There is evidence that climate change will worsen socio-economic and political disparity in the region as those in power will get to decide who gets the limited resources and how much, the report co-authored by researchers Pernilla Nordqvist and Florian Krampe while working for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), has said.

“The climate-conflict linkage primarily plays out in contexts that are already vulnerable to climate change and violence, and where income is highly dependent on agriculture and fishing,” Nordqvist told IndiaSpend in an email.

Human activities have already caused warming of 1.0 degree Celsius as compared to pre-industrial times, according to the latest report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2030, or latest by mid-century, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Close to 2.5 billion people live in South and South-East Asia, where poverty rates have been declining substantially, thanks to years of strong economic growth in countries such as India. However, the region is also prone to the fallouts of climate change, with glaciers in the Himalayas melting and several island-countries facing rising sea levels. Floods, cyclones, heat waves and droughts are now a frequent occurrence and are expected to intensify in the coming years.

“The region is highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change and also has a recent history of political violence,” Krampe told IndiaSpend.

Nordqvist and Krame examined 2,000 peer-reviewed studies on the relationship between climate change and conflict and narrowed down on 21 of the most authoritative works for their report, which was published in September 2018.

Their findings from India show that rebel groups and government forces both find recruitment easier when drought is around the corner.

The IPCC report also adds that climate-related risks to livelihoods, food security, health, water supply and human security are projected to increase as the planet warms by 1.5 degrees. With a 2-degree rise, the risks will intensify.

In some areas affected by the Naxalite conflict, the worsening of livelihood conditions has been related to the increased intensity of ongoing civil conflicts. During a drought, or a potential drought, there is an increased risk that rebels and government actors recruit or cooperate with civilians in exchange for livelihood and provision of food.

Naxalites could use climate-related events to gain power in an ongoing conflict, and rebel groups more generally could increase their use of violence against civilians to ensure their groups’ food security, according to the report.

“They violently remove local farmers from their land to ensure enough cropland and agricultural supplies for their own use. The risk of violence seems especially high in rural areas, where government control is scarce and the local population is dependent on the support or protection of rebels or other armed actors,” Nordqvist said.

As climate change pushes up migration, it introduces the possibility of riots in urban areas over resources, the report said. Highlighting the case of riots in Tripura in northeastern India, it said the effects will be most felt in areas where there are already low levels of socio-political stability.

“Many of the climate change problems are trans-national. The Brahmaputra, for example, flows through three countries and is seeing frequent flooding. There is no question that countries will need to cooperate and tensions like the ones between countries India and Pakistan will make this difficult,” Krampe said.

There is some research on the relationship between climate change and conflict in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the report said, adding that there is little understanding of how climate change could be driving conflict in places such as Afghanistan and Myanmar.

Elsewhere in South-East Asia, in some coastal areas of Indonesia the reduced income opportunities from fishing have been linked to a rise in piracy-related activities.

But the impact does not end there.

In Pakistan, for instance, the Islamist group Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD) was able to increase its stronghold in Sindh province after the group participated in relief activities following extreme floods.

The IPCC report also warns that those living along coasts and populations dependent on agriculture will be the worst hit by climate change, which will push up poverty rates in coastal areas and in developing countries.

However, “Not everyone affected by climate change will join a rebel group but this also relates to the failure of the governments to respond to disasters,” Krampe said.

At the same time, not all areas will see conflict in the face of climate change. Some might even see a greater cooperation in the aftermath of a natural disaster. These regional dynamics are evolving, however, and their contours will only become clearer with time.

“There is an urgent need for a climate change risk assessment in South Asia and South-East Asia as right now we simply do not know the risks involved,” Krampe said.

(Disha Shetty is a Columbia Journalism School-IndiaSpend reporting fellow covering climate change.)

This article was first published on indiaspend.com
 

The post Climate Change Will Worsen Disparities, Increase Conflict, Support For Naxals: New Report appeared first on SabrangIndia.

India is and has been, since 2011, the single largest importer of arms in the world, accounting for 14 per cent of total arms imports of the world and the sixth largest spender on arms in the world, the second largest from Asia, second only to China.

Pakistan our bête noir is much lower down in the arms import scale, making up only 3.3 per cent of the world imports. China, which has the largest number of military expenditure in Asia, however, accounts for only 4.7 per cent of the total world imports, when it comes to arms.

