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Climate change, environmental violence and genocide
Jürgen Zimmerer
Department of History, University of Hamburg/Cluster of Excellence (EXC 177) ‘Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction’ (ClISAP), University of Hamburg, Germany
Anthropogenic climate change is the most fundamental challenge for humankind in the twenty-first century. Rising sea levels and the loss of agricultural land, severe weather changes and desertification are just some of the likely consequences that will drastically alter the living conditions of millions of people, mainly in the global south. Environmental violence, including resource crises such as peak fossil fuel, should be of major concern to genocide studies. This article argues that environmental violence is amongst the main driving forces of collective violence and that climate change will dramatically increase the likelihood of genocide occurring in areas at risk. On this basis, the article criticises genocide prevention orthodoxy for its focus on humanitarian military intervention and asks for a new concept of sustainable prevention on the basis of global social justice.
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the northern hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.1
Climate change
‘Climate change’ has had an astonishing career over the last three decades. Almost unknown in the 1980s – although the phenomena is much older – climate change had become somewhat of a hegemonic discourse at the end of the first decade of the new millennium. This ‘career’ is reflected in the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded in 1988. It symbolises both the global nature of climate change and the necessity of addressing climate change in transnational cooperation. The IPCC’s highest prominence, was marked by the year 2007, when it, along with former US Vice-President Al Gore, was awarded the Noble Peace Prize. As this article is being written, the IPCC has started presenting its Fifth Assessment Report, beginning as usual with the findings of Working Group 1 on the physical science basis of climate change; reports from Working Group 2 on ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, Working Group 3 on ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’, and finally a ‘Synthesis Report’, will follow later in 2014.2
Despite all scientific evidence on climate change and its causes and consequences, it has become a matter of heated scientific and public debate. A series of ‘scandals’, such as ‘climate gate’, in which confidential emails of climatologists of the University of East Anglia were leaked, have been used to undermine the credibility of the scientific assessment, as has seemingly contradictory evidence, such as the apparent pause in the increase of temperature during the last 15 years, acknowledged now by the IPCC.3 According to most scientists,4 none of this fundamentally challenges the reality of climate change:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased5
Despite the overwhelmingly affirmative scientific evidence, these findings are met by fierce ideological opposition from certain politicians, lobbyists and journalists. The debate shows all the signs of the ideological rifts of past conflicts, with extreme representatives of both sides accusing each other of being denialists or alarmists. In a complete reversal of the actual position, those people arguing with scientific models and predictions are labelled as ‘ideological’, whereas the so-called climate sceptics, amongst whom are only a few serious scientists, claim objective truth for their position. They abuse, for example, qualified statements made by the IPCC, which tries to assess the likelihood of any given future event in percentages, as a lack of scientific evidence, whereas it could be seen with much more justification as proof of the scientific character of the entire endeavour. Often climate change critics claim to possess the absolute truth, an illusion which in itself is highly questionable and certainly unscientific.
Nevertheless, the close nexus between science and politics and the procedure where not only scientists but also diplomatic and other representatives of various governments negotiate at least the summary of the Assessment Reports has also drawn serious criticism from scientists involved in the work of the IPCC.6
One reason for this intense debate seems to be that the public – both supporters and critics of the IPCC – tend to concentrate on the apocalyptic dimension of climate change. And indeed, if some of the more extreme predictions come true, the world would become uninhabitable for humankind within a relatively short period of time. The Guardian, one of the most popular UK newspapers, terms this doomsday terminology ‘Climate Calamity’.7 However, it seems that this focus on the most extreme predictions, on the potentially apocalyptic consequences of unmitigated climate change, might in the end be to the detriment of the cause; in the light of the fierce battle regarding the apocalyptic dimension of passing tipping points and the danger of a runaway climate, the simple truth that climate change is already taking place and is already affecting the lives of millions of people seems to have been lost. It might be the tragedy of climate change research that the potentially truly apocalyptic character of climate change in the future obscures the view of the ground-level suffering occurring today. The fact that this suffering predominantly takes place – at least at this moment – in the global south might be a further explanation for this deficiency.
Nevertheless, in many ways the fierceness of this debate is testament to the ‘success’ of climate change as a concept, as it increasingly influences disciplines outside the narrow confines of climate sciences. In particular, human responses to climate change, both in preventing a further acceleration and in mitigating its effects, are studied in a variety of disciplines from economics8 and political science9 to anthropology,10 from agriculture to engineering. Some scholars have even proclaimed the ascent of a new field of research: climate and culture, particularly focusing on the cultural and political consequences of climate change.11 Since violence plays a role amongst the possible effects of climate change, conflict and peace research and security studies are also engaged with climate change research.12 What is strangely amiss, despite the fact that many see in climate change the scourge of the twentieth century, and one would assume also of the twenty-first century, is the integration of genocide studies in the climate change debate. This article sketches some of the historical reasons for this lack and argues for the inclusion of climate change in genocide studies and vice versa. It does so with the aim of opening up genocide prevention to the challenges of environmental violence.
Climate change and environmental violence: a note on terminology
It appears that climate change in common usage has acquired a surplus of meaning that goes beyond the actual physical phenomenon or the set of physical phenomena originally subsumed under the term. Climate change has become a chiffre for man-made environmental change and its potentially catastrophic effects. Climate change in this broader sense, however, cannot be separated from the carbon economy and population growth, that is, the finiteness of resources. Both are not only amongst the main causes of climate change, but are themselves threat drivers as the unsatisfied need for resources and the increase in demand will, in all likelihood – as any resource scarcity – cause an increase in violence, conflict and war. To give just one example: fossil fuel is both a driving force of climate change and will, after its peak,13 amplify environmental and other crises, as the lack of energy supply will need to be compensated for and a reduction in energy supply will most likely increase the likelihood of resource conflicts. At the same time, energy scarcity will limit the resources available to mitigate the consequences of climate change. This challenge will not change even if we factor in new ‘extreme energy’ techniques of oil and gas production that are expanding current fossil fuel reserves14 as on the one hand the process of ‘extreme energy’ is itself unsustainable, while the greater extraction effort and risk involved also bring environmental problems of their own.15
Resource scarcity in general, however, is intensified by population growth as population growth results generally in an increase in consumption unless the unequal distribution of food, water, energy, etc. worsens. By the 1970s, the finite nature of resources had been identified and brought to the attention of a wider public. In their famous 1972 study, The Limits to Growth, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens had modelled economic and population growth and come to the conclusion that the current lifestyle based on growing consumption was unsustainable.16 Forty years later, the situation has worsened, exacerbated by – amongst other things – climate change. For the analysis of the societal impact and the prediction of future violence, climate change cannot be separated from general environmental change.17
Scientists have reacted to this challenge by introducing the concept of ‘Anthropocene’,18 which as a geological epoch followed the ‘Holocene’ (a term that is used to describe the last 11,000 years), and began some 250 years ago with the advent of the carbon-based industrial revolution.19 The concept of ‘Anthropocene’ acknowledges the interconnectedness of various human activities to an extent that, for the first time, humankind is seen as a primary mover of global physical phenomena. Rockström et al. have made use of this concept by attempting to identify and quantify thresholds by which various environmental changes became or will become irreversible and catastrophic. They have marked a set of nine ‘planetary boundaries’, the crossing of which would endanger the continental ...
