project on environment, population & security

Overview

The Project on Environment, Population and Security began in July 1994 and concluded in June 1996. It was an activity of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Toronto conducted in cooperation with the Population and Sustainable Development Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, and the Canadian Centre for Global Security in Ottawa. The project was supported by the Global Stewardship Initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The project gathered, evaluated, integrated and disseminated existing data on causal linkages among population growth, renewable resource scarcities, migration and violent conflict. This effort was guided by three key questions:

1. What is known about the links among population growth, renewable resource scarcities, migration and violent conflict?
2. What can be known about these links?
3. What are the critical methodological issues affecting research on these links?

To date, the policymaking community has not had adequate access to the best research findings on the linkages among environment, population and security. The evidence is in disparate form, often scientific in nature and not easily comprehended by those outside specialist audiences. Therefore, this project gathered as much evidence about such linkages as possible; examined and compared the best material to see if common patterns of causation exist across societies, economic regions, and time; and provided accessible summaries of these findings to policymakers.

The information and analyses generated by the project will:

• help policymakers better understand where to intervene to improve social outcomes;

• strengthen the research methodology and theories that could help scholars and policymakers understand common patterns of causation across diverse societies;

• gather together a large quantity of relevant data and make these data available to researchers and policymakers; and

• strengthen the network of experts, opinion leaders and policymakers interested in these issues

Key Findings

Through close analysis of the relationship between environmental scarcity and conflict, researchers for the Project on Environment, Population and Security have identified common physical, economic, and social dynamics in a variety of contexts. The main findings are as follows:

1. Under certain circumstances, scarcities of renewable resources such as cropland, fresh water, and forests produce civil violence and instability. However, the role of this “environmental scarcity” is often obscure. Environmental scarcity acts mainly by generating intermediate social effects, such as poverty and migrations, that analysts often interpret as conflict’s immediate causes.

Environmental scarcity — in interaction with other political, economic, and social factors — can generate conflict and instability, but the causal linkages are often indirect. Scarcities of cropland, fresh water, and forests constrain agricultural and economic productivity; generate large and destabilizing population movements; aggravate tensions along ethnic, racial, and religious lines; increase wealth and power differentials among groups; and debilitate political and social institutions. Migrations, ethnic tensions, economic disparities, and weak institutions in turn often appear to be the main causes of violence.

The relationship between environmental scarcity and violence is complex. Scarcity interacts with such factors as the character of the economic system, levels of education, ethnic cleavages, class divisions, technological and infrastructural capacity, and the legitimacy of the political regime. These factors, varying according to context, determine if environmental scarcity will produce harmful intermediate social effects, such as poverty and migrations. Contextual factors also influence the ultimate potential for instability or violence in a society.

2. Environmental scarcity is caused by the degradation and depletion of renewable resources, the increased demand for these resources, and/or their unequal distribution. These three sources of scarcity often interact and reinforce one another.

A simple “pie” metaphor illustrates the causes of renewable resource scarcity. A reduction in the quantity or quality of a resource shrinks the pie; population growth and increased per capita demand for the resource boost demand for the pie; and unequal distribution can cause some groups to get portions of the pie that are too small to sustain their wellbeing.

3. Environmental scarcity often encourages powerful groups to capture valuable environmental resources and prompts marginal groups to migrate to ecologically sensitive areas. These two processes — called “resource capture” and “ecological marginalization” — in turn reinforce environmental scarcity and raise the potential for social instability.

Resource Capture: The degradation and depletion of renewable resources can interact with population growth to encourage powerful groups within a society to shift resource distribution in their favour. Powerful groups secure or tighten their grip on a dwindling resource and often use this control to generate profits. Resource capture intensifies scarcity for poorer and weaker groups.

Ecological Marginalization: Unequal resource access can combine with population growth to cause large-scale and long-term migrations of the poorest groups within society. They move to ecologically fragile regions such as steep upland slopes, areas at risk of desertification, tropical rain forests, and low-quality public lands within urban areas. High population densities in these regions, combined with a lack of knowledge and capital to protect the local ecosystem, cause severe environmental scarcity and chronic poverty.

4. Societies can adapt to environmental scarcity either by using their indigenous environmental resources more efficiently or by decoupling from their dependence on these resources. In either case, the capacity to adapt depends upon the supply of social and technical “ingenuity” available in the society.

