Man sitting in IDP camp in Mogadishu. Somalia in the grip of an unprecedented and devastating food crisis. Brutal conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen, Nigeria and Somalia have driven millions of people from their homes and left millions more in need of emergency food.
Picture by NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved. On March 10th,
Stephen O’Brien, under secretary-general of the United Nations for
humanitarian affairs, informed
the Security Council that 20 million people in three African
countries — Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan — as well as in Yemen
were likely to die if not provided with emergency food and medical
aid. “We are at a critical point in history,” he declared.
“Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest
humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.” Without
coordinated international action, he added, “people will simply
starve to death [or] suffer and die from disease.”
Major famines have, of course, occurred before, but never in
memory on such a scale in four places simultaneously. According
to O’Brien, 7.3 million people are at risk in Yemen, 5.1
million in the Lake Chad area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in
South Sudan, and 2.9 million in Somalia. In each of these countries,
some lethal combination
of war, persistent drought, and political instability is causing
drastic cuts in essential food and water supplies. Of those 20
million people at risk of death, an estimated 1.4 million are young
children.
Despite the potential severity of the crisis,
U.N. officials remain confident that many of those at risk can be
saved if sufficient food and medical assistance is provided in time
and the warring parties allow humanitarian aid workers to reach those
in the greatest need. “We have strategic, coordinated, and
prioritized plans in every country,” O’Brien said. “With
sufficient and timely financial support, humanitarians can still help
to prevent the worst-case scenario.”
All in all, the cost of such an intervention is not great: an
estimated $4.4 billion to implement
that U.N. action plan and save most of those 20 million lives.
The international response? Essentially, a giant shrug of
indifference.
To have time to deliver sufficient supplies, U.N. officials
indicated that the money would need to be in pocket by the end of
March. It’s now April and international donors have given only a
paltry $423
million — less than a tenth of what’s needed. While, for
instance, President Donald Trump sought
Congressional approval for a $54 billion increase in U.S. military
spending (bringing total defense expenditures in the coming year to
$603 billion) and launched $89
million worth of Tomahawk missiles against a single Syrian air
base, the U.S. has offered precious little to allay
the coming disaster in three countries in which it has taken military
actions in recent years. As if to add insult to injury, on February
15th Trump told
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari that he was inclined to sell his
country 12 Super-Tucano light-strike aircraft, potentially depleting
Nigeria of $600 million it desperately needs for famine relief.
Moreover, just as those U.N. officials were
pleading fruitlessly for increased humanitarian funding and an end to
the fierce and complex set of conflicts in South Sudan and
Yemen (so that they could facilitate the safe delivery of
emergency food supplies to those countries), the Trump administration
was announcing plans to reduce American contributions to the United
Nations by 40%.
It was also preparing to send additional
weaponry to Saudi Arabia, the country most responsible
for devastating air strikes on Yemen’s food and water
infrastructure. This goes beyond indifference. This is
complicity in mass extermination.
Like many people around the world, President Trump was horrified
by images of young children suffocating from the nerve gas used by
Syrian government forces in an April 4th raid on the rebel-held
village of Khan Sheikhoun. “That attack on children yesterday had a
big impact on me — big impact,” he told
reporters. “That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I’ve been
watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.”
In reaction to those images, he ordered a barrage of cruise missile
strikes on a Syrian air base the following day. But Trump does not
seem to have seen — or has ignored — equally heart-rending images
of young children dying from the spreading famines in Africa and
Yemen. Those children evidently don’t merit White House sympathy.
Who knows why not just Donald Trump but the world is proving so
indifferent to the famines of 2017? It could simply be donor
fatigue or a media focused on the daily psychodrama that is now
Washington, or growing fears about the unprecedented global
refugee crisis and, of course, terrorism. It’s a question
worth a piece in itself, but I want to explore another one entirely.
Here’s the question I think we all should be asking: Is this
what a world battered by climate change will be like — one in which
tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people perish from
disease, starvation, and heat prostration while the rest of us,
living in less exposed areas, essentially do nothing to prevent their
annihilation?