So not only are we spending more on arms but our dependency on foreign powers for defense equipment (not indigenous manufacture) adds another factor to the relationship. India’s imports are twice the second largest importer country Saudi Arabia’s imports, which makes up for 7 per cent of the total world imports.

These figures are irrefutable, coming as they do from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Images: SIPRI

India is the sixth largest spender in the world, when it comes to military expenditure and is second largest from Asia, following China, also according to SIPRI. In 2015, India’s expenditure on military was $ 51,257 million as against Pakistan’s $ 9,510 million. However, South Asian countries are far behind the expenditure of the United States, which is whooping $ 596,024 million and quite behind China’s $ 214,787 million as well, according to SIPRI. (The extensive map by SIPRI showing military expenditure by different countries in an interactive graphic format can be found here.)

And this is while, even according to conservative estimates put out by the World Bank, India accounted for the largest number of people living below international poverty line in 2013, with 30 per cent of its population under the $1.90-a- day poverty measure. Placing the figure of the total of India’s ‘poor’ at a staggering 224 million, the recently released report 'Poverty and Shared Prosperity', also indicated that ‘extreme poverty worldwide continued to fall despite the global economy's "under-performance".

So while we puff up our chests on the surgical strokes against our neighbour and turn a blind eye to the pitfalls of sabka saath sabka vikas paradigm within, maybe its worth taking a deep breath and looking at this, the other side.

In the last two months, Maharashtra capital, Mumbai–a state regarded as being high on both the ‘financial capital’, business, and ‘progressive social values’ index’ has seen at least 12 deaths of infants as a result of malnutrition. Palghar district, situated at a distance of a hundred kilometer from the state capital, has recorded 600  deaths of children due to malnutrition within a four-month-period (April – August 2016), and as per some of the news reports, close to 4,000 children in the district are suffering from either severe or moderate form of malnutrition.

The United Nations (UN) says that in India, 2.1 million children die before reaching the age of five, every year. And, malnutrition is only one of the issues in the country, where 21.9 percent of the population is below poverty line, 68 million people still live in slums and suffer because of the unsanitary and uninhabitable living spaces.

On the other hand, India’s relation with the neighbouring country Pakistan is at its worst after Uri attack, skirmishes that have been taking place since and an anticipated war scenario. Some have been stressing on the need to modernise the Indian military and want the government to spend more in order to strengthen its defence. Many more deals to purchase modern aircraft and equipment for Indian Army are in the pipeline. Beneficiaries as we have seen with the recent Rafael deal are none less than India’s favoured few, the crony capitalists.

India is the largest client for Russia and the second largest for UK and Italy. Several deals to purchase Rafael fighter jets, Apache and Chinook aircrafts, Kamov helicopters and M777 lightweight Howitzer guns have either been signed or are going to be signed in near future, at a cost of approximately 1.5 lakh crore (SIPRI).

These figures pose a serious dilemma in front of a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with high human development index.

In India’s annual budget this year, however, the government allocated a budget of 2.58 lakh crore to defence, 38,892 crore for health and of 72,394 crore to education. A massive 13.04 per cent of the country’s annual budget, therefore, goes to defence as against the 1.96 per cent to health and 3.96 per cent to education. India’s defence spending spending went up by ten per cent (9.76 per cent) of the budgetary allocations (2.58 crores) as compared to the revised estimates of 2.33 lakh crores for 2015-2016. The finance minister Arun Jaitley had, conspicuously, made no mention of the defence allocation for 2016-17 in his Budget speech, however.
 
For a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with a high human development index (HDI), these priorities in focus pose a serious dilemma. As India settles for rank 130 in the list of 188 countries, its neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh have settled for ranks 147 and 142 respectively.
 
Though the budget allocated to the health sector, showed a hike of 15 per cent as compared to the last year’s allocation which had been slashed by five per cent from the previous year, the allocation is not close to what attention and funding that this sector actually deserves. The question one needs to ask here then, is:  is the Indian taxpayer’s money going where it’s really required?

As the issue like poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and dearth of infrastructure continue to plague the country, where do our priorities lie? Is the modernisation of the military the only absolute priority?

Will these questions receive any answers?

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