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Resistance to Extinction Rebellion’s Press Protests Reveals Double Standards in the UK

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by Holly Barrow

Protestors block the entrance at Merseyside printing press (Image credit: Liverpool Echo)

On 5 September 2020, the global environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion, dominated headlines after blockading key printing sites in Merseyside and Hertfordshire, causing a significant disruption to the distribution of some of the UK’s leading national newspapers – including the Sun and The Times. Activists blocked exits to the print works, describing the protest as an attempt to hold these publications to account for their failure to report truthfully on the scale of the climate crisis and for ‘polluting national debate’ on a number of social issues, including migration.

Each of the newspapers affected by the blockade is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has been openly criticised on numerous occasions for his climate change denialism – not least due to his personal interests in the fossil fuel industry. By no coincidence, Murdoch’s newspapers have become renowned for being littered with rife climate skepticism, both across Australia and the UK.

Yet, despite the well-known murky ethics and questionable practices surrounding Murdoch’s publications, Extinction Rebellion’s protests were met with an onslaught of accusations by the likes of the Sun which claimed the organisation’s protests were ‘trying to destroy our greatest democratic principle: freedom of speech’. The Prime Minister himself echoed such sentiments via social media, suggesting that it is ‘completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way’ and that a free press is ‘vital’ in ‘holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.’

Only, this assertion neglects to acknowledge the inherent biases within the UK’s mainstream media and how it notably fails in its apparent duty to hold the powerful to account. The responses to Extinction Rebellion’s protests have revealed a deeply ingrained double standard regarding what is and is not considered ‘democratic’. In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that Extinction Rebellion’s protests served to expose and fight against the ‘shallowness of our theatrical democracy’, and the ‘blatant capture of ours by the power of money’. It’s almost laughable, then, to witness those arguing that the movement’s protests threaten our way of life – that they attack the ‘freedom of the press’ that is considered so crucial to a functioning democracy – with zero irony. This glorified notion of the UK’s so-called ‘free press’ is a far cry from reality. As a matter of fact, it has long been in decline.

The increasing corporatisation of the media is what ought to be recognised as the real threat to press freedom. The UK’s leading newspapers are owned by a handful of billionaires and giant corporations. This drastically hinders the workings of an actual ‘free press’. From Murdoch to the Barclay brothers – 85-year-old British billionaire twins whose business empire spans from luxury hotels to budget retail – their deceitful dedication to protecting vested interests and setting political agendas through the UK’s leading publications has become well-established.

Former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, Peter Oborne, resigned from the paper after coming to recognise the unethical collusion between their editorial and commercial arms. The publication – owned by the aforementioned Barclay brothers – allegedly sought to bury criticisms against HSBC in 2013. In response, Oborne wrote in an article for OpenDemocracy: “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.’” The media’s reliance on corporate advertising sees editors pandering to their whims.

What’s more, these billionaire-owners of the UK’s media and their publications are, unsurprisingly, right-leaning. The majority supported right-wing political parties in the 2019 general election, with a recent study by Loughborough University finding that the Labour Party was overwhelmingly targeted with negative coverage by national newspapers, while particular publications reserved positive stories almost exclusively for Johnson’s Conservative party. strong editorial support provided by the newspapers with the largest circulation (the Daily Mail and the Sun)

The political influence of the mainstream media is no new phenomenon. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair notoriously cosied-up to Murdoch in order to gain the backing of the Sun in the lead up to the 1997 general election – a move which many believe contributed to his landslide majority. In a recent BBC documentary on Murdoch’s media dynasty, former Sun deputy editor Neil Wallis told of how Murdoch played a crucial role in the paper’s drastic shift in support away from John Major’s Conservative party to Blair’s New Labour: “Rupert comes up and says ‘you’re getting this wrong. You’ve got this totally wrong. We are not just backing Tony Blair but we are going to back the Labour party and everything he does in this campaign 200%. You’ve got to get that right’.”

The relationship between Blair and Murdoch went on to be described as ‘incestuous’, with Murdoch’s decision to back him in 1997 allegedly arising as the two made a deal; Blair promised Murdoch he would not take the UK into the European currency without first having a referendum.

