The Human Cost of Climate Change

The consequences of climate change extend well beyond the scope of melting glaciers and rising sea levels.  The effects of climate change expand to include not only rising temperatures and desertification, but mass migrations of people, scarcity of natural resources, increased poverty and starvation, disease and war, to name a few.  

One of the significant elements of global climate change’s geopolitical side effects is its capacity to affect property, resources, and border issues.  Property and borders are key elements in human disputes.  Land and property are sources of relative power, nationalism, bargaining capability, and respect.  Owning land with natural resources is a source of economic power.   Land is often a factor in military conflict, and a tool for discrimination.  The changing of border configurations can have profound effect on a region, as evidenced by the post- Berlin Conference Africa.  The importance of property and borders in international relations is hard to emphasize enough, and there is virtually limitless proof for it.  

Alterations to land and property create the need for revisions of hard-won treaties (for example, the decades-old Indus Water Treaty between Pakistan and India), migration and displacement, and the loss of food and irrigation sources for affected residents. Populations will destabilize, and displacement of large groups of people will cause outbreaks of violence as ethnicities clash and provisions become stretched. Overflows of refugees will create anger, resentment, crowding and fighting.  Existing racism will become exacerbated within newly competitive geographic configurations.  The vulnerabilities of starvation and displacement become opportunities for usurpations, coups and corruption.  As the class divides grow wider because of  uneven distribution of available resources, violent takeovers by dissatisfied populations will increase in number as already crumbling states become further delegitimized by their inability to exert control over the crises. Rebellion in general has far greater appeal to the starving and neglected.  The fault lines along which these countries and their populations begin to crack also make perfect openings for terrorist groups like the Taliban, Somalia’s al-Shabaab or other branches of al-Qaeda, who see opportunity in others’ vulnerabilities.

According to a 2007 study published by International Alert in London, there are 46 countries at risk of having poverty and violent conflict compounded by climate change.  Included in the risk factors of climate change which International Alert’s report lists as potential causes for violent conflict are desertification, melting glaciers, floods, loss of coastline, and less usable land.  Climate change added into the mix for states that are already experiencing tumult and poverty makes for a veritable Petri dish for growing human rights violations and deplorable living conditions.

And what will this mean for the U.S.?  Many of the top countries from which we import crude oil and petroleum products are listed as in danger, borderline, and even critical  on the 2010 Foreign Policy Failed States Index.  The previously mentioned report from International Alert lists Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq as “facing a high risk of armed conflict as a knock-on consequence of climate change.”  We cannot deny our personal interest in stability in those regions.  The ethnogeographic tensions between Jews and Muslims, Sunni and Shi’a will only be worsened.  When the Persian Gulf’s water levels rise and flood the oilfields, or when armed conflict derails oil production, we will feel such shocks harshly.  

This is a grim prognosis.  However, it must be recognized that global climate change will have global effect. It is up to all the countries, large and small, developed and undeveloped, democratic and autocratic to take action.  This will not merely become a problem for some countries, but for all countries.  Climate change is no longer just about saving our ozone layer or our polar ice caps, but about saving people.  And they need saving, not merely from natural disasters, but from the chaos of fear, racism, poverty and greed which will surely spring up to replace the eroding coastlines and the melting glaciers.        

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