Follow us on social

Shutterstock_2147722665-scaled

The looming climate-security crisis in South Asia

Extreme weather has been called a 'threat multiplier' — feeding into existing social and political problems and making them even worse.

Analysis | Global Crises

Largely unnoticed by the Western public, a disaster is building in South Asia with the potential over the long term to dwarf the global impact of the war in Ukraine. 

Average April temperatures in northern India and Pakistan were the highest since records began 122 years ago. Large parts of India and Pakistan faced temperatures exceeding 40°C (104°F), while several cities in Pakistan recorded temperatures just under 50°C (122°F). So high were temperatures that a huge landfill near Delhi spontaneously combusted, adding a pall of toxic smoke to the dire effects of the heatwave on public health.

This is in line with scientists’ predictions concerning the particularly early and powerful effects of climate change on South Asia and the Persian Gulf. A quarter of the world’s population — almost two billion people — live in that region. An ecological catastrophe that destroys states and societies there will have dreadful consequences not just for those people but for the world as a whole, including the United States.

A 2018 report by HSBC puts India in first place among large countries most threatened by climate change, followed by India’s neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh in second and fourth place respectively. In the longer term, rising sea-levels threaten to destroy low-lying Bangladesh. Much more imminent, however, is the danger to South Asian agriculture if present climate trajectories continue.

According to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at sustained temperatures above 40°C, rice cultivation collapses. For every one degree permanent rise in average temperatures, grain yield declines by around 10 percent. Equally importantly, if very high temperatures are combined with humidity (the so-called “wet-bulb” effect), prolonged work in the open becomes fatal for human beings. Even in western Europe, the heatwave of 2003 killed an estimated 30,000 people. The probable impact on South Asian countries, with their severely limited public health systems, is truly dreadful.

Extreme heat’s harmful effects on humans are not limited to their physical well-being. There is a well established relationship between increased heat and spikes in violence and crime. Heat exposure has been shown to cause significant decreases in cognitive performance, even among young and healthy people, which over the long-term could have far-reaching economic consequences. 

Put these factors together, and if climate change continues unchecked, we are facing the prospect of a catastrophic decline in South Asian agriculture, with disastrous prospects for the hundreds of millions of people working in this sector, as well as for South Asian and global food supplies. Exacerbating this are growing water shortages in parts of South Asia due to the overuse of groundwater and the effects of a multi-year drought.

The World Bank predicts that by 2030, climate change will have plunged 62 million Indians into deep poverty, and that by the middle of this century it has the potential to cripple India’s economic growth. This is not some distant prospect in the 22nd century. It is less than three decades from now. The vast majority of Indians alive today will still be alive then.

These developments are also likely to have severe and possibly fatal consequences for India’s political stability. In recent decades, the legitimacy of the Indian state has been largely founded on the promise of improved living standards, and especially on the aspirations of the rising middle classes. The Indian elites meanwhile have dreamed of India becoming a superpower to rival China and the United States. If temperatures continue to rise and the World Bank is correct about their effects, then none of this is going to happen.

The specific impacts this will have on the countries of South Asia are impossible to predict, but it is not hard to surmise that the general result will be catastrophic. Climate change has been called a “threat multiplier,” feeding into existing social and political problems and making them worse — as prolonged drought and increased food prices helped spark the revolution and civil war in Syria. 

In India alone, nearly 300 million live in poverty; millions, particularly from rural areas, are displaced. Intra-ethnic tensions and especially chilling discrimination and violence against Muslims are on the rise. Cross-border tensions with neighbors such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China remain high. Papers by Joshua Busby and our colleague Sarang Shidore show how climate effects are likely to exacerbate India’s existing domestic security issues including internal migration, local resource conflicts, and urban violence — as well as its long-standing and volatile conflict with Pakistan.