This relationship between media tycoons and leading politicians has been tirelessly scrutinised, with the 2012 Leveson inquiry revealing the extent of its impact, as editors admitted that Murdoch regularly interfered with content. Critics of Murdoch’s News Corp UK – which owns the Sun and The Times – have previously argued that ministers, chief constables, and regulators alike were unable to stand up to him due to the power of his company.

This enmeshing of media and commerce hardly screams the ‘pinnacle of democracy’ and press freedom. The insularity of the UK’s senior journalists only speaks further to a monolithic media – one which upholds the values, beliefs, and interests of a small section of society. A 2018 article by Jane Martinson described the UK media as ‘pale, male and posh’. Martinson – a British journalist and Professor of Financial Journalism at City University – broke down some extremely telling statistics regarding the background of some of the UK’s leading journalists: 51% are privately educated, as are 80% of editors. The journalism industry is 94% white with just 0.4% being Muslim. This inevitably plays a role in the way stories are reported, which stories are covered, and the interests of those reporting them.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Johnson’s denouncement of Extinction Rebellion’s protests as a threat to Britain’s apparent free press is one riddled with hypocrisy. In December 2019, in the lead up to the general election, Johnson threatened to revoke Channel 4’s licence after they held a leaders’ debate on climate change – to which Johnson did not show. In his absence, Channel 4 placed a melting ice sculpture where Johnson would have stood; a symbol to mark the urgency of the crisis, with Johnson’s non-attendance speaking volumes. The Conservative party went on to launch a formal complaint with Ofcom, threatening to have Channel 4’s public broadcasting licence revoked.

Fast forward a few months and the Conservative government faced backlash again, this time for attempting to ban specific journalists – those most critical of the party – from attending a Downing Street briefing. Suffice to say, Johnson and the elite seem only to value the UK’s ‘free press’ when activists fight back against a heavily skewed media.

XR’s protests come at a time when the increased accessibility of social media helps to provide a necessary balance to the partisan traditional media. Twitter in particular has become key in challenging powerful political and social figures, succeeding where traditional media outlets often now fail. In July, Twitter fact-checked tweets made by Trump, after he incorrectly claimed that mail-in ballots would result in “a rigged election.” The platform then went on to flag any posts he had shared which included manipulated media.

The social media platform also caused a stir when it permanently banned the account of Katie Hopkins – notorious for espousing dangerous islamophobia and xenophobic rhetoric. Hopkins had previously been given a free pass to spout such views in the likes of the Sun. In refusing to provide a platform for such deeply hateful, divisive language, some – such as Trump – have denounced this as a form of censorship; a ‘policing of conservative voices’. However, this seems more like a balancing of power; no longer allowing for the dominant narrative to prevail unabated.

Holly Barrow is a features writer for the Immigration Advice Service – an organisation of OISC-accredited immigration lawyers providing assistance with Spouse Visas, British citizenship, and more

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part III) – Slow Violence: Climate Refugees and the Legal Lacuna of Protection

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by Eloise Judd

Climate change and natural disasters are rapidly putting people around the world on the run, often rendering them stateless climate refugees (Image credit: Campaigncc)

Cities and states are gradually being submerged by rising sea levels, food and water security are threatened by temperature and rainfall variability, and diseases are spreading with increasing frequency and severity – to name but a few effects of climate change. Refugees coming from such regions find themselves in a legal lacuna of protection in international law. This ‘slow violence’ that is ‘not just attritional but exponential’ is exacerbated with each passing day of political inaction. The inertia of legal developments mirrors the very threat faced by these refugees, with climate change and its correlative forced migration as the epitome of ‘delayed destruction’.

Climate-induced migration will also be, for the most part, gradual, with the exception of sporadic, mostly internal, migration shifts in response to significant climatic events such as cyclones or king tides. However, by focusing on transnational migration, specifically from low-lying, ‘disappearing’ island states, pertinent and unanswered questions around statelessness, international law, and human rights obligations are highlighted.

The slow violence of climate change is consistently an issue of representation, accruing in the shadows of the ‘immediate’, ‘explosive’ and ‘spectacular’ violence that dominates rapid news cycles and political agendas. This article seeks to bring the legal lacuna in which climate refugees are positioned to the fore. By challenging the ‘slow violence’ of political inaction, it advocates for an amendment to treaty law on the basis of international human rights obligations.

