On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict

A number of scholars have recently asserted that large-scale human-induced environmental pressures may seriously affect national and international security. Unfortunately, the environment-security theme encompasses an almost unmanageable array of sub-issues, especially if we define “security” broadly to include human physical, social, and economic well-being.

We can narrow the scope of this research problem by focusing on how environmental change affects conflict, rather than security, but still the topic is too vast. Environmental change may contribute to conflicts as diverse as war, terrorism, or diplomatic and trade disputes. Furthermore, it may have different causal roles: in some cases, it may be a proximate and powerful cause; in others, it may only be a minor and distant player in a tangled story that involves many political, economic, and physical factors. In this article, I accept the premise that environmental change may play a variety of roles as a cause of conflict, but I bound my analysis by focusing on acute national and international conflict, which I define as conflict involving a substantial probability of violence.

How might environmental change lead to acute conflict? Some experts propose that environmental change may shift the balance of power between states either regionally or globally, producing instabilities that could lead to war. Or, as global environmental damage increases the disparity between the North and the South, poor nations may militarily confront the rich for a greater share of the world’s wealth. Warmer temperatures could lead to contention over new ice-free sea-lanes in the Arctic or more accessible resources in the Antarctic. Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugees that spill across borders with destabilizing effects on the recipient’s domestic order and on international stability. Countries may fight over dwindling supplies of water and the effects of upstream pollution. In developing countries, a sharp drop in food crop production could lead to internal strife across urban-rural and nomadic-sedentary cleavages. If environmental degradation makes food supplies increasingly tight, exporters may be tempted to use food as a weapon. Environmental change could ultimately cause the gradual impoverishment of societies in both the North and South, which could aggravate class and ethnic cleavages, undermine liberal regimes, and spawn insurgencies. Finally, many scholars indicate that environmental degradation will “ratchet up” the level of stress within national and international society, thus increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict and impeding the development of cooperative solutions.

Which of these scenarios are most plausible and why? In the following pages, I review some reasons for the current salience of environmental issues, and I note several examples of good research on links between environmental change and acute conflict. I then suggest a preliminary analytical framework that lays out a research agenda for exploring the issue. Using this framework, and drawing on the literature of conflict theory, I suggest hypotheses about the likely links between environmental change and acute conflict.

I propose that poor countries will in general be more vulnerable to environmental change than rich ones; therefore, environmentally induced conflicts are likely to arise first in the developing world. In these countries, a range of atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic environmental pressures will in time probably produce, either singly or in combination, four main, causally interrelated social effects: reduced agricultural production, economic decline, population displacement, and disruption of regular and legitimized social relations. These social effects, in turn, may cause several specific types of acute conflict, including scarcity disputes between countries, clashes between ethnic groups, and civil strife and insurgency, each with potentially serious repercussions for the security interests of the developed world.

I do not hypothesize that the causal links between these variables will be tight or deterministic. As anti-Malthusians have argued for nearly two centuries, numerous intervening factors–physical, technological, economic, and social–often permit great resilience, variability, and adaptability in human-environmental systems. I identify a number of these factors in this article; in particular, I examine whether free-market mechanisms may permit developing countries to minimize the negative impacts of environmental degradation. But I suggest that, as the human population grows and environmental damage progresses, policymakers will have less and less capacity to intervene to keep this damage from producing serious social disruption, including conflict.

These hypotheses should be thoroughly tested using both historical and contemporary data at the regional and societal levels. There is great need for empirical research by students of security affairs.