One of My Biggest Fears

You’ll notice that I post a lot of articles from Mother Jones’ website. This is primarily because I happen to love their environment section. It’s quite honest and does a good job at describing the current state of affairs. The article, 32 Countries Where Global Warming Could Make Violence Worse, by James West adequately sums up one of my biggest fears for our future.

The article warned that “climate change” will “exacerbate problems like terrorism and disease outbreaks, drain military resources, and create new enemies.”

The study that is referenced in this article was conduced by Maplecroft (a company that analyzes how vulnerable different countries are to various risks).  The study concludes “food production, poverty, migration, and social stability – factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states.” The report also points out the five countries that they found to be most vulnerable to “climate related conflict and food insecurity.” They’re Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Chad – the next five are Haiti, Ethiopia, Philippines, C.A.R, and Eritrea.

The report specifically talks about Boko Haram and the effects that global warming has had on the terror they’ve been reaking in Nigeria. It’s pretty long, so I won’t quote the entire thing, but I’ve provided a direct quote of the part I found most compelling.

There are now more clashes between farmers and nomadic herders over ever-dwindling agricultural land, and economic hardships in the country are boosting Boko Haram’s recruitment efforts. Eichelberger quoted Oluwakemi Okenyodo, the executive director of CLEEN Foundation, a Nigerian security-focused nonprofit, as saying that when “young people are pushed to the wall,” there’s a greater chance that they will be sucked into the growing Boko Haram insurgency. Eichelberger reported that “there’s not enough hard evidence yet to implicate human-caused climate change in the bulk of the ecological disaster” in Nigeria—but that could change in the future as rising temperatures increasingly threaten agriculture in the region.

There’s often speculation that the next world war is going to be over water. This report doesn’t seem to state the specifically, but it does lay out the potential for additional conflict within country borders, and soon to be outside of them.