Climate change and conflict in Afghanistan
It feels like misdirection that the climate movement continues to view the crisis in reductive terms: the earth heats and then people die. There is a critical stage that is overlooked and inevitably comes before: conflict.
The situation in Afghanistan is a testament to how this pernicious cycle plays out; almost as if it were a fatal rehearsal for the rest of the world unless we meaningfully address the climate emergency before it is too late. We should to pay close attention to a lesson in history that affords us invaluable insight about the future.
Climate change is neither a national phenomenon nor a challenge limited to individual states. Consequences of climate change can be felt more quickly or more strongly in some places; the effects often delayed or spatially separated from the cause. Shifts of less than one degree Celsius in temperature or a few centimetres in sea level determine life and survival in some regions, not to mention economic and social existence.
This year’s COP26 is defined by terrifying responsibility. The burden of dealing with the effects of climate change cannot be transferred solely to people in affected regions. The climate crisis is one that has overwhelmingly been caused by white people in Europe and North America, not those suffering the harshest consequences today in some of the poorest countries on earth. In a study by the Lancet in 2020, research found that the US is responsible for 40% of the climate breakdown the world is experiencing today, and the European Union is responsible for 29%, according to new research. In total, the global north is responsible for 92% of excess global carbon emissions.
There ought to be a powerful sense of injustice that permeates every conversation that takes place over those two weeks in Glasgow.
In addition to the ethical obligations of cooperation, political responsibility also includes the “polluter pays” principle in order to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change and to counteract the risks of further destabilizing the global climate. This also applies to the interdependency of climate change and the spread of political as well as social violence.
In Afghanistan, which has been marked by armed conflict for decades, the consequences of climate change have become startlingly apparent. What should the world do when a fragile government dissipates and a country ravaged by the climate crisis surrenders to extremists? How equipped will the Taliban be in meeting the demands of a population at very real risk of starvation? It doesn’t require a leap of imagination to anticipate similar circumstances producing the same result in different countries, particularly across the global south.
Can we, as a society in the UK, continue to view refugees fleeing these sites of terror as criminals depending on the route they take here? Our responsibility to these people is two-fold, firstly as the architects of a war that was never resolved, and secondly as the greatest historical contributors of carbon emissions to the climate emergency. If we abdicate this moral responsibility or fail to contribute help at the scale demanded of us, history will rightly damn us.
The impacts of climate change create additional conflicts over resources, and in hardly any country is the link between climate change and conflict as clear as in Afghanistan, where a brutal war has been raging for 40 years. A country that itself has made little contribution to global climate change is severely and directly affected by the effects of global warming within its borders. A UNDP report from 2018 highlights that more than 80 percent of the population in Afghanistan are dependent on subsistence agriculture. Flash floods, earthquakes, and landslides provoked by glacier melting, as well as droughts and extreme temperatures, make agricultural work increasingly difficult. These dynamics will continue apace in the coming years. Drought and crop failure could trigger a nationwide famine.
Dried-up rivers and decades of deforestation drive an increasing scarcity of arable land, provoking further conflict among groups in (often violent) competition over land and resources alongside the country’s existing decades-long conflict. According to the United Nations, 41 percent of Afghans are directly affected by these land and resource conflicts.
Climate impacts increase poverty and organised crime, fuelling conflict in Afghanistan. These conflicts catalysts acted against the backdrop of the civil war, a fragile and sometimes dysfunctional infrastructure, and the weakened government in Kabul, which controlled little more than half of the territory. Under such conditions, the risk of poverty in Afghanistan is growing. According to the UNDP, 56 percent of Afghanistan’s total population already lives below the poverty line. Poverty, in turn, makes it easier for opposition organisations to recruit fighters from rural communities. Many people see no other prospect for themselves or their families than to take up arms in the struggle for limited resources, despite the risk to their lives.
In other cases, the interplay between climate change and weak governance pushed people toward the illicit economy to ensure their own survival. Organised criminal groups facilitated this development, but the profits from the drug trade do not benefit local producers. What can farmers do when, as a result of the lack of water, the cultivation of opium poppies is more fruitful than growing grains, and alternatives to the illegal market scarcely exist? Armed conflicts have only exacerbated the problem. Currently, almost all the raw materials of the global heroin market originate in Afghanistan. The state, deeply weakened by war, could hardly fight the established criminal structures, especially since most opium production occurs in areas outside of its control. The power vacuum resulting from the weakened state is partly filled by organised crime groups which, to shield their profits, stifle efforts at conflict management, state-building and development, thereby further entrenching the violent conflicts.
Only a more sophisticated understanding of the climate emergency can address the connection between conflict and climate, understanding the complex dynamics that occur when a state is brought to the brink of failure. Any coalition of nations must commit to this understanding if we are to prevent outright catastrophe on an unprecedented global scale.
