From the Frying Pan into the Fire: Environmental Crises and their Implications for Conflict Resolution (chapter in "Conflict Resolution after the Pandemic: Building Peace, Restoring Justice")
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Author(s): Michael Shank
Date: 2021
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Disasters, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Livelihoods, Public Health, Renewable Resources
This chapter describes the threats most likely to produce escalated social conflicts in the immediate and medium-term future. Two environmentally rooted crises – the planetary crisis and the current pandemic – deserve the conflict field’s attention with preventive, not only responsive, approaches. Conflicts emerging from these crises, such as climate refugee claims, resource wars, unequal socio-economic impacts from Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and disputes over health mandates, merit response. The climate crisis is generating ample conflict. Global heating is creating deadly heat waves, permanent droughts, recurring wildfires, and more torrential storms, displacing millions of people and increasing armed conflict up to 20%. Fossil fuels, the systems they energize, and the behaviors they enable, are structurally violent in three primary ways. Cities are also reconfiguring in response to COVID-19. Food systems vary little from energy systems: they are as exploitative and extractive, whether in informal slaughterhouses in Wuhan, China, or formal ones in Waco, Texas.