When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts

Here's a follow up to the previous post about climate change and war as threat multipliers; a link to a 2011 Webby nominated 16-minute video "When the Water Ends" produced by Yale Environment 360.

Here's a description of the video's content.

For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.

These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.

“When the Water Ends” tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.” But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.

Parenti on Climate Change and War: Threat Multipliers

Christian Parenti's interview on Democracy Now is a fantastic examination of the nexus of climate and society, in particular, the multifarious causal links between climate change and violent conflict. I recommend reading the entire interview as well as reading his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.

Parenti doesn't say that "climate change causes war." Instead, he looks at how states have already been weakened and destabilized by social conditions, e.g. IMF policies forcing "structural adjustments" that include the abandonment of small farmers, political collapse that leads to tribal conflict and a flood of small weapons, and then how climate change amplifies social breakdown and the proliferation of violent conflict. From the interview:

"The Pentagon, particularly around 2007, was putting out these reports and think tanks around them, realizing they were going to be called upon to respond to this problem. To their credit the armed services take climate change seriously, which is more than you can say for, say the GOP leadership in the House. And what they see again and again is not so much a future of interstate conflict, but of irregular warfare within states, social breakdown, increased banditry, mass migration. They realize they’re going to be called upon to respond to these low intensity conflicts and these civil wars, so front and center in their program of response is counterinsurgency.

This goes by different names — small wars, low-intensity conflict, counter insurgency. This is as part of the War on Terror become very important to U.S. foreign policy and I’m critical of that one, because I don’t think it will work. I don’t think it’s moral. But also, counterinsurgency, if you look at its record, what it does to societies is very damaging. Because the object is the population rather than territory, it leaves societies fragmented and vulnerable."

These themes echo the historical study of collapse that I have been reading in Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Civilizations.