
A study by International Alert, a London-based international peacebuilding organisation, in 2007 found that 46 countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion people are at risk of armed conflict related to the effects of climate change. A further 56 countries - with a combined population of 1.2 billion - have a severe risk of political instability.
So it is a big problem - but also a subtle one. It would be misleading to argue that climate change alone causes wars. Armed conflicts never start because of a single cause and, in any case, climate change is not the only thing happening in the world.
The conflict problem comes about because climate change interacts with a number of other things that are wrong in a country's social, economic and political landscape - poverty, arbitrary and corrupt state power, inequality, legacies of war and colonialism, the malign influence of outside power and so on. So climate change is a stress multiplier. We see how this works by looking at one of the main natural consequences of climate change - fluctuations in water supply….
Silhouette of Kalashnikov's automatic rifle model of year 1947, designed by radioflyer, Wikimedia Commons
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