Famine, drought, and
climate change
First, though, let’s consider whether the famines of 2017 are
even a valid indicator of what a climate-changed planet might look
like. After all, severe famines accompanied by widespread starvation
have occurred throughout human history. In addition, the brutal armed
conflicts now underway in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen
are at least in part responsible for the spreading famines. In all
four countries, there are forces — Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab
in Somalia, assorted militias and the government in South Sudan, and
Saudi-backed forces in Yemen — interfering
with the delivery of aid supplies. Nevertheless, there can be no
doubt that pervasive water scarcity and prolonged drought (expected
consequences of global warming) are contributing
significantly to the disastrous conditions in most of them. The
likelihood that droughts this severe would be occurring
simultaneously in the absence of climate change is vanishingly small.
In fact, scientists generally agree that global warming will
ensure diminished rainfall and ever more frequent droughts over much
of Africa and the Middle East. This, in turn, will heighten conflicts
of every sort and endanger basic survival in a myriad of ways. In
their most recent 2014 assessment of global trends, the scientists of
the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
concluded
that “agriculture in Africa will face significant challenges in
adapting to climate changes projected to occur by mid-century, as
negative effects of high temperatures become increasingly prominent.”
Even in 2014, as that report suggested, climate change was already
contributing to water scarcity and persistent drought conditions in
large parts of Africa and the Middle East. Scientific studies had,
for instance, revealed an “overall expansion of desert and
contraction of vegetated areas” on that continent. With
arable land in retreat and water supplies falling, crop yields were
already in decline in many areas, while malnutrition rates were
rising — precisely the conditions witnessed
in more extreme forms in the famine-affected areas today.
It’s seldom possible to attribute any specific weather-induced
event, including droughts or storms, to global warming with absolute
certainty. Such things happen with or without climate change.
Nonetheless, scientists are becoming even
more confident that severe storms and droughts (especially when
occurring in tandem or in several parts of the world at once) are
best explained as climate-change related. If, for instance, a type of
storm that might normally occur only once every hundred years occurs
twice in one decade and four times in the next, you can be reasonably
confident that you’re in a new climate era.
It will undoubtedly take more time for scientists to determine to
what extent the current famines in Africa and Yemen are mainly
climate-change-induced and to what extent they are the product of
political and military mayhem and disarray. But doesn’t this
already offer us a sense of just what kind of world we are now
entering?
History and social science research indicate that, as
environmental conditions deteriorate, people will naturally compete
over access to vital materials and the opportunists in any society —
warlords, militia leaders, demagogues, government officials, and the
like — will exploit such clashes for their personal advantage.
“The data suggests a definite link between food insecurity and
conflict,” points
out Ertharin Cousin, head of the U.N.’s World Food Program.
“Climate is an added stress factor.” In this sense, the current
famines in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen provide us with a
perfect template for our future, one in which resource wars and
climate mayhem team up as temperatures continue their steady rise.
The selective impact
of climate change
In some popular accounts of the future depredations of climate
change, there is a tendency to suggest that its effects will be felt
more or less democratically around the globe — that we will all
suffer to some degree, if not equally, from the bad things that
happen as temperatures rise. And it’s certainly true that everyone
on this planet will feel the effects of global warming in some
fashion, but don’t for a second imagine that the harshest effects
will be distributed anything but deeply inequitably. It won’t
even be a complicated equation. As with so much else, those at
the bottom rungs of society — the poor, the marginalized, and those
in countries already at or near the edge — will suffer
so much more (and so much earlier) than those at the top and in the
most developed, wealthiest countries.
As a start, the geophysical dynamics of climate change dictate
that, when it comes to soaring temperatures and reduced rainfall, the
most severe effects are likely to be felt first and worst in the
tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, the Middle East, South
Asia, and Latin America — home to hundreds of millions of people who
depend on rain-fed agriculture to sustain themselves and their
families. Research conducted by scientists in New Zealand,
Switzerland, and Great Britain found
that the rise in the number of extremely hot days is already more
intense in tropical latitudes and disproportionately affects poor
farmers.
Living at subsistence levels, such farmers and their communities
are especially vulnerable to drought and desertification. In a
future in which climate-change disasters are commonplace, they will
undoubtedly be forced to choose ever more frequently between the
unpalatable alternatives of starvation or flight. In other
words, if you thought the global refugee crisis was bad
today, just wait a few decades.
