Climate changes may fuel human conflicts

Climate change presents substantial threats to physical and mental health, and may also create social instability, conflict and violence, a new study has revealed. The study by researchers from Columbia University and the University of Washington said that climate variability and change may also lead to widespread migration away from areas that can no longer provide sufficient food, water and shelter for the current populations.

Coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change due to hazards such as changing water use patterns, shoreline erosion, sea level rise and storm surge, the study noted. "The science of climate change and the threat to human and population health is irrefutable, and the threat is evolving quickly," said professor Irwin Redlener from Columbia University.

"Unfortunately, we are now at a point where simply slowing climate change, while critical, is not enough. We need to simultaneously develop and deploy ways of mitigating the impact and adapting to the consequences of this environmental disaster," he added. Public health impact in the US Gulf Coast may be severe as the region is expected to experience increases in extreme temperatures, sea level rise and possibly fewer but more intense hurricanes.

"Climate change may amplify existing public health impacts, such as heat-related morbidity and mortality, malnutrition resulting from droughts, and injury and deaths following exposure to floods," said Elisa Petkova from the National Centre for Disaster Preparedness. "Although future trends are difficult to project, climate change may also facilitate the re-introduction of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever to the Gulf Coast and other vulnerable coastal regions," Petkova added.

The study appeared in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/does-climate-change-cause-conflict). According to The Guardian, it might be more accurate to consider climate change in the way that the Pentagon has come to think of it: as a “threat multiplier”.

“Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in a statement announcing the US defense department’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap.

As a precursor to conflict, lack of access to basic human needs is a major driver and Pete Newell, a retired army colonel and a consultant to the defense department and other government agencies, says he has seen the impacts of water and energy scarcity firsthand in conflict zones. “In my personal opinion, that underlies a lot of the issues and conflict,” Newell says.

“I saw it a few years ago, watching tribes along the Iraq-Iran border going to war over water rights. And it’s becoming worse as populations migrate to urban coastal centers and those areas’ ability to provide services are overwhelmed. As a precursor to conflict, lack of access to basic human needs is a major driver and it’s only getting worse.”

Global climate change and the El Niño weather event may have played a role in 21% of all civil conflicts since 1950, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. El Niño refers to the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, leading to weather shifts that can disrupt food production through extreme rain or drought.

One-off extreme weather events have been linked to civil conflict in the past but in a new paper, US researchers used global data from 1950 to 2004 to examine the probability of new civil conflicts arising throughout the tropics during the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

“We find that for years in which there is a strong El Niño event, the likelihood of civil war onset in the tropics is 6%,” said co-author of the study, Kyle Meng, a PhD student from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. “Compared to the opposite phase of the cycle, known as La Niña events, this is a doubling of the conflict risk. From 1950-2004, we find that El Niño has played a role in 21% of all civil wars globally.”

El Niño was not the sole cause of problems but increased the probability that conflict would occur in poor countries, said Meng. “We believe that the direct causes of conflict are a complex mix of social, political, and economic factors. However, what we are observing is that, given those factors, the likelihood of conflicts breaking out increases when there is an El Niño event.”

More accurate weather and climate change predictions may help countries likely to be affected by El Niño prepare before conflict breaks out, he said. “We think much can be done by international institutions such as the UN on this matter.

One action might be to prepare food aid supplies to be delivered to teleconnected countries in the lead up to strong El Niño years,” he said. “Another would be to warn humanitarian relief organisations in the inevitable humanitarian crisis that might follow.”