Will climate change cause wars?

All along history, while a few wars have been fought over ideologies, most wars had resource acquisition and exploitation at their core.

With climate change and global warming likely to have significant adverse effects on natural resources, it is only likely that these too could become causal factors for wars worldwide.

Let us explore this topic a bit further.

Environmentalists have warned that if temperatures rise significantly over the next century, large areas of the planet could become uninhabitable, forcing millions of people to migrate elsewhere and significantly increase the risk of conflicts breaking out.

It’s not hard to imagine international tensions bubbling over with such large-scale migrations, is it? In fact, as the planet heats up, defence planners in many countries have already begun to pay more attention to the risk of climate-related conflicts. One landmark assessment prepared for the Pentagon way back in 2003 considered a specific scenario for abrupt climate change in which conflicts over land and water use grow through the century.

Drought, in particular, is a perennial marker of conflict but the connection isn’t a simple one. The horrific violence in Darfur, Sudan, for example, followed decades of strained relations between nomadic herders and farmers, coinciding with a sustained drop in rainfall from the 1970s onward.

African countries like Uganda are among the world’s most ethnically diverse, and they are also vulnerable to climate change. New findings suggest peace will be harder to achieve and maintain in places like Uganda as the climate changes.

As the world’s subtropics heat up and dry out, many important regions – including parts of the southwest US and northern Mexico, and the nations ringing the Mediterranean – will see an intensifying risk of major drought, which may feed other sources of societal stress and international conflict.