BENGALURU: Climate change poses muttiple threats to mankind. The phenonemon triggers a chain of events. Droughts lead to less food and protests, ultimately leading to wars..Rise in temperatures as a result of global warming results in excessive rain and extreme famine. Large-scale drought is being increasingly linked to the incidence of forest fires, and scientists have established a correlation between rising temperatures and widespread conflagrations.
One such fire raged through Vyksa, Russia on July 29, 2010, killing 55,000 people, after record droughts in the region. Between August 1 and 8, carbon monoxide levels above Western Russia climbed to dangerous levels. Four months later, world food prices reached record highs.
After Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan halted grain exports. Protests over food price were seen across the globe, from Lahore to Bolivia to Kolkata to Tunisia, starting 2010. The Arab Spring, as we know it today, erupted in Tunisia in 2010, bringing a tsunami of change, climatically and socially, across the region.
The 2006-2010 droughts turned 60 per cent of Syria’s fertile land into desert and killed 80 per cent of the country’s cattle. “I had 400 acres of wheat, and now it’s all desert,” said Ahmed Abdullah, a Syrian farmer who is facing the tragedy, in October 2010.
The Syrian minister of agriculture stated publicly that the economic and social fallout of the drought was “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with”. In March 2011, Syria plunged into civil war after this occurred.
The connection between the 2010 drought in China and the political uprising in Egypt seems more than a coincidence. The Chinese event was a once-in-a-century winter drought. Other wheat-growing countries saw record-breaking heat waves and floods. It was an abnormally wet season in Canada that year.
All this reduced global wheat supply and sent prices skyrocketing, particularly hitting Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer. Higher wheat prices affected the cost and availability of bread in Egypt as a result.
“Bread provides one-third of the caloric intake in Egypt, a country where 38 per cent of income is spent on food,” said Troy Sternberg, a geographer at Oxford University. Global food prices peaked at an all-time high in March 2011, after Mubarak was toppled.
When you are hungry, you are angry. Okay, let’s back up here. Are we saying that extreme weather events caused by manmade factors caused the Arab Spring, the civil war in Syria and the unrest in Egypt? This seems an absurd assumption. Weren’t other long and short-term social, political, religious and economic issues at the root of these incidents?
In a paper titled ‘Global Warming and the Arab Spring’, Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo explain the connection. “The early events of what came to be called the Arab Spring offered a textbook example of what analysts mean when they talk of complex causality and the role of climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’. The wave of protests across the region, feeding on one another, might have broken at any other time over the past few decades. Why, then, did they happen when they did? ...In the distinct chain of events that led to the Arab Spring, climate change played a necessary role, even if it was obviously an insufficient trigger on its own. A proximate factor behind the unrest was a spike in global food prices, which in turn was due in part to the extreme global weather in 2010-2011. This was not enough to trigger regime change-we have seen food-price spikes and food riots before-but it was a necessary part of this particular mix.”
As new data and analysis emerges, it is all heading towards a chilling revelation. Climate change is having repercussions beyond temperature rise, on politics, food supply, global health and infrastructure.
The author is founder of Green Dreams for the Planet, an NGO. He is a certified climate leader with the Al Gore network. He can be reached at CBRamkumar@GreenDreams.Vision