Despite its poignant resonance, the term ‘climate refugee’ does not exist in international law. For this reason, many authors avoid this label as it is considered an ‘international misnomer’ which ‘does not accurately reflect in legal terms the status of those who move’. Instead, alternative appellations such as ‘environmentally displaced person’ or ‘climate change migrant’ are adopted. Yet, in doing so, authors present an implied acceptance of a differential standard of legal protection according to the source of harm from which one is fleeing.

Climate refugees fall within a ‘protection gap’ – a legal lacuna – unprotected by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951 Convention) (UNHCR, 1951) and the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless People (1954 Convention). The former is ‘the centrepiece of international refugee protection’ however the criterion of Article 1A(2) is limited to those with a ‘fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion’.

Extensive literature has debated whether ‘climate change counts as persecution.’ This focus, however, is misguided. The centralisation of ‘persecution’ overshadows the elaboration in Article 1A(2) of one ‘being unable… to avail himself of the protection of [his] country’. By encouraging the notion of ‘protection’ to take precedence in debate, a case can be made in favour of extending the 1951 Convention to obligate international protection for human rights when state assurance is inhibited.

Under international law, human rights are the positive obligation of a citizen’s nation-state. Climate change may undermine the state’s capacity to protect and ensure numerous human rights: including the right to life, the right to health, the right to a nationality, and the right to political freedoms. In Tuvalu and Kiribati, for example, this cessation will ensue on a slow and violent continuum: the state will become increasingly uninhabitable, with resources such as freshwater supply threatened until the point that it is lost below sea level. Consequently, climate refugees are de facto stateless; a status that should not be limited to the de jure loss of nationality but to the loss of ‘protection resulting from nationality’.

This is a novel form of statelessness, unprotected by the 1954 Convention which, when drafted, was formulated around state absorption, merger, and dissolution (with successor states). The loss of low-lying island states, however, is not met by a territorial replacement. Contributing further to the lacuna of protection, the right to nationality outlined in article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not present in customary international law. This lacuna of protection is highly significant for de facto stateless climate refugees who are unable to rely upon the legal obligation of the international community to grant a new nationality.

Solutions posited to the legal lacuna centre around the principles of non-refoulement and ‘complementary protection’. The former is exemplified in the Teitiota ruling in January 2020, heralded as a ‘landmark’ and ‘historic’ case. Although valuable in its unprecedented recognition of climate refugees, the legal protection afforded in insufficient. The case made by Teitiota, a Kiribatian man seeking asylum in New Zealand, formed the basis of the UNHCR ruling against the deportation of persons who’s right to life may be threatened by climate change upon return.

However, the protection offered by non-refoulement is conditional and temporally latent, premised upon an individual reaching the host state before any form of security is granted. It is also a highly individualised form of protection, wholly inadequate to meet the demands of entire populations as states disappear below sea level. Similar ad hoc protection is reflected in ‘complementary protection’ regimes – nation-state responses to persons outside of the 1951 Convention seeking asylum. These are premised upon national discretion rather than a universalized obligation. Without a binding treaty, disparate nation-state displays of altruism are ineffectual.

Nevertheless, ‘complementary protection’ regimes do exemplify political will to meet the post-1951 Convention demands of refugeehood on the basis of human rights. This notwithstanding, political will must be transformed into action to explicitly incorporate climate refugees in the mandated protection afforded by the 1951 Convention. Some authors, such as McAdam and Saul and Williams critique that the Convention cannot, or should not, be amended; arguing that the incorporation of specialised sub-groups would devalue current refugee protection by fragmenting the legal regime.

This contention is flawed, however, as the 1951 Convention itself is additional to the refugee criterion established in the Arrangements of 12 May 1926 and 30 June 1928, the Conventions of 18 October 1933 and 10 February 1938, the Protocol of 14 September 1939, and the Constitution of the Refugee Organisation. The Convention encompasses former refugee definitions, thus broadening rather than devaluing protection.

