between the wealthy and poor people, societies and countries than ever before. The pursuit of retaining more power and wealth is leading to excessive exploitation of resources without much consideration about the future consequences. This disparity inevitably causes and supports war and violence in various forms and scales in the world.
The UCDP (Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2015) has compared the rules of organised violence for the period of 1989-2014 and established that the world has become more violent with more human casualties. Referable to the emergence and outreach of violent conflicts and insurgencies around the universe, there has been an increase in the debate on whether warfare has a direct and adverse impact on nature. The preparations for war occupy the land, deforest the jungles and produce carbon emissions while spoiling the biodiversity and distressing the human wellbeing (Joksimovich 2000; Dudley & Woodford 2002). Research illustrates that more than 90 percent of the major armed conflicts, between 1950 and 2000, happened in the countries containing biodiversity hotspots and more than 80% occurred directly within hotspot areas (Hanson et al. 2009).
Warfare ecology extends to the three levels of warfare—preparations, war, and post-war activities—and treats biophysical and socioeconomic systems as coupled systems (Hanson & Machlis 2008). They suggest, based on empirical experiences, that the relationship between warfare and ecosystem change is complicated and hence there has not been enough in-depth research in the concerned areas. The military institutions’ take on the environment is that the nature is an independent entity (Buel Jr 1995), the ecologists focus on the consequence side of the warfare such as air and soil contamination (Homer-Dixon, 1999), the political scientists expect to see the rise in interstate conflict due to the resource scarcities (Westing 1994) and all of these arguments have now influenced the security strategists to consider climate change as a serious threat to national and international security and so the security consequences should utterly be amalgamated into the national security and defense strategies (Catarious et al. 2007).
The financing for warfare has always been associated with the state in the world. Those in power constitutes a comprehensive strategy to get local and exterior financial support sources to run the state, and to engross in warfare and to protect the country from internal and external coercions (Tilly 1985). Due to the scrutinization of the international financial transactions to address the complex global security concerns, terrorist threats and money-laundering challenges, the actors of armed conflict have now looked into non-orthodox sources to finance the war. The nature factor plays a crucial part in the battle zone regarding funding for armed struggle (Wennmann 2011).
Groups engaged in the armed conflict follow various approaches to funding their activities. They employ all sorts of alternatives including looting, support from external state and groups, ‘safety’ tax from local corporations and individual firms, extortion, kidnapping and the illegal use of environmental sources such as timber smuggling (Wennmann 2011). Use of oil reserves in Nigeria is a good example of how natural resource can be used to wage and sustain the criminal activities and insurgencies. Wennmann, however, warns against generalising the linkage and stresses on carefully examining the link of natural resources as a perennial source to finance the conflict and vice versa.
2. Environment and Security
Despite the fact that countries are now utterly considering the environmental security issues, this is yet to be profoundly unified in the national security policy and programs regarding resource allocation and defence preparation (Oels 2012). Both resources and environment are part of the discussion that has formed the concept of environmental security over the last few decades. The incidence of 9/11 eclipsed the idea of environmental security, but it resurfaced lately with more focus on climate change induced concerns and not on the broader environmental changes.
Simon (Dalby 2014) proposes four major themes that link environment and security. The first argument suggests that warfare and preparations for war are one of the leading causes of environmental destruction (Renner 2006). The ill-fated instances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan became the most extreme example of radioactive radiation and environmental contamination (Pellizzoni 2011). During the 1980s the concept of nuclear winter emerged as the consequence of a full-scale nuclear warfare that could result in a below freezing air temperature (Robock 2010), and which would have severe negative impact on agricultural lands and regional ecologies.
The second theme in the environmental security emerged in the late 1980s when concerns over large scale environmental changes compounded earlier concerns with technological disasters like the Bhopal gas tragedy in December 1994 in India and Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in April 1986 in Russia. These unfortunate accidents forced to consider that the environmental incidents are serious enough for security concerns (Mathews 1989). The empirical gap is the extent of the degree of such environmental disasters that could lead to violent conflict and how that could be translated into real national and international security concerns. The Chernobyl accident raised safety concerns about nuclear power plants (Malone 1987), and environmental safety later integrated into the larger security concern (Dabelko 2008).
