TODAY: Jeffrey Stark, the 2013 Gijs van Seventer Lecturer in Environmental Health, on Climate Change and its Potential Effect on Global Conflict and Instability.
Could climate change interact with pervasive cultural, political, and socioeconomic issues to fan small sparks of existing conflict into bigger problems?
Jeffrey Stark, the director of research and studies at the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability (FESS), spent much of the past five years investigating this question — and its more subtle and systemic implications — in regions potentially vulnerable to climate-driven instability.
Stark is the featured speaker at the 2013 Gijs van Seventer Lecture in Environmental Health on Friday, April 12, presented by the Department of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. The lecture will be held from noon to 1 p.m. in the 670 Albany St. Auditorium on the BU Medical Campus. The lectureship is in tribute to Dr. Gijs van Seventer, an internationally recognized immunologist in the field of human T cell cytokine biology, and a former member of the faculty of the Department of Environmental Health at BUSPH.
Stark will present findings from field research that examines the potential for climate change-related conflict, an emerging research area that was prompted, in part, by a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicted rising global temperatures will contribute to increases in severe storms, floods, droughts, glacier melt, and sea level rise.
On behalf of the USAID, Stark and his colleagues conducted three case studies in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Peru to investigate how climate-related vulnerabilities interact with the dynamics of fragility, instability, and conflict; and to identify opportunities to improve policies and programs that can help address the intersection of climate and conflict.
Stark’s presentation will review the scholarly and policy debates on the relationship between climate change and security, and will examine specific findings from field research in Africa and Latin America. He argues for a more nuanced perspective that closely traces the intersection of climate change effects with local political, economic, and social factors in order to relate them to the potential for instability and conflict.
What are some of the linkages your team identified between climate change and instances of global conflict?
“They tend to be pretty context specific, but they’re generally issues having to do with governance. Communities tend to be poor and vulnerable because of failures in governance in many cases, and the stresses induced by climate changes are increasing those forms of vulnerability — especially in relation to livelihoods. So if there are crop failures, or droughts, or floods, they tend to produce crises in communities — and because of the failures of governance, there’s not usually a good response from government actors. That increases tension.
“There are also divisions among groups — think in terms of ethnic or identity groups, or borders between countries or regions. When you have harsh climate change effects that have differential outcomes for different groups, because a group is favored or disfavored within their society, that produces rifts and tensions. When you see yourself struggling at an existential level, and somebody else is doing better – climate change didn’t produce those rifts but it exposes and amplifies them.”
Would those types of group conflicts and boundary disputes be illustrated by what you studied in Ethopia between the Issa and the Afar?
“That’s a good example, because in Ethiopia different groups have different standing with the central government. Both of these are pastoralist groups. The Issa are moving into areas that were traditionally held by the Afar, so there were tensions over water and pasture already. The Issa were being driven ever harder into the Afar lands because the drought frequency in that part of Ethiopia has increased.”
In your research, the economic implications of climate change looked fairly apparent but it seems like you found an entirely different sociopolitical layer that just added more complexity.
“That’s really what needs more attention. We need more case studies so that we find more examples and we can have a better comparative understanding of what kinds of circumstances we might face. The non-climate factors are very strong. The question isn’t whether climate change causes conflict – it’s too crude a question, and not a very productive research question – but to cast it in terms of what are the consequences of climate change for conflict? How does it impact some of these other stressors that already exist? How does it become a factor in existing areas of instability?”
So, climate change may not be the direct trigger for conflict itself, but it can act as the catalyst if the conditions are right?
“Conflict is very hard to predict. By now most of us know the story of the street peddler in Tunisia who set himself on fire and somehow started the Arab Spring. He wasn’t the start of those conflicts but his actions brought to light existing contradictions within people that they already had strong feelings about. That kind of thing can happen in relation to climate change. It can be something that develops over time, or it can happen quickly if there’s a natural disaster like a drought or a flood. If the government can’t respond, that failure could be symbolic — of its weakness, its lack of legitimacy, it’s lack of regard for one particular identity group. Any of those could take an inherently unstable situation and push it toward conflict.”
Have you identified any other emerging potential hotspots for this kind of climate-driven increase in conflict?
“Areas that we need to begin to think about are urban areas in the developing world. If you look at Latin America, something like 75 percent of the population is urbanized. In Asia it’s less, but still quite high, and Africa is beginning to urbanize at an unprecedented pace. Six of the 10 largest cities in Africa are along the coast, so they’re exposed to the potential of sea level rise and storm surges, but with little of no infrastructure and unregulated hosing in precarious areas.
“There’s a tremendous potential for immediate loses from storms, but there’s an additional threat of contamination of water systems and some pretty significant likelihood of environmental health problems and epidemics, which we already see in areas of the Philippines. This hasn’t been studied too well, and we know from incidents such as food riots that these kinds of social problems and crises in places where’s there’s weak or no government response can turn violent fairly quickly.”
The 2013 Gijs van Seventer Lecture in Environmental Health: Friday, April 12. Noon to 1 p.m., 670 Albany St. Auditorium, BU Medical Campus. Free and open to the public.