Terrorism and Climate Change: Causation or Correlation?
During the second Democratic presidential debate on November 14, Bernie Sanders told the moderator that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.” Though tweeters and commentators everywhere latched onto this as an absurd claim initially, Sanders quickly went to on to elaborate that this would be a more indirect relationship: as a result of climate change, people would be “struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops, and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict,” he explained.
Conflicts over limited water and resources are hardly new: some historians cite water conflicts as major contributors to the war in Darfur and the Rwandan genocide. The Pacific Institute has a timeline of water conflicts that dates back to Noah’s ark. The timeline includes various acts of terrorism that were aimed at destroying water supplies.
Political scientists will tell you that terrorism is caused by the perfect mix of social and political injustice, socioeconomic inequality, unemployment (especially among young people), power vacuums, general disgruntlement among a particular group of people, and the belief that violence will be the most effective means of communicating a message. It’s impossible to say that any one factor causes terrorism itself, and yet any one of these issues can spark attacks that one might classify as terrorism if one were so inclined.
Others will tell you that terrorism is caused not by inequality itself but by anger about that inequality. Climate change can lead to or aggravate poverty, socioeconomic inequality, and unemployment, especially in countries which lack the infrastructure to deal with its consequences. Water scarcity due to climate change has already led to crises in places like Mexico City, which has seen an uptick in violence related to water. So while it’s generally accepted that poverty alone doesn’t lead to terrorism, poverty can certainly contribute to the anger and desperation that terrorism requires, especially if that poverty is fueled by a need as fundamental as that for clean water.
When Bernie Sanders talks about terrorism, he’s probably thinking about terrorism that has directly affected the United States and other western countries. That means he’s thinking about Al Qaeda and Daesh, both terrorist groups that rose out of either proxy wars or colonial wars in countries with dictators that had been propped up by western states for decades. And it’s important to note that the ability to actually engage in widespread deadly terrorism has recently required some outside interference for training, arms, and funding. After all, terrorism cannot by definition exist in a vacuum: Daesh were originally Al Qaeda affiliates, and Al Qaeda’s founders were famously trained by the US military. Boko Haram received seed money from Al Qaeda, too.
But not every war produces a group as internationally devastating as Daesh. That means there’s something special about the regions that produce major terrorist groups, in particular groups whose reach extends far outside of those regions. The major terrorist groups of the last fifteen years have emerged from Afghanistan, the Levant, the Gulf, the Indian subcontinent, and West Africa, which are (coincidentally?) some of the regions hardest hit by climate change since 2000. See, for example, this map of estimated deaths attributed to climate change in 2000 for an idea of the regions worst affected by climate change. See the map below (Map A) of water scarcity in 2007 from the Food and Agriculture Organization compared to Map B of projected water scarcity in 2025 from the International Water Management Institute.
Map A (http://www.fewresources.org/)
Map B (http://www.fewresources.org/)
Map A shows areas approaching water scarcity, many of which are current hotbeds of terrorism. It makes a key distinction between places which, in 2015, faced economic as opposed to strictly physical water scarcity. But Map B’s projections for 2025 demonstrate that economic water scarcity will likely spread to places that Map A doesn’t anticipate. This illustrates a clear difference between places like Pakistan (where we see a lot of terrorism) and places like Mongolia (where we see very little).
So is Sanders right? Does climate change lead to a growth in terrorism? Well, probably not directly. For one thing, correlation doesn’t equal causation; if it did, we would probably be seeing a rise in terrorism in South America instead of a steady decrease. For another, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of terrorism, but it’s not like Ireland was suffering from a great lack of water when the IRA was at its deadliest in the late 20th century.
It’s certainly possible that water and resource scarcity that have come about at least partially as a result of climate change have highlighted socioeconomic inequalities in regions that are currently hotbeds of terrorism, and possible that this scarcity bred anger and desperation in populations from Morocco through Africa and into the Indian subcontinent. It’s especially worth noting that Syria suffered one of the worst droughts in recent history between 2007 and 2010, and subsequently Daesh (which has been around since 1999 under a variety of names, of which “Islamic State” is only the latest and probably most offensive incarnation) became one of the most powerful and deadly terrorist groups in recent history.
But terrorism must also come as a result of governments unwilling or unable to spend the money required to deal with the repercussions of climate change. The Pentagon’s assessment that climate change would “aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions … ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions” says roughly the same: in the case of the rise of global terrorism, climate change only emphasizes problems that already exist. It’s possible—though has not yet been explicitly demonstrated—that global climate change might one day be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back, the catalyst in a region that already boasts the reagents that have sparked terrorism in the past.