Expansion to meet novel contexts, such as climate change and its correlative forced migration, was anticipated when drafting the Convention in 1950: the French delegate critiqued the narrow criterion, affirming that ‘new and undreamed-of categories of refugees might be created’ and ‘in view of the turbulent state of the world, no such list could ever be complete’. Thus, it was acknowledged in Recommendation E of the Conference’s Final Act that the Convention could be extended in response to changing demands. Ad hoc extensions of the contractual scope have been exemplified at the national level by ‘complementary protection’ regimes. However, until climate refugees are explicitly protected by the 1951 Convention, they will continue to exist precariously in a lacuna of international legal protection.

Eloise Judd is currently completing an MA in Conflict, Security & Development within the War Studies Department at King’s College London. Formerly specialising in Political Geography at Durham University, she is currently researching protracted refugee situations and the interaction between camp architecture and human rights. Eloise hopes to pursue a career in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. You can connect with her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Twitter: @eloise_judd

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part II) – Drought and its Effect on Internal Conflict

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by Anatol Lieven

While difficult to measure, the connection between climate change and conflict is important to study how it fuels internal tensions. In this picture, taken on August 3, 2018, drought-displaced Afghan children carry water containers filled from a tanker at a camp for internally displaced people in Injil district of Herat province. (Image credit: Hoshang Hashimi/AFP/Getty Images)

The idea that ‘climate change causes conflict’ is not so much a red herring as a red whale when it comes to understanding its impacts. Being by its nature unprovable, it also provides a very convenient target for climate change deniers. Equally pointless are attempts to attach mathematical weightings to the likelihood of climate change increasing conflicts. Given the number of variables involved, the results are inevitably so approximate as to be of very limited value in analytical terms. More sensible is to examine existing tensions and vulnerabilities and then assess (or perhaps “imagine” is a better word) how climate change could make them worse. Thus much of the literature on climate change and conflict has focused on the possibility of interstate wars over rivers, including between India, Pakistan and China, as increased water shortages and the melting of glaciers lead to worsening disputes over the sharing of the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers.

Though by no means absent, this threat may have been somewhat exaggerated. Precisely because these rivers are so vital, serious interference with them would be regarded as an existential threat. Pakistan has stated that serious Indian reductions in the flow of the Indus would be regarded as the equivalent of war; and presumably China, as Pakistan’s ally, would respond in kind by reducing the flow of the Brahmaputra river to eastern India. If however, water shortages become so severe that the choice for upstream states is water diversion or state collapse, then all bets would be off. Critically, if this was the case, a combination of internal stress and mass migration would already have brought the states concerned down in ruins.

More significant than interstate war in this regard is therefore internal conflict within states. Precisely because so many states and societies are already facing a growing set of challenges, they cannot afford to face the effects of climate change as well. This is the crucial thing about climate change in the medium term. It will feed into and exacerbate most other existing social, economic, health, and political problems – just as it will also feed into all other ecological problems, from mass extinction through deforestation to the acidification of the oceans. Western democracies also are coming under increasing internal strain, from unemployment, inequality, and growing chauvinism stemming partly from immigration and the reaction against it. With the exception of immigration, these problems are not related to climate change; but with increasing migration and crippling economic growth, climate change may in the future gravely worsen the political condition of Western societies.

I have been struck in this regard by the latest book by Ian Bremmer, Us Vs. Them, which paints a deeply worrying picture of the effects on Western societies of globalisation, automation, immigration, and growing inequality. Factor in the effects of climate change as well, and Bremmer’s grim scenarios become even grimmer, and his hopeful ones a great deal less hopeful. Yet, Bremmer’s book mentions climate change only once. The same is true of Paul Collier’s impressive work on the future of capitalism, which, too, fails to consider the impacts of climate change on Western economies. In the next three generations, by far the greatest threats of climate change to existing states and societies will come in South Asia and parts of Africa, for the simple reason that these societies are already under pressure from a combination of high temperatures and water shortages, leading to a growing threat of famine. Their steeply growing populations increase this danger still further.

