In a recent editorial article for the academic journal Climatic Change, Jon Barnett argues that the current debate about climate change and security is missing the point. Everyone following the news knows the story by now – global warming leads to resource scarcity, and resource scarcity leads to war. Barnett, one of the world’s foremost researchers on climate and security, cautions scholars and activists against making such simplistic assumptions.
A major problem with the popular discourse on climate wars is that it is excessively general, and poorly if at all informed by evidence…. what is passing as research on climate conflicts is not good social science either: it eschews evidence, most of it ignores the large body of research on the causes of conflict generally and on so-called ‘environmental conflicts’ in particular, and very little of it is peer-reviewed.
While there is evidence that resource scarcity does increase the likelihood of violent conflict, correlation is not causation. The current assumption that climatic stress leads to war takes no account of social and cultural responses, to say nothing of international aid and cooperation. Worse still, taking an oversimplified view of conflict related to environmental stress, such as the violence in Darfur, could inure us to the reality of war crimes and atrocities.
Moreover, Barnett points out one more major factor in the discussion of climate security: the military establishment, which has no particular interest in promoting peace. The army is in and of itself a major greenhouse gas emitter – Barnett estimates the U.S. military’s total emissions in 2006 at 1% of the global total. Yet their interest in co-opting the discourse around climate change is more insidious than protecting their desire to emit. Countries which are already powerful through military means need a narrative of conflict to maintain their status on the international stage:
These countries require discourses of global disorder in order to justify their security and trade policies, and their security and defence agencies require problems to justify their continued existence in a world where the threat of war has diminished since the end of the cold war. They seem to be appropriating the dangers of climate change to serve these institutional agendas. That these agendas are inimical to a sustainable world where there are deep cuts in emissions and considerable action on adaptation is obvious.
It is clearly time to adopt a view of climate security which puts peace at the center of the discussion, rather than war. Moreover, it is our job as activists and organizers to expand our scrutiny to include anyone, including the military and the arms trade, whose interests stand at odds to human security and social justice.
