Environmental changes as causes of acute conflict assignment

These social effects, in turn, may cause several specific types of acute conflict, including scarcity disputes between countries, clashes between ethnic groups, and civil strife and insurgency, each with potentially serious repercussions for the security interests of the developed world. I do not hypothesize that the causal links between these variables will be tight or deterministic. As anti-Malthusians have argued for nearly two centuries, numerous intervening factors–physical, technological, economic, and social–often permit great resilience, variability, and adaptability in human-environmental systems. 2 I identify a number of these factors in this article; in particular, I examine whether free-market mechanisms may permit developing countries to minimize the negative impacts of environmental degradation. But I suggest that, as the human population grows and environmental damage progresses, policymakers will have less and less capacity to intervene to keep this damage from producing serious social disruption, including conflict. These hypotheses should be thoroughly tested using both historical and contemporary data at the regional and societal levels.

There is great need for empirical research by students of security affairs. The Recent Salience of Environmental Issues A paradigm-shattering example of such nonlinear or “ threshold” effects in complex environmental systems was the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in the mid-1980s. 16 The hole was startling evidence of the instability of the environmental system in response to human inputs, of the capacity of humankind to significantly affect the ecosystem on a global scale, and of our inability to predict exactly how the system will change.

An important intervening factor was the fabric of religious and social beliefs held by the people and promoted by preachers, especially those beliefs attributing weather fluctuations to the sin of someone in the community. 20 MacKay thus argues against a simplistic “ stimulus-response” model of environment-conflict linkages and instead for one that allows for “ culturally mediated” behavior. Addressing a modern conflict, William Durham has analyzed the demographic and environmental pressures behind the 1969 “ Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras. 1 Because of the prominence in this conflict of previous migration from El Salvador to Honduras, and because of the striking evidence of population growth and land stress in the two countries (most notably in El Salvador), a number of analysts have asserted that the Soccer War is a first-class example of an ecologically driven conflict. 22 A simple Malthusian interpretation does seem to have credibility when one looks at the aggregate data. 23 But Durham shows that changes in agricultural practice and land distribution–to the detriment of poor farmers–were more powerful inducements to migration than sheer population growth.

Land scarcity developed not because there was too little to go around, but because of “ a process of competitive exclusion by which the small farmers [were] increasingly squeezed off the land” by large land owners. 24 Durham thus contends that ecologists cannot directly apply to human societies the simple, density-dependent models of resource competition they commonly use to study asocial animals: a distributional component must be added, because human behavior is powerfully constrained by social structure and the resource access it entails. 5 While these studies are commendable, a review of all of the recent work on environmental change and conflict reveals a number of difficulties, some methodological and some conceptual. First, researchers often emphasize human-induced climate change and ozone depletion to the neglect of severe terrestrial and aquatic environmental problems such as deforestation, soil degradation, and fisheries depletion. Second, much of the recent writing on the links between environmental change and conflict is anecdotal. These pieces do not clearly separate the “ how” question (how will environmental change lead to conflict? from the “ where” question (where will such conflict occur? ). I address the “ how” question in the following sections of this article. Third, environmental-social systems are hard to analyze. They are characterized by multiple causes and effects and by a host of intervening variables, often linked by interactive, synergistic, and nonlinear causal relations. Empirical data about these variables and relations are rarely abundant. Although the underlying influence of environmental factors on conflict may be great, the complex and indirect causation in these systems means that the scanty evidence available is always open to many interpretations.

The first question asks about the nature of the arrow in Figure 1 between “ environmental effects” and “ social effects,” while the second asks about the arrow between “ social effects” and “ conflict. ” Figure 1 clarifies these aspects of our research agenda. If we wish to understand a society’s capacity to prevent severe social disruption (where the preventive action could be either mitigation of, or adaptation to, the environmental stress), we need to understand the arrows between the ideational factors at the top of the figure and “ population,” “ activity per capita,” and “ social effects” along the main spine of the figure.

If we wish to understand a society’s propensity toward conflict (given certain social effects due to the environmental stress), we need to understand the arrow between the ideational factors and “ conflict. ” When sufficiently advanced, this research should help identify key intervention points where policymakers might be able to alter the causal processes linking human activity, environmental degradation, and conflict. These interventions will fall into two general categories: those that seek to prevent negative social effects and those that seek to prevent the conflict that could result from these social effects.