The World Bank predicts that if we continue emissions at the rate of recent years, by 2050, in South Asia alone some 800 million people (around 35 per cent of the probable population at that date) will see their living standards decline sharply as a result of climate change. In 2050, Indian teenagers alive today will only be middle-aged. It is not a distant prospect affecting generations yet to be born. If in addition the resulting suffering is very unequally distributed among Indian states and leads to mass migration within South Asia, it is hard to see how Indian democracy and the Indian Union itself will be able to survive. In both India and Pakistan, water shortages are also causing friction between upriver and downriver provinces. Should the water crisis become truly disastrous, these tensions have the capacity to spur separatist movements.

Many parts of South Asia are already experiencing severe water stress, and since 2000, drought in north India and Pakistan has largely wiped out the expected further gains from agricultural development. Drought, coupled with the commercialisation of agriculture, is causing despair among India’s smaller farmers and is fuelling support for the Naxalite communist rebellion in central India. An official Indian report of 2018 stated that six hundred million people (almost half the population) already suffer both physically and economically due to water stress; while a 2017 study by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) drew attention to the severe danger posed by a rise in temperatures to agriculture, both because intensified heatwaves will make it impossible to work outside for months on end, and because beyond a certain level they produce steep falls in rice production.

Moreover, even if economic development allows India to deal adequately with the direct effects of climate change, the country is likely to be overwhelmed by the collapse of the even more endangered neighbouring states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, it has been estimated that a rise in sea levels of only one metre will render 17.5 per cent of the country uninhabitable, while a rise of ten metres would essentially destroy the country. By the end of the century, Bangladesh is predicted to have a population of 250 million at the absolute minimum (from 160 million at present).

Western studies of international migration have focused overwhelmingly on migration to the West. The most ferociously enforced border fence of all, however, is that constructed by India to prevent illegal migration from Bangladesh. This hostility to Bangladeshi Muslim immigration has increased still further under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. In 2019, Modi also introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act, giving rights to Hindu and Christian migrants to India but denying them to Muslims.

In 2010, the US Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, reported to Congress that: ‘For India, our research indicates that the practical effects of climate change will be manageable by New Delhi through 2030. Beyond 2030, India’s ability to cope will be reduced by declining agricultural productivity, decreasing water supplies, and increasing pressure from cross-border migration into the country.’

2030 is now only ten years away.

This article is based on Anatol Lieven’s new book Climate Change and the Nation-State: The Realist Case, published by Penguin in March 2020.

 Anatol Lieven is a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. He is a visiting professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC and a member of the academic board of the Valdai discussion club in Russia. He also serves on the advisory committee of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He holds a BA and PhD from Cambridge University in England. From 1985 to 1998, Anatol Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and is author of several books on Russia and its neighbours including Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power? and Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry. From 2000 to 2007 he worked at think tanks in Washington DC. A new edition of his book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism was published in 2012. His latest book, Climate Change and the Nation-State, was published in March 2019 by Penguin in the UK and Oxford University Press in the USA. His previous book, Pakistan: A Hard Country was published by Penguin and OUP in 2012. Anatol Lieven is currently working on the relationship between nationalism and progress in modern history.

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict (Part I) – Climate Change and the Rise of Islamist Terror: al-Shabaab in Somalia

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by Annabelle Green

Illicit charcoal trading, and deforestation that lies in its wake, is threatening an already fragile climate in Somalia (Image credit: Getty Images/AFR/T. Karumba)

In June 1989, a gathering of British, American, and Canadian bureaucrats in Wilton Park, England left little impression on history. At the conference, despite being titled ‘Sub-Saharan Africa: The Challenge of Population Growth, Desertification and Famine,’ only a handful of African representatives were present. Somalia did not feature significantly within the discussion, save for its involvement as one-sixth of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Development.

At a time when agriculture was the primary occupation of the Somali labour force  – seventy-one per cent in 1975 – the country was vulnerable to the key issues discussed. Adversities they faced, such as droughts and subsequent famines, were only exacerbated by a growing population and a decrease in fertile land appropriate for cultivation, caused by processes such as desertification. Despite these issues being highlighted, few attempts were made to improve the situation. Those at the meeting could not know that these environmental factors, if left unchecked, would hold great international significance in the future. By neglecting efforts to tackle the issue of climate change in Somalia, experts unknowingly aided the rise of violent extremist group al-Shabaab, which would come to present new and dangerous problems of its own.

