Climate change is intensifying pre-existing scarcity and vulnerability of key natural resources, providing an opportunity for conflict parties to weaponise these for political/military gains and using them as a tool for strategic and tactical aims, psychological terrorism and extortion or incentivisation.
Natural resources, such as water, are used by both state and non-state actors as a highly effective strategic tool of war, a weapon and a target, with harmful implication for human security as well as on state-level instability and unrest due to its long-lasting social, political, economic, environmental and health consequences. The absence of insufficient preventive mechanisms coupled with the difficulty to apply international humanitarian law to non-state armed groups and the misuse of natural resources are all issues of concern in the context of accelerating climate change.
In an webinar organized by IISS, speakers including HCSS Senior Analyst Laura Birkman discussed the dynamics of natural resources weaponisation in conflict in the context of accelerating climate change-induced scarcity and the implications for future policy attention. The webinar explored possible early warning methods to identify conflict areas/states most at risk of resources weaponisation and multilateral solutions to strengthen the protection of natural resources and prevent their violent instrumentalisation in conflicts.
Source: iiss.org