It was mainly during the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987) that asserted the notion of sustainable development as a prerequisite to prevent violent conflict over resource scarcities. The debate that the environmental resources would not endure from the deficiency was linked to 1970s’ discussion about the limits to growth. Kutting (2014) claims that the limits to growth concept is based on fears of resource shortage and conflict over diminishing supplies and that was simply an over-exaggerated version of Malthusian Theory of Population. Despite some relationships between resource scarcities, which is the third theme, and violent conflict, social and political reasons are the determining forces behind such linkage (Watts & Peluso 2014). Another argument is that the conflict is more imminent in areas with limited economic opportunities than the extraction of the natural resources (Le Billon 2001). Examples from the Horn of Africa show that many wars were fought over controlling the food and other resources during famine and drought (David, 1994).
The fourth theme of the environmental security is a combination of first three subjects, and that is labelled as climate security. The concept of climate security addresses some of the most important elements determined by recent global warming, such as land degradation, freshwater availability, population density and change (Raleigh & Urdal 2007). While population growth and density are linked with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insufficient. The effects of political and economic factors overshadow those link between local level demographic and environmental factors and violent conflict.
There is a need to rethink whether environmental concerns are scientifically required to be integrated into the security policy and agenda or not. Deudney (1990) argues that military institutions are primarily established to deal with security issues and so environment protection should not be a part of their formal purposes. Another scholar, Rosaleen (Duffy 2014), criticises the link between war and conflict with little epistemology and is ignorantly based on the Malthusian visions of scarcity.
Thomas (Homer-Dixon 1991) through several studies, asserts that although there can be a link between environment and security, some ‘intervening variables’ related to governance are required to justify the explicit linkage. Baechler-led studies in Europe show that violence related to the environment in the contexts influenced by elite discrimination and where resource allocation resulted in the social division (Gunter Baechler, 1999). Kahl (2008), through the findings of his two field works in the Kenya and the Philippines, concludes that political factors are the catalysts to drive violent conflict.
3. Demography and environmental conflict
Some scholars claim that the competition over the resources can lead to conflict (Ehrlich, 1968, Kahl, 2008 and Homer-Dixon, 1999). Demographic pressure on environment resources is increasingly considered a security challenge around the world, especially after the end of Cold War. The increase in population can lead to increased demands which cannot always be met by the supply side as many of the environmental resources are either being scarce or turning into a high valued product by the big corporations or the government entities. The environmental resources can be categorised into ‘renewable’ such as forest, arable land and ‘non-renewable’ such as oil and gas.
Quantitative studies have found that countries with lower Gross Domestic Products (GDP) are at the most risk of conflict (Collier & Hoeffler 2004). In countries with weaker institutions and over/population pressure on the environmental resources and the discriminatory socio-economic policies to have access, control and distribution of such resources can lead to violent clashes. In the context of resource limitation or struggle over scarce resources, the people with lower socio-economic status are more obliged to adjust with shrinking resources whereas the people from dominant groups or ruling class tend to make or amend the new laws and policies to safeguard their supremacy over natural resources. The differential treatment amplifies the gap between elites and excluded groups which, eventually, can result in a conflict.
Demographic pressures caused by the population growth and the transformation of fertile land into high-value private property targeting the wealthy and affluent ones in the Philippines. One good example from the Philippines about the handful number of a powerful and wealthy landowners forced the farmers to less-fertile farming lands for subsistence. The hardship of the poor farmers eventually interjected the expansion of insurgency in the Philippines during the 1980s (Homer-Dixon 1994). Another example from Israel and Palestine where 40% of the audible water supply in Israel, that originate in Palestinian area since 1967 until 1995 has been controlled by Israeli administration. This arrangement left Palestinian to survive with less than 20%, of the same groundwater whereas Israel took control of 80%. The water source is significantly important to Israel, occupying the water source in Palestinian land is thus linked to the existence of Israeli statehood, and so eventually the water is related to Israel’s national security (Lowi 1999).
