Conflict Increasing with Extreme Weather

It makes sense to me that environmental degradation would cause conflict to occur within countries. In times of desperation, people will do what they can or what they have to, to survive. Like in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, if the first and most basic level of food, water, and shelter is not achieved, people cannot move forward onto morality, which is in the last level. People struggling to survive can’t afford to think morally, because that could lead to their death.

However, what was particularly interesting to me, was the specific weather conditions and their effect on conflict. In Tara’s presentation she explained how “one standard deviation change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall increase frequency of interpersonal violence by 2.3% and of intergroup conflict by 13.2%.” I think being able to assign hard numbers to the effects of climate change on the world would help in creating and implementing a climate change policy. Often times, the reasoning for policy makers to be hesitant or against climate change policy is because of the “uncertainty” that is involved. Yes, in science there is no such thing as solid proof; we would be unable to know 100% that climate change is occurring. However, with all the evidence we have and continue to get, it is fairly certain that climate change is occurring. Yet, scientific uncertainty is heard all too often. Policy makers hold on to that tightly, since it is their strongest argument, and use it time and time again in order to resist any climate change policies that might affect industries and corporations. However, being able to provide solid numbers of what climate change is going to do to the world, might further belittle their uncertainty argument.

In Climate Change, Rainfall, and Social Conflict in Africa, by Cullen Hendrix and Idean Salehyan, they look into how deviations of the normal rainfall patterns impacts people in African communities. They conclude that armed conflict is more likely to occur when rainfall is above average. Non-violent events (protests, strikes) are more likely in the event of below average rainfall. All types of events (violent or non-violent) have a higher chance of occurring when experiencing either high or low extremes of rainfall, when compared to years with years of average rainfall.

Morality tends to go out the window when faced with water scarcity. California is currently experiencing a drought, I’d be curious to know if the problems that were seen in Africa translate over to America.