CLIMATE CHANGE

CLIMATE CHANGE has been synonymous with polar bears and deforestation, but these days climatologists are paying more attention to people.

For many years now, climate change studies have tended to focus and rely on numbers-heavy charts and complex models to report on phenomena such as shrinking polar caps, melting glaciers and permafrost, caribou, the declining populations of reindeer and seal, as well as rising sea levels from Nigeria to the Maldives to the South Pacific.

In recent times, however, ethnographers, think tanks and sociologists have begun looking more closely at the social and cultural impacts of climate change on indigenous communities. Studies have been published on subjects including the Wauja people in Brazil (who have been impacted by the shrinking Amazon rain forest and industrialisation), Sami reindeer-herding communities across a warmer northern Scandinavia, as well as how the Bantu- and Khoisan-speaking tribes in the Kalahari Basin of sub-Saharan Africa have been affected. Of particular interest are the subsistence communities in Bangladesh and Malaysia whose coastal settlements are at continued risk of flooding from typhoons, monsoons and higher sea levels. Such research reflects a growing realisation in academic and policy circles that cultures and societies tied to nature have multigenerational knowledge that gives them special insight into changes in nature and the environment.

In the last decade or so, it has suddenly become apparent that the impact on people is really important and should be more than just an afterthought. There is undoubtedly an increasing realisation that climate change is more than a scientific artefact.

In 2014, Earth had its hottest year since weather record-keeping began 135 years ago. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, with nine of the total in the 21st century, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Recent studies show changes happening more quickly than predicted. The highly credible journal Science reported in March that the southern Antarctic ice sheet suddenly began losing its mass in 2009 at a steady and fast rate.

There is also growing interest in the geopolitical effects of climate change. The Brookings Institute, for example, estimates that for every percentage point rise in average temperature and drop in average rainfall, violent conflict between neighbouring states rises 4 percent, while violent conflict between groups within states climbs 14 percent. Scholars foresee, too, new shipping routes opening up as the Arctic ice cap shrinks still further, potentially leading to military conflicts. Russia, for instance, planted a flag on the seabed below the North Pole in 2007 and has some 4,300 miles of Arctic coastline.

In violence-plagued northern Mali, a desiccated landscape of dust and mud huts where the average rainfall is a third less than it was nearly two decades ago, scholars recently blamed a climate-change induced drought for fuelling conflict between Tuareg separatist rebels (who need water and grass for their cattle herds), as well as government-backed forces. In March, the National Academy of Sciences published a peer-reviewed study stating that ‘there is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria.’ This was a devastating drought that led to widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families towards urban centres. Some studies suggest climate change will produce permanent refugees.

Last October the Pentagon published a report which said: ‘Climate change poses immediate risks to national security.’ Chuck Hagel, then defence secretary, referred to climate change as being a “threat multiplier” that could exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases and armed insurgencies. And President Barack Obama picked up that thread in May, telling graduating cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that climate change ‘constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security’ as well as invoking how those threats will impact on how the U.S. military defends its country.