Climate wars are coming and Southern Africa will be one of the areas most at risk. As environmental resources dwindle because of global warming, people will begin fighting over scarce resources, particularly water and agricultural land. These predictions are contained in a report titled Climate Change as a Security Risk, which was specially tabled in Bali this week to urge policymakers at the conference to reach a settlement to cut down emissions.
Combating climate change will be a central peace policy of the 21st century, cautions the report. It was prepared by the German Advisory Council on Global Change and draws on the work of international experts and organisations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep).
Expressing their “deepest concern”, three other UN agencies — the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development — added that climate change is a major challenge to world food security and will increase hunger and malnutrition unless immediate action is taken.
Lead author of the report, Hans Schellnhuber, says climate change will lead to conflicts when water supplies diminish and food becomes scarce as harvests fall. This will lead to new regional forms of conflict based on environmental issues. He even went as far as to say that a “global climate civil war” is not out of the question.
“Climate policy … is peace policy,” says Schellnhuber.
In the respected Stern Review, Sir Nicholas Stern estimated that as many as 150-million to 200million people would be “permanently displaced” environmental refugees by the mid-century, and that they would be unable to ever return to their homes.
The report estimates that after 2050 there could be more than 500million environmental refugees forced from their homes through flooding, drought and rising sea levels. This will in turn put a lot of stress on the security of other countries.
The UN Security Council convened a meeting this year to speak for the first time about the security risk that climate change presents. Many developed countries at the conference expressed fears about the security risks associated with climate change.
In Bali this week, Unep executive director Achim Steiner said there were multiple environmental challenges to world peace and security. “Climate change is perhaps the most high-profile,” he said. “It is not far-fetched to begin to see growing tensions; it’s not far-fetched to think climate change will have a destabilising effect globally.”
Africa will be a hot spot for conflict, says the report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that by 2020 up to 250million people in Africa could be exposed to increased water stress and food production could be halved. Steiner said that all the gains made so far in reaching the Millennium Development Goals could be erased.
Southern Africa would be one of the areas most at risk, the Unep report warns, explaining that climate change could further weaken the economic potential of this region, which is home to many of the poorest countries in the world.
The number of people in Southern Africa exposed to water stress will rise from 3,1million in 1995 to 38million in 2025 and up to 188million in 2085. With droughts increasing there is simply not enough water to go around and conflicts could erupt over access to water for crops.
Vulnerable coastal cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, could be submerged as sea levels rise. Groups such as the NGO Climate Action Network have warned that sea-level rise presents a threat to coastal cities worldwide, but that the 17-million strong Lagos — in an already politically volatile region — might explode owing to overpopulation and the loss of jobs.
Some international commentators, including former British foreign secretary Margaret Beckett and Unep, have already labelled the conflict in Darfur as the world’s first climate change conflict. They say the conflict is essentially a struggle between nomadic and pastoral communities for resources made scarcer through a changing climate.
Other areas highlighted in the report include countries in the Sahel region and the Mediterranean. In North Africa, the report says, political crises could multiply because dealing with climate change will eat up political resources and limit states’ abilities to deal with crises.
“The populous Nile Delta will be at risk from sea-level rise and salinisation in agricultural areas,” it warns. Two million people could be displaced by flooding, which would ruin the fertile agricultural land on which Egyptians depend for food .
Climate change in the Sahel zone will cause additional “environmental stress and social crises” through drought, harvest failure and water scarcity in a region already characterised by weak states such as Somalia and Chad. The region has had its fair share of civil wars and the report warns that the current 700Â 000 refugees fleeing the crisis in Sudan could reach millions.
Other potential hot spots include central Asia; India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; China; parts of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico; and the Andean and Amazonian regions of Latin America.