Resource Wars: How Climate Change Is Fueling Militarization of the Arctic

Aug 7, 2024 | Joanna Rozpedowski
View Original

As the Russo-Ukrainian conflict continues to redefine the international security landscape, more sources of dispute among rivals are emerging. New outbreaks of mass violence in the Middle East and Africa, struggles over drinking water from Afghanistan to Niger, ethnic cleansings, simmering conflicts, unrests, insurgencies, and civil wars in the earth’s poorest countries, and endless flows of migrants and refugees into Europe and the United States are only a few yet concerted and unabating forces reorganizing the geo-economic, geopolitical, and social landscape which deepen social cleavages and increase prospects for conflict.

The appreciation of the multifaceted threat vectors arising from localized environmental degradation and resource and food scarcity presents one of the more compelling challenges for policymakers. In his 2012 book Climate Wars: What People Will be Killed in the 21st Century, Harald Welzer argued that the consequences stemming from the relationship between violence and climate change will “establish different social conditions from those we have known until now” which will “spell the end of the Enlightenment and its conception of freedom” resulting in the decline of the Western social model based on democracy and liberalism. Resource scarcity and relative economic deprivation will lead to violence, and violence, Welzer contends, is always highly adaptive and “innovative” as it develops “new forms and new conditions” for the use of force. The twentieth-century wars may well have been driven by conflicts over land, religion, and economic interests but the wars of the 21st century will in no insignificant measure be fueled by the multipronged environmental crises leading to a potential state failure contagion, water and food shortages, and a brutal scramble for resource dominance in strategic areas of the globe. The world’s rapacious appetite for natural resources and rare earth minerals will open new theatres of potential conflict ranging from outer space to the Arctic.