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  • Report n° 7: The Stern review

Report n° 7: The Stern review

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    • Three key elements on the nature of climate risks
      • Political cost of environmental disasters

Political costs of environmental disasters (1)

In the past, some disasters had destabilizing consequences.
Hurricane Bohla devastated more than half of East Pakistan in 1970 (over 200,000 fatalities), and the ineffectual rescue operations organized by the central government headquartered in West Pakistan caused instabilities which led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.
Of course, Hurricane Bohla is not alone in bearing responsibility for the event, but it was clearly the triggering factor. Climate events have also often sparked off rapid urbanization phases, as with the "Dust Bowl" in the thirties in the United States. Uncontrolled urbanization is well-known major cause of social fabric breakdown, and this in turn facilitates mounting criminality and political destabilization. In Darfur, even if the political situation is immensely complex, the present conflict opposes sedentary farmers and nomadic cattle-breeders who are in competition for water and grazing land in a context of increased environmental scarcity.
These conflicts, which today are caused by an interaction between population growth and resource depletion, may well become more frequent with the change in climate which is going to render most traditional lifestyles and social organizations obsolete.

At an international level, things are somewhat different. Concerning water resources for instance, international management leads more often to cooperation than to conflict (Wolf et al., 2003).
Yet, population growth and climate change may well worsen existing tensions.
Lonergan and Kavanagh, (1991), or the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, provide examples of this kind of tension, such as between Egypt and Ethiopia which controls 82% of the water flowing into Egypt, or between Iraq, Syria and Turkey for the Euphrates. So long as people's fundamental needs are not at stake, the tensions are manageable. It is however likely that water and climate change will play a major role for the future of semi-arid zones.
But even if resource-related conflicts have seldom sparked off international crises, they often create domestic tensions, and the cost of these internal conflicts can soon become significant.

The other major problem is that of "environmental refugees". According to Myers (2001), who is however considered to be rather pessimistic, there could be some 210 million refugees because of global warming by 2050, including 160 million because of rising sea levels (73 in China, 26 in Bangladesh and 20 in India), and 50 million because of droughts and water shortages.
Six million people for example live at present in areas that would be flooded in case of a one meter rise in the Nile delta sea level, and 4,500 km2 of excellent arable land would also disappear.
The estimates for Bangladesh stand at 17 million people and 22,000 km2, i.e. 15% of the population and 16% of the country's area.
For small islands the situation is even more tragic since entire countries might disappear because they would not be able to withstand tropical storms if sea levels rise by one meter, or because of insufficient fresh water resources if the trend towards increased salt content persisted.

(1) Note the special issue on this subject of "Cahiers de la Sécurité" (number 63), published by S. Hallegatte and P. Ambrosi.