Climate-Related Flashpoints: A Useful Notion for Early Warning?

Michael Glantz
Environmental and Societal Impacts Group

Search on the Internet for the word "flashpoints" and you will come up with scores of Web sites that use the term somewhere in their description. Many use it in their title, however, mainly in reference to military and political issues.

Flashpoints can be viewed as a catalyst to change, often an abrupt change that can lead to military or political conflict. Identifying potential flashpoints between or within countries in advance can be used to defuse if not avert an unstable situation. What might be sources of instability? Poverty, religious fundamentalism, ethnic rivalries, border disputes, socioeconomic inequities, aggression, greed, a fight over scarce natural resources? In reality, there are many such sources that could lead to instability in the political or economic systems of countries or regions within them. To the possible sources of instability must be added "climate and climate-related factors." This includes climate variability on seasonal and interannual time frames, as well as climate fluctuations across decades, climate change, and extreme climate and climate-related events. What was the role, for example, of a multiyear drought situation in North Korea in its rapprochement with South Korea?

Flashpoints fall under the umbrella of "early warnings." Governments everywhere like – no, love – early warning systems. Such systems give the government a warning about impending crises that might be avoided with advance notice. The longer the lead time, the more time governments have to develop a response strategy and tactics. Close scrutiny of almost any government will likely expose early warning (or fail-safe) systems. Government ministries seem to rely only on their own list of early warning indicators. In the Sudan, for example, one can find a dozen or so early warning systems related to food insecurity and famine.

El Niño and La Niña events are known to spawn climate and climate-related hazards in some locations around the globe. El Niño-related forest fires and the resulting smoke and haze in Southeast Asia added to existing political pressures on the Indonesian government and indirectly to cultural instability throughout the country. Might an El Niño-related drought at the end of 2001 serve to destabilize the present-day government of Zimbabwe, a government that has already shown signs of increasing political instability as its president seeks yet another term in office? To what extent might drought-induced migration from Afghanistan to Pakistan become a political flashpoint to the relationship between these countries or to the Indo-Pakistani conflict in Kashmir?

The question here is whether any of the numerous aspects of climate might be used to identify in advance potential instability to a government, economy, or culture. I myself am not yet sure, but it is worth considering.

– Michael Glantz