Conflict and Climate Change
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water conflict has been triggered by the U.S. plan to reline part of the AllAmerican Canal. Such a project would minimize leakage for California users but in the process would impose water shortages on villagers in Mexico. The plan has spurred organized protests from Mexico, with the president noting that it would be “terrible for Mexico.”
Destabilization of Traditional Indigenous Structures Indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable to the increased variability in nature’s cycles. Climate change and variability could lead to internal conflicts both within and among indigenous communities, as well as to conflicts with nonindigenous communities.10 With regard to the latter, some of the main conflicts seen are those between mestizo (nonindigenous) and indigenous people over access to farmland and forest resources, with the advance of the agricultural frontier. Aside from the well-described adverse effects on agricultural productivity caused by climate change, the increasing severity of hurricanes, for example, can lead to large tracts of forest being devastated. That together with more droughts increases the risk of forest fires. This condition provides opportunities for farmers to expand the agricultural frontier further into forests inhabited by indigenous people, displacing them from their traditional territories and hence potentially causing conflict. These three cases illustrate a few of the adverse consequences that nonviolent conflicts induced by climate change and variability can generate. They emphasize that we should be concerned with the socioeconomic outcome of both violent and nonviolent conflicts. They imply that to minimize adverse impacts and expand the capabilities of vulnerable groups, social policies should attempt to influence the processes that translate climate change impacts into increased tensions and disputes.
Day-to-Day Violence and Climate Change Climate change might also have adverse impacts on violence in small communal or household settings. This type of unstructured violence without any clear link to conflicts appears widespread. Gender-based violence, for instance, despite being the least visible manifestation of violence (precisely because it is unstructured and exercised in the private domain), is by far the most widespread type of non–conflict-related violence (Kelly and Radford 1998). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore in any depth the consequences of climate change and variability for day-to-day violence in general. However, there appears to be a real risk that climate change (by transforming livelihoods and social structures) could spur