Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace by Tony Fry

Author:Tony Fry
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030247201
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Climate Change and Conflict

Even from a brief outline it’s clear that climate change impacts pose a huge risk to many nations and to global security in general. There is a widespread assumption that these impacts will arrive in various forms of environmental disasters—flood, fire, drought, extreme weather and so on. But it’s very likely what will first occur will be economic and informational crisis. For example, many coastal cities will experience and economic collapse and population flight when information arrives indicating inundation looks to be certain, which maybe several years before the actual event. In such circumstance information management and post-abandonment planning will have direct consequences on the actions and fate of the population. Where issues of logistics and relocation destinations have been resolved risk is reduced, where it is not its obviously high. Abandoned cities themselves raise issues. For example, their material reuse and recoverable resources can be ‘mined’ in an organised and orderly ways. In many cases these materials could be the means to raise the ground levels and contribute to rebuilding recoverable sections of a city. At the other extreme these cities could become sites of scavenging, chaos and violence.

Currently, climate science holds the dominant position in defining the problem of climate change , but this presents a serious and unbalanced view of the problem. Climate is a much a cultural issues as it is a scientific one (which is not to diminish the scientific perspective). This is because climate has always been, and remains, a dominant feature of our collective historicity and being. What ‘we’ look like, grow, eat, wear, the work we do, how and where we live, how we feel, what we value and don’t value all link to the effects and affects of climate. It alters our bodies, affects our minds and influences our behaviour. Thus over the entire period of hominoid existence climate reactive action has been, as mentioned, a major directive force in how we as a species evolved. It was also a major factor in our species global distribution.

The Anthropocene now represents the age of a hominoid accelerated moment of planetary and climate change . Yet adaptation to climate in the engineered environments of late modern life is under-recognised, reductively instrumentalised, urgent and a crucial imperative to embrace. It begs to be understood as indivisibly a trans-science/culture collaborative and diverse project of transforming modes of earthly habitation and conduct that go well beyond the current technocentric climate action agenda and its restrictive epistemological framework. The actual complexity of the ‘what and how’ of adaptive action, beyond the instrumental, presently goes almost totally unthought.

Likewise, the issue of the relation of climate change to conflict is not gaining substantial and needed exposure in the political and public sphere. However, it is being recognised by a number of organisations working in areas of critical climate concerns—this evidenced by an already large and growing literature. For example Oxfam published a comprehensive literature review in 2010,4 in 2017 the US Department of Defence Centre for

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