Today, the severity of climate change as a key transnational issue is increasingly recognised by countries around the world. The international effort to combat Australian bushfires, Greta Thunburg’s global school strikes campaign, and emerging climate-centric summits, demonstrate the ever-growing awareness of climate change as a pressing issue. Yet, the negative effects of climate change, such as those in Somalia, are by no means a novel development. According to research conducted by the Federal Republic of Somalia published in 2013, Somalia has experienced one or more extreme climate events per decade since 1960. Along with excessive heat and subsequent famines, such as those of 1991 and 2011, Somalia has yoyo-ed between nationwide floods and droughts. These erratic patterns of rainfall are a strong indicator of climate change.

A startling lack of consensus surrounding the method to tackle climate change in Somalia can be largely attributed to the limited data collected on the country’s climate. This lack has been inhibited primarily by domestic political tensions which resulted in the ongoing civil war. Subsequently, the country’s climate monitoring network collapsed, resulting in little data availability from 1990 onwards. Such a situation has made it difficult for accurate scientific analysis of weather patterns to be conducted.  As a result, extreme weather and potential natural disasters are difficult to predict, based on the lack of records from previous years. This uncertainty adds to the lack of security in Somalia, as leaders do not have sufficient resources to deal with the aftermath of environmental crises, let alone prepare for them.

The impacts of climate change discussed so far, combined with other factors including desertification and above-average birth rates (compared to the Sub-Saharan average), exacerbate an already weak economy. The climate and economy are intrinsically linked. A key example of this is that land scarcity, caused by increased population levels and decreased fertility, is having an adverse effect on employment levels and food shortages. High youth unemployment contributes to further human insecurity; causing a small number, and only those that can afford it,  to migrate to Southern African countries. A large number of countries also do not accept Somali identification documents, meaning many cannot legally leave the country. Consequently, this had left the demographic more vulnerable to recruitment campaigns of al-Shabaab.

While the relationship between human insecurity and the likelihood of joining an extremist group is not linear, there is a strong correlation between both. Research suggests that those who face uncertainty are more likely to be attracted to extremist groups because they offer a clear vision for the future. al-Shabaab provides members and their families the security most of the country is lacking. In return, it commands an intense commitment from its followers to comply with its ideology. Moreover, militants have been known to divert river water to commercial farmers who have supported them financially, whilst others experience shortages. The importance of human security to this issue has been acknowledged: before 1994, policies surrounding the improvement of conditions in countries such as Somalia were focused on national security. However, following a UN report produced in 1994, there was a shift to emphasis on human security. While not conclusive, this shift to a human security focus in Somalia demonstrates the impact that poor socio-economic conditions, exacerbated by climate extremities, have on wider political and security issues.

Critically, it seems that al-Shabaab is not only impacted by, but contributing to, the negative effects of climate change. A key example of this is al-Shabaab’s deforestation endeavours, which supported its charcoal trade until late 2019. For this reason, the United Nations Security Council imposed an embargo on Somali charcoal trade in 2012. However, before this legislation was implemented, nearly two-thirds of forests in southern Somalia were destroyed to ship charcoal to the Persian Gulf. These shipments went through the port of Kismayo, which was only recaptured from the militant group in 2012. Revenues from Kismayo and two other ports run by al-Shabaab were estimated to have earned the group between $35-50 million a year, according to a UN report.  The removal of these trees from the Somali ecosystem has led to a deficit in nutrients and a subsequent decrease in fertile ground. This has subsequently worsened the impacts of extreme climate change that are ongoing in the East-African country, escalating the scale of floods and famines.

A key concern is that al-Shabaab has recognised that a level of environmental insecurity is in its best interests to strengthen its power. This is supported by evidence suggesting the terrorist organisation exploited the Somali famine of 2011. It forcibly limited movement when residents tried to flee areas of the country most severely impacted by the food shortages. The group consistently blocked support from NGOs, suggesting it would prefer a starving population than a dilution of power. Its own feeble attempts to manage the situation, such as a Drought Committee founded in 2010, have made little progress. The country has continued to experience droughts almost annually in the last five years. Therefore there is a strong argument to suggest that despite some attempts to act as a social regulator, there is little motivation for Al Shabaab to facilitate improvement.

