Climate War: How Global Warming Exacerbates Conflicts

The climate crisis is not coming. She is already here. If we continue as before, it will be six degrees warmer on average worldwide than it was before industrialization began. The aim is to limit global warming to two degrees compared to the time before industrialization, ”says the Paris climate agreement. 1,5 degrees are better. That was in 2015. Not much has happened since then. The CO2 content in the atmosphere continues to rise and with it the temperatures - despite the corona pandemic.

Most of the changes that we are now experiencing in weather and climate were predicted by the Club of Rome's report in the early 70s. In 1988, 300 scientists in Toronto warned against an increase in the global average temperature of up to 4,5 degrees by 2005. The consequences were "as bad as a nuclear war". In a report in the New York Times, the American author Nathaniel Rich describes how the US Presidents Reagan and Bush, under pressure from the oil industry in the 80s, prevented the US economy from switching to less energy consumption and more sustainability. As early as the late 70s, NASA researchers and others had “understood very well that the burning of fossil fuels is bringing the earth into a new hot period.” Now it has started.

Conflict drivers

Global conflicts are also getting hotter. Most people want to live like the majority in Central Europe or North America: at least one car in front of the door, a new smartphone every two years, cheap flights on vacation and buying a lot of stuff that we didn't even know yesterday will not be needed tomorrow. Slum dwellers in India, Pakistan or West Africa take care of the disposal for us: They slaughter our consumer waste without protective clothing, poison and burn themselves in the process and what is left seeps into the ground. We deliver plastic waste, declared as recyclable, to East Asia, where it ends up in the sea. And where would we go if everyone did this? Not very far. If everyone were to live like us, we would need about four earths. If you extrapolate German resource consumption to the world, it would be three. The fight for scarce resources will intensify. 

Melting glaciers, parched land

When the glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes melt, one fifth of humanity in South America and Southeast Asia will eventually find themselves on dry land. The major rivers in India, South and Indochina are running out of water. A third of the glaciers have thawed away since 1980. According to information from Worldwatch, 1,4 billion people already live in “areas with water scarcity”. In 2050 it will be five billion. Around 500 million human lives depend on the water from the Himalayas alone. Laos and the south of Vietnam, for example, live on and off the water of the Mekong. Without water there is no rice, no fruit, no vegetables. 

In other regions of the world too, climate change is reducing the resources that people need to live. Already today, 40% of the land area is considered "arid areas" and the deserts are spreading further. Droughts, storms and floods hit especially those who have to make do without reserves with what they wrest from their barren soil. It's the poor.

Drought civil war

The civil war in Syria was preceded by the longest period of drought the country has ever experienced. According to a study by US climatologist Colin Kelley, around 2006 million Syrians moved to cities between 2010 and 1,5 - partly because their parched land no longer fed them. Violent conflicts arise out of necessity when other factors exacerbate the situation. The Assad regime, for example, cut subsidies for staple foods. It subscribed to a neo-liberal economic policy that left the victims of the drought to fend for themselves without government assistance. "Climate change has opened the door to hell in Syria", wrote the then US Vice President Al Gore and Barack Obama analyzed after the beginning of the war: "Drought, crop failures and expensive food helped fuel the early conflict."

Also in other parts of the world , especially in the Sahel region, global warming is fueling conflicts. One more reason to stop.