Scholars such as Homer-Dixon (1999) and Baechler (1999) consider the resource distribution as the core of environmental resource-led conflicts. They also claim that the countries with weaker institutions are more at the risk of conflict due to environmental reasons. There are, however, counter-arguments of the theory that population growth can lead to resource scarcity and competition over the environmental resources can eventually result in violent clashes or even war. Scholars argue that the countries, governments and even the people, in general, are now adopting appropriate measures to control and manage the population growth issues (Lomborg 2001). Use of technology, smaller family size, migration trend, alternative resource options is some of the widely-used approaches that can minimise the adverse impact of population on natural resources and even can prevent resource based conflicts.
Another comprehensive research that covered 180 countries and between the period 1970 to 2000, found that the progress along the ‘populations shift from high to low rates of birth and death’ is linked to the ongoing decrease in the risk factors of the countries to violent conflict (Cincotta et al. 2003). If this trend continues, they hope, the developing countries are likely to experience political stability which eventually promote the peace and security in the world.
Population growth can also help the technological advancement of the resource alternatives and resource consumption (Simon 1989). In countries with poorer or weaker institutions can be strengthened with appropriate technical and strategic supports to improve the gap between the demand side of the poor and marginalised population and the exploitative market and elite-centric non-state practices.
4. Climate-induced Migration
Migration is a global phenomenon and no country on earth is remained untouched by the in or outflow of migration. The UN estimates that international migration has grown over 244 million in 2015 comparing to 222 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000 (Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2016). Some argue that the developing countries encourage international migration to provide employment and an ‘outlet for domestic frustrations’ besides receiving the valuable foreign currencies (Russell 1995). The fact, however, is different and rapidly shifting. The UN’s Global Migration Report 2015 highlights that most of the (157 out of 244 million in 2015) international migrants come from middle-income countries and these migrants live in high-income countries.
A group of experts claim that the greenhouse gas emission (GHG) and thus the climate change will lead to the rise of about 38 cm of the sea level by 2080s. The change in the sea level will not just impact the humans but could also cause the loss of over 20% of the world’s coastal wetlands. The same analysis also claims the loss of over 70% of the world’s coastal wetland due to sea level rise and other human action against the environment (Nicholls et al. 1999). Appropriate and timely policies and procedures, concerning the GHG emission reduction and other climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, are required to avoid such catastrophic incidents of climate change-induced migration (Barnett 2001).
Although many of the scholars agree that climate change leads the migration and eventually the risk of conflict, not everyone agrees. After reviewing a diverse set of literature on the climate-migration-conflict relationship, they found that the climate and migration alone is not enough to be a catalyst for violent conflict (Burrows & Kinney 2016). They further elucidated that many variables, such as social, economic and political contexts, their interpretation of migration and then the combination of these two with the climate change, could determine whether there is a significant and direct link between climate-induced migration and the conflict. In a country with weaker and fragile institutions and higher vulnerability from the climate change, it is more preventive and efficient to address the socio-economic and political issuances to prepare better to deal with the negative consequences of the environmental degradation (Mazo 2009).
Conclusions:
Whether large or small, inter or intrastate, almost all types and ranges of conflict negatively impact the environment. Despite the impact which diverges by the stage and geography of the conflict, most of the conflicts in the last five decades occurred in the countries with biodiversity hotspots.
The globalisation and neoliberalism have resulted in excessive exploitation of natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable. Social and economic disparities backed by the political hegemony of market and power-centric elite institutions do often create discriminatory access, control and distribution policies and arrangements. This power and economic discrimination frequently contributes to latent hostility and can intermittently proliferate armed responses or conflict. Although the international war and regional conflicts are in descending order, interstate and inter-group battles are on rising posing new challenges to political and environmental security in the world.
At the one hand, interventions of security establishments are severely affecting the ecological diversity, they are, on the contrary, increasingly worried about the challenges posed by climate change and global warming. Climate change, invited by the human action, mostly by wealthy and powerful ones, is probably the most influential environmental change widely perceived as a threat to not just for the security but also for the stability of the global market economy.
Finally, human behaviour shapes the social, economic and political institutions and influences the interaction between human and environment. These interactions affect the frequency, intensity and quality of the relationship between environment and conflict. Concisely, there is not enough epistemic, empirically-proved and the standalone relationship between the environment change and the violent conflict. Without other non-environmental determinants, the link between environment and conflict can’t stand on its own.
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Rakesh Karna 