Climate change and conflict – violence

It’s becoming a trendy topic, the connection between future climate scenarios and conflict, violence and terrorism. Some quotes from The Guardian – Climate change will increase threat of war, Chris Huhne [UK climate secretary] to warn:

“Climate change is a threat multiplier. It will make unstable states more unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely,” Huhne is expected to say in a speech to defence experts. “And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change.”

[…]

His comparison of climate change and terrorism echoes Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the government who warned in 2004 that global warning posed “a bigger threat than terrorism”. The warning so incensed the then US president George W Bush that he phoned Tony Blair to ask him to gag the scientist.

[…]

Climate change intensifies security threats in three ways: increasing competition for resources; more natural and humanitarian disasters, such as the droughts now causing famine in Africa, which will also lead to mass migration and the conflicts that ensue; and threats to the security of energy supplies.

The recently published book Tropic of Chaos: Climate change and the New Geography of Violence by Christian Parenti seems to be on the same line of thought. Although disentangling causality from a bunch of case studies is a delicate issue, by looking at the TOC’s one get some curiosity on his arguments on the links between e.g. monsoons, droughts, CPR dilemmas -cattle, water management- and particular syndromes of violence in different places of the planet. The interested reader may have a look at his interview on Grist: Packing heat: Why violence boils over on a warming planet. He for example picked up on the link between food crises and the Arab spring also reported by Bar-Yam and Homer-Dixon on a previous post here. Such linkages reinforces my idea that the frequency of disturbance is a key component on a regime shift archetype that operationalize the link between social and ecological processes. Let’s see how the idea evolves. In the meanwhile, I’ll need an extra summer to catch up my readings list.

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