Abhijit Bhattacharyya | Will climate change trigger social unrest, future wars?

Military Balance 2022 (International Institute for Strategic Studies, London) put across the issue crisply: “First-order physical effects of changing climate include storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts. Second-order effects include degradation of water supplies, reduced agriculture productivity and damage to infrastructure and disruption to energy generations, with all these having potential consequences for economics, employment”. All these, the receding glacier line, reduced ground water level, deforestation, rising sea levels, tsunami, tornado, migration, flood, and forced displacement are creating formidable challenges to governance, which will make mass social unrest inevitable.

No doubt the 194 members of the United Nations are relentlessly pursuing it in various international platforms as treaties are signed, promises made, lofty ideas floated to the delight and appreciation of politicians and diplomats, yet virtually nothing so far appears workable. On the contrary, regressive actions are ruthlessly revived by the human hunger for cash and commerce, culminating in multi-dimensional conflict and combat. To them, talking climate change is a good topic for optics at the UN, but not implementable in a materialistic world, which cannot distinguish between the lure for dollars and the plebeian’s right to live.

Simple and basic questions, therefore, need to be addressed to get into “climate change” and chalk out an implementable action plan to ensure that things don’t go out of control to inflict wholesale disaster, which would threaten the survival of the human race.

What are the main reasons for this fiery situation? Who are responsible, and what can be a way out? Is it impossible to ensure a stable climate, air purity, water and soil preservation, preventing degradation by mankind?

No doubt, the leaders of various nations do realise the threat as efforts are on for a consensus at the UN. While setting goals at the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, it was gloomily estimated that “up to 14 per cent of land species face a very high risk of extinction”. The reasons for this grim realisation could be pointed to innumerable sources of origin, attributable to unbridled human greed to “control” the trajectory of science and tech advancement. From the North and South Poles to the Himalayas, the oceans to teeming megalopolises, the fertile arable land of various continents to the Amazon basin, and South Asia’s natural forestry inhabited by tigers, lions and rhinos, nothing has been spared under the guise of “development projects” of nation states by plundering monopolists or other merchants who can dictate terms to any small, medium or even large nation in need of state-of-the-art technology. They often offer astronomical financial benefits to the rich elites of various nations to sweeten the deal.

The most harmful of all actors responsible for killing the climate/atmosphere system today, however, are the profit-seeking mega arms corporations, which have little or no concern whatsoever even if the world gasps for fresh air, or the thirsty die without potable water or agricultural land for global food security is bombed out to permanent sterility. Along with arms merchants selling everything from machine-guns to warplanes, these shark-like predators whose commercial interests from environmentally harmful mining to manufacturing show little concern for resource-rich but poor Third World countries who often emerge as “basket cases”, depending on alms and loans which turn into non-returnable debt, leading to their loss of sovereignty. Their outlook of “only money matters” overrides the survival interests of ordinary people facing the adverse effects of climate change.

Slowly, however, some kind of realisation is beginning to dawn about the harmful effects caused. The armed forces of some advanced nations are thinking of how to reduce the carbon emissions from combat hardware to achieve sustainable and achievable goals. But for now, these still seem to be a mirage.

In today’s world, there are two broad ways to multilateral diplomacy: first, through 46 “arms control and disarmament agreements”, and second, through 74 “international security co-operation bodies”, which include the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

All these have effectively entangled the entire world. But one can also understand how varied and bizarre these binding systems can be from the bewildering variety of titles given to them, creating the impression of a global exercise in futility, making every diplomatic act appear artificial. All these agreements and alliances end up looking useless as they cannot contain or control the bilateral or multilateral arms trade between nation states, some of which are making astronomical profits by killing thousands and often destroying environment and climate forever.

Just consider two major conflicts of our times. First, the ongoing intra-Slav Russia-Ukraine race war, over two years old, in which more than 50 nations have now got entangled, killing the environment, contaminating water, destroying fertile land, murdering humans and injecting poison in air. What is the future of Europe, the cradle of recurring, prolonged mayhem since the days of the Roman Empire?

Second, the Levant’s religious war of hatred between Muslims and Jews also spells disaster for both climate and human race. Starvation, famine, poisonous air, water and soil degradation will surely inflict generational damage to future children of congenital mental disability and incurable physical deformity.

Who should then bell the cat of catastrophe? Why is the entire Christian West, the advanced Jewish state and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation not trying to stop the potential Armageddon for the sake of “climate change”, on which the politicians and diplomats of all countries talk long but act short? No wonder the types and numbers of bilateral, trilateral and multilateral “agreements” between nations have names which would be a true reflection of the indifference to, and collective failure of, the League of Nations between the two world wars and now the lame duck United Nations.

Frankly speaking, “climate change” will continue to degrade human life and help depraved political leaders, diplomats and others to lead us to inevitable doom. Most ambitious plans about tackling the warming planet are a joke: all talk and no action. The world’s arms bazaar rules the roost and overrides all other factors. The West’s “military industrial complex” is on the march, and any reversing of climate change is its first casualty.