The fashion for reducing war to climate has had a remarkable resurgence in recent years stimulated in part by the proclivities of funding agencies and the priorities of national governments. Not least is this the case with national security agencies. As the British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, put it in 2007 in her presentation to the UN Security Council first-ever debate on the impact of climate change: the consequences of climate change “reach to the very heart of the security agenda.” A few years earlier in their report to the United States Department of Defense, on abrupt climate change and “Its implications for United States National Security,” Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall insisted that in the near future “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.” Once the preserve of classical thinkers, Enlightenment philosophers, and turn-of-the-century geo-historians, “the allure of a naïve climatic determinism is now seducing” − in Mike Hulme’s words − “those hard-nosed and most unsentimental of people… the military and their advisors.” And it is seducing other publicists too. Drawing on the neo-Malthusian analyses of Thomas Homer-Dixon, whom he credited with officiating at the marriage of “military-conflict studies and the study of the physical environment”, Robert Kaplan announced that “We all must learn to think like Victorians… Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists.” This reductionist impulse, however, has not met with universal approval.
A team of research ecologists based mostly at Colorado State University, for example, has challenged the suggestion that warming has increased the risk of civil war in Africa. They argue that attributing such causal powers to climate “oversimplifies systems affected by many geopolitical and social factors.” And they point out that “unrelated geopolitical trends” − most notably decolonization and the legacy of the Cold War − which “perturbed the political and social landscape of the African continent” tend to be ignored in climate reductionist agendas. Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, together with colleagues also have serious reservations about what might be called climatic supremacism. Reworking a range of models used by advocates of climate’s determining role in civil wars, Buhaug contends that “Climate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict” and that civil wars in Africa are far better explained by such conditions as “prevalent ethnopolitical exclusion, poor national economy, and the collapse of the Cold War system.” The prehistory of a particular violent episode is relevant too for, as he puts it, “recent violence may affect the likelihood of a new conflict breaking out”.
Empirical inquiries like these, which challenge the assumption that climate and climate change are prime causes of violence, raise troubling concerns about the ease with which an ideology of climate reductionism has infiltrated its way into national security consciousness. Critics of this determinist turn, and particularly of the Malthusian assumption that increased environmental scarcity and migration “weaken states” and “cause conflicts and violence”, express grave concerns about the lack of attention devoted to ascertaining “the ways that environmental violence reflects or masks other forms of social struggle” and about the too comfortable means by which “forms of technological engineering… reduce “solutions” to matters of purely technical concern.” For one thing such scenarios take outbreaks of violence as merely the natural consequence of social evolutionary adaptation. Climate reductionism thus facilitates the sense that war can be readily “naturalized and depoliticized” in markedly similar ways to earlier climatic readings of the American Civil War. As one group of researchers observe: “Some studies in environmental security are in danger of promulgating a modern form of environmental determinism by suggesting that climate conditions directly and dominantly influence the propensity for violence among individuals, communities and states.” When analysts “neglect the complex political calculus of governance” and the remarkable ways in which human societies actually do cope with challenging environments, they reach “conclusions that are little different from those ascribing poverty to latitudinal location or lessened individual productivity to hot climates, as was common in European and American scholarship about a century ago.”
