Recipe For War: Remove Water and Food, Add Ethnic Strife—Then Stir

Climate change hasn’t driven humans to kill each other yet, but we’re getting closer.

Eric Roston
July 26, 2016 — 6:00 AM EDT

The question is no longer just whether climate change will kill us, but also whether climate change will make us kill each other.

Almost 25 percent of armed conflicts in ethnically divided countries occur around the same time as climate-related disasters. This is the main take-away of a new study by researchers that adds crucial data to a debate that's been simmering for several years: Is there evidence (PDF) that ties war and civil unrest to the changing climate? Another finding directly applies to this and humanity's key climate change choke points: food and water. Over the three decades ending in 2010, 9 percent of wars took place in the wake of heat waves or droughts.

Shooting wars generally require a complex web of short- and long-term causes. Anecdotal fodder abounds pointing toward extreme climate events as one of them. Syria's civil war erupted amid the area's worst drought in 900 years, though consequences of the Arab Spring were its primary genesis. Further meteorological chaos could push Venezuela's economic implosion over the edge, but the oil glut and political chaos will probably play larger roles. As early as 2007, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon touted a link between climate change and the conflict in Darfur that's killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The new study, by mostly German researchers, adds weight to the common-sense notion that, at the very least, climate-related catastrophes contribute instability to places in which neighbors already stand poised to shoot each other. The authors aren't suggesting a direct and causal relationship between weather and war, at least not yet. What they have concluded is, when looking at the record of weather and war, their coincidence is dramatically higher in countries with inter-ethnic tensions than in those without them. Ethnic division and disaster was a more potent recipe for conflict than when disaster mixed with poverty or income inequality, or even with a past propensity for conflict.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-26/recipe-for-war-remove-water-and-food-add-ethnic-strife-then-stir

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/07/20/1601611113.full

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/Hsiang_and_Burke_2013.pdf