Climate change is also intensifying the dangers faced by the poor
and marginalized in another way. As interior croplands turn to
dust, ever more farmers are migrating to cities, especially coastal
ones. If you want a historical analogy, think of the great Dust
Bowl migration of the “Okies” from the interior of the U.S.
to the California coast in the 1930s. In today’s climate-change
era, the only available housing such migrants are likely to find will
be in vast and expanding shantytowns (or “informal settlements,”
as they’re euphemistically called), often located in floodplains
and low-lying coastal areas exposed to storm surges and sea-level
rise. As global warming advances, the victims of water scarcity and
desertification will be afflicted anew. Those storm surges will
destroy the most exposed parts of the coastal mega-cities in which
they will be clustered. In other words, for the uprooted and
desperate, there will be no escaping climate change. As the
latest IPCC report noted,
“Poor people living in urban informal settlements, of which there
are [already] about one billion worldwide, are particularly
vulnerable to weather and climate effects.”
The scientific literature on climate change indicates
that the lives of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed will
be the first to be turned upside down by the effects of global
warming. “The socially and economically disadvantaged and the
marginalized are disproportionately affected by the impacts of
climate change and extreme events,” the IPCC indicated in 2014.
“Vulnerability is often high among indigenous peoples, women,
children, the elderly, and disabled people who experience multiple
deprivations that inhibit them from managing daily risks and shocks.”
It should go without saying that these are also the people least
responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global
warming in the first place (something no less true of the countries
most of them live in).
Inaction equals
annihilation
In this context, consider the moral consequences of inaction on
climate change. Once it seemed that the process of global warming
would occur slowly enough to allow societies to adapt to higher
temperatures without excessive disruption, and that the entire human
family would somehow make this transition more or less
simultaneously. That now looks more and more like a fairy tale.
Climate change is occurring far too swiftly for all human societies
to adapt to it successfully. Only the richest are likely to
succeed in even the most tenuous way. Unless colossal efforts are
undertaken now to halt the emission of greenhouse gases, those living
in less affluent societies can expect to suffer from
extremes of flooding, drought, starvation, disease, and death in
potentially staggering numbers.
And you don’t need a Ph.D. in climatology to arrive at this
conclusion either. The overwhelming majority of the world’s
scientists agree that any increase in average world temperatures that
exceeds
2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial
era — some opt for a rise of no more than 1.5
degrees Celsius — will alter the global climate system
drastically. In such a situation, a number of societies will
simply disintegrate in the fashion of South Sudan today, producing
staggering chaos and misery. So far, the world has heated
up by at least one of those two degrees, and unless we stop
burning fossil fuels in quantity soon, the 1.5 degree level will
probably be reached
in the not-too-distant future.
Worse yet, on our present trajectory, it seems highly
unlikely that the warming process will stop at 2 or even 3
degrees Celsius, meaning that later in this century
many of the worst-case climate-change scenarios
— the inundation of coastal cities, the desertification of vast
interior regions, and the collapse of rain-fed agriculture in many
areas — will become everyday reality.
In other words, think of the developments in those three African
lands and Yemen as previews of what far larger parts of our world
could look like in another quarter-century or so: a world in which
hundreds of millions of people are at risk of annihilation from
disease or starvation, or are on the march or at sea, crossing
borders, heading for the shantytowns of major cities, looking for
refugee camps or other places where survival appears even minimally
possible. If the world’s response to the current famine
catastrophe and the escalating fears of refugees in wealthy countries
are any indication, people will die in vast numbers without hope of
help.
In other words, failing to halt the advance of climate change —
to the extent that halting it, at this point, remains within our
power — means complicity with mass human annihilation. We know, or
at this point should know, that such scenarios are already on the
horizon. We still retain the power, if not to stop them, then
to radically ameliorate what they will look like, so our failure to
do all we can means that we become complicit in what
— not to mince words — is clearly going to be a process of climate
genocide. How can those of us in countries responsible for the
majority of greenhouse gas emissions escape such a verdict?
And if such a conclusion is indeed inescapable, then each of us
must do whatever we can to reduce our individual, community, and
institutional contributions to global warming. Even if we are already
doing a lot — as many of us are — more is needed.
Unfortunately, we Americans are living not only in a time of climate
crisis, but in the era of President Trump, which means the federal
government and its partners
in the fossil fuel industry will be wielding their immense powers to
obstruct
all imaginable progress on limiting global warming. They
will be the true perpetrators of climate genocide.
As a result, the rest of us bear a moral responsibility not just to
do what we can at the local level to slow the pace of climate change,
but also to engage in political struggle to counteract or neutralize
the acts of Trump and company. Only dramatic and concerted action on
multiple fronts can prevent the human disasters now unfolding in
Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen from becoming the global
norm.
This article was first
published on TomDispatch
on April 20, 2017