In conclusion, al-Shabaab clearly benefited from the impacts of climate change in Somalia. The loss of fertile land has led to an economically vulnerable population; which the terrorist organisation has fuelled through deforestation efforts and promoting competition for scarce resources (by limiting in-migration). With few opportunities, a consequently disillusioned youth have turned to extremism for some form of security, however tenuous. There is little motivation for al-Shabaab to improve conditions, demonstrated by its refusal to grant access to NGOs and prevention of out-migration in famine stricken areas. The meagre attempts it has made to improve conditions, such as its Drought Committee, appear superficial and have achieved limited results. Through such exploitation of the impacts of climate change, al-Shabaab in Somalia sustains already rife human insecurity, thus strengthening its own power.

 Annabelle Green is currently completing an MA in Terrorism, Security and Society at King’s College London. She hopes to pursue a career in policy surrounding extremist offenders and in her spare time volunteers as a researcher for the charity Action on Armed Violence. She can be found on LinkedIn.

Strife Series on Climate Change and Conflict – Introduction

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by Gemma MacIntyre

Studies show a direct correlation between climate and violent conflict (Image credit: Image: Reuters/Amit Dave)

In recent decades, climate change has been recognised as an important international concern. Scientists and leaders worldwide agree that the pressure of increased temperatures on crop yields, natural capital, and water availability – and subsequent demand for already dwindling resources – is undoubtedly of detriment to global populations. In a recent IPCC report, it was concluded that a predicted 1.5-degree celsius of global warming could significantly impede efforts to achieve sustainable development goals: pushing more people into poverty, exacerbating inter-group equalities, and wreaking global economic disruption. Such acute warnings from scientists, combined with mounting pressure from environmental activists worldwide, has prompted multilateral efforts to curb carbon emissions.

As states have become more aware of the impact of climate change, so too have they come to analyse it from different perspectives. In doing so, an important consensus has emerged: that climate change is not merely an environmental concern; it is a human security challenge too, with the potential to aggravate societal grievances. Further, the impact of increased temperatures on already scarce resources, migration movements, and food security may affect both intra- and inter-state relations: with the capacity to fuel further conflict.

Still, the direct impacts of climate on international conflict and security remain somewhat hazy; and policies to address it, scarce. This is partially due to the empirical difficulties of measuring climate’s impact on violence. Associating casualties with conflict is, at the best of times, challenging: let alone when those causal factors – including changing temperatures, rising sea levels, and depletion of resources – are intangible. Further, while drought and extreme temperatures have undoubtedly exacerbated poverty and forced displacement in regions such as Syria, Sudan, and Bangladesh; in a knotted web of additional political, social, and economic grievances, isolating climate as a cause of conflict is difficult to ascertain.

With that being said, while the empirical evidence remains uncertain, it is critical to treat climate change as not merely an environmental or economic concern, but as an international security issue, as well. To analyse this idea in greater depth, this series aims to form a discussion about the relationship between climate change and conflict. By outlining the impact of climate change on issues including terrorism, migration, and civil strife; this series aims to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of climate change as an international security challenge. It is hoped that, by doing so, it will emphasise the relevance of climate change to contemporary conflict studies, and national security policy more widely.

 

Publication schedule

Part I: Why Has Somalia Proved a Fertile Environment for the Rise of Al Shabaab? The Impacts of Climate Change on the Rise of Islamist Terror by Annabelle Green

Part II: Climate Change and Social Conflict by Professor Anatol Lieven

Part III: Slow Violence: Climate Refugees and the Legal Lacuna of Protection by Ellie Judd

Part IV: Water Conflicts: Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier in Sub-Saharan Africa by Musab Alnour

Gemma graduated from the University of St Andrews in International Relations and Management and is now studying an MA in Conflict, Security and Development at King’s College London. During her undergraduate degree, she studied a range of post-conflict cases, with a particular focus on intractable conflicts such as Israel-Palestine and Bosnia. Through her academic studies and voluntary experience with VSO in Nigeria, Gemma has developed a strong interest in the relationship between corruption and development. Her experience with VSO Nigeria furthered this interest, as she was made aware of the acute impacts of governance on public services, such as health and education. She hopes to pursue further research on the impact of conflict on health security.