Societies that adapt to environmental scarcities can avoid undue suffering and social stress. Strategies for adaptation fall into two categories. First, a society can continue to rely on its indigenous environmental resources but use them more sustainably. Second, the society can sometimes decouple itself from dependence on its scarce environmental resources by producing goods and services that do not rely heavily on these resources. The country can then trade these products on the international market for things it can no longer produce at home because of local natural resource scarcities.

In the next decades, population growth, rising average resource demand, and persistent inequalities in resource access ensure that scarcities will affect many environmentally sensitive regions with a severity, speed, and scale unprecedented in history. Some poor countries are ill-equipped to adapt. These countries are underendowed with key social institutions, including research centres, efficient markets, competent government bureaucracies, and uncorrupt legal mechanisms. Such social institutions are essential prerequisites for an ample supply of the social and technical ingenuity that produces solutions to scarcity. Moreover, a society’s ability to generate and deliver ingenuity can be diminished by the very environmental scarcity the society needs to address, since scarcity often engenders competition among powerful groups that blocks institutional reform.

5. If social and economic adaptation is unsuccessful, environmental scarcity constrains economic development and contributes to migrations.

Developing economies tend to depend on their environmental resource base for a large part of their economic production and employment. If the supply of social and technical ingenuity is inadequate, therefore, scarcity constrains local economic development, affects the overall health of the economy, and causes economic hardship for marginal groups. To escape this hardship and improve their lives, large numbers of people migrate, often to urban centers.

6. In the absence of adaptation, environmental scarcity sharpens existing distinctions among social groups.

Environmental scarcity can strengthen group identities based on ethnic, class, or religious differences. Individuals identify with one another when they perceive they share similar hardships. This shared perception reinforces group identities and, in turn, intensifies competition among groups, a process called “social segmentation.”

7. In the absence of adaptation, environmental scarcity weakens states.

In some poor countries, the multiple effects of environmental scarcity increase the demands on the state, stimulate predatory elite behavior, reduce social trust and useful intergroup interaction, and depress state tax revenues. These processes in turn weaken the administrative capacity and legitimacy of the state.

8. The intermediate social effects of environmental scarcity — including constrained economic productivity, population movements, social segmentation, and weakening of states — can in turn cause ethnic conflicts, insurgencies, and coups d’état.

Migrating groups can trigger ethnic conflicts when they move to new areas. Declining or stagnant economic welfare can generate deprivation conflicts, such as rural insurgencies and urban riots. The weakening of the state shifts the social balance of power in favor of challenger groups (whose identities have often been strengthened by social segmentation) and increases opportunities for violent collective action by these groups against the state. Whether violence actually occurs, however, depends on a variety of additional conditions, including the conceptions of justice held by challenger groups, the opportunities for alliances among diverse social groups, and the capabilities of the leaders of the state, challenger groups, and elites.

9. Environmental scarcity rarely contributes directly to interstate conflict.

Although interstate conflict has occurred over non-renewables such as oil and strategic minerals, scarcities of renewable resources rarely cause “resource wars” among states. There are two reasons for this difference. First, in general, states cannot easily or quickly convert renewable resources into assets that significantly augment their power. Second, the very countries that are most dependent on renewable resources, and that are therefore most motivated to seize resources from their neighbors, also tend to be poor, which lessens their capability for aggression.

The renewable resource most likely to stimulate interstate war is river water. However, wars over river water between upstream and downstream neighbors are likely only in a narrow set of circumstances: The downstream country must be highly dependent on the water for its national well-being, the upstream country must be able to restrict the river’s flow, there must be a history of antagonism between the two countries, and, most important, the downstream country must be militarily much stronger than the upstream country. Research shows that conflict and turmoil related to river water is more often internal than international; this conflict results from dams and other major water projects that relocate large numbers of people.

10. Conflicts generated in part by environmental scarcity can have significant indirect effects on the international community.

Environmental scarcity can contribute to diffuse, persistent, subnational violence, such as ethnic clashes and insurgencies. In coming decades, the incidence of such violence will probably increase as environmental scarcities worsen in some parts of the developing world. This subnational violence will not be as conspicuous or dramatic as interstate resource wars, but it may have serious repercussions for the security interests of both the developed and developing worlds.

Civil violence within states can affect external trade relations, cause refugee flows, and produce humanitarian disasters that call upon the military and financial resources of developed countries and international organizations. Moreover, states destabilized by environmental stress may fragment as they become enfeebled and peripheral regions are seized by renegade authorities and warlords. States might avoid fragmentation by becoming more authoritarian, intolerant of opposition, and militarized. Such regimes, however, sometimes abuse human rights and try to divert attention from domestic grievances by threatening neighboring states.