Together, these pressures could lead to state collapse — and even if India were to weather these storms, the collapse of Pakistan and Bangladesh could push it over the brink. Already, India’s border with Bangladesh is the most ferociously policed anti-immigrant frontier in the world, with more than 1,100 Bangladeshis killed trying to cross since 2000. India’s determination to prevent immigration has been increased by the Hindu Nationalist Modi government’s deep hostility to any increase in India’s Muslim population. In recent decades, Bengali migration has helped spark severe ethnic violence in northeastern India and Myanmar.

It is idle to think that the effects of crises on this scale in South Asia (and other vulnerable regions with weak states including West Africa, the Middle East, and Central America) will be confined there. The near-term impact on the West will come mainly in the form of a migration crisis that by many estimates could be orders of magnitude larger than the world has ever seen. Projections of the number of displaced — within their own countries and abroad — range from several hundred million to even 1.2 billion by 2050. 

Long before the direct physical effects of climate change on the West become truly disastrous, this indirect impact has the potential to destroy Western liberal democracy. Given the reactions to previous border crises in the United States and the 2015 European migrant crisis, it can reasonably be expected that this will send shockwaves through the developed world. Faced with their own internal problems and political paralysis, the United States and Europe are likely to take a greater turn to anti-democratic chauvinism.

Even a limited possibility of these scenarios unfolding should be absolutely intolerable to leaders and societies around the globe. That these outcomes are widely predicted makes the present course of global politics all the more frustrating and horrifying. 

Last week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recorded that global military expenditures in 2021 — before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — for the first time surpassed $2 trillion. By contrast, the Climate Policy Initiative estimated a total of $632 billion devoted to climate finance in 2020. This figure is dwarfed both by military spending and by prior IPCC estimates that the world must invest $2.4 trillion annually in the energy system alone until 2035 to stay below the target of 1.5°C of global warming. 

To arm for future conflict without attempting seriously to reduce a fundamental driver of future conflict is profoundly illogical.

If the challenge of climate change is to be met, the climate peril must be properly understood both as exceeding that of traditional military threats and as contributing to them. If the trends reflected in the Indian heatwave continue, will our descendants a century from now really think that we got our security priorities right?


Editorial credit: Sudarshan Jha / Shutterstock.com
Analysis | Global Crises
American Special Operations
Top image credit: (shutterstock/FabrikaSimf)

American cult: Why our special ops need a reset

Military Industrial Complex

This article is the latest installment in our Quincy Institute/Responsible Statecraft project series highlighting the writing and reporting of U.S. military veterans. Click here for more information.

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have left indelible imprints on our society and our military. In some cases, these changes were so gradual that few noticed the change, except as snapshots in time.

keep readingShow less
Recep Tayyip Erdogan Benjamin Netanyahu
Top photo credit: President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Shutterstock/ Mustafa Kirazli) and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Salty View/Shutterstock)
Is Turkey's big break with Israel for real?

Why Israel is now turning its sights on Turkey

Middle East

As the distribution of power shifts in the region, with Iran losing relative power and Israel and Turkey emerging on top, an intensified rivalry between Tel Aviv and Ankara is not a question of if, but how. It is not a question of whether they choose the rivalry, but how they choose to react to it: through confrontation or peaceful management.

As I describe in Treacherous Alliance, a similar situation emerged after the end of the Cold War: The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the global distribution of power, and the defeat of Saddam's Iraq in the Persian Gulf War reshuffled the regional geopolitical deck. A nascent bipolar regional structure took shape with Iran and Israel emerging as the two main powers with no effective buffer between them (since Iraq had been defeated). The Israelis acted on this first, inverting the strategy that had guided them for the previous decades: The Doctrine of the Periphery. According to this doctrine, Israel would build alliances with the non-Arab states in its periphery (Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia) to balance the Arab powers in its vicinity (Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, respectively).

keep readingShow less
Havana, Cuba
Top Image Credit: Havana, Cuba, 2019. (CLWphoto/Shutterstock)

Trump lifted sanctions on Syria. Now do Cuba.

North America

President Trump’s new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on Cuba, announced on June 30, reaffirms the policy of sanctions and hostility he articulated at the start of his first term in office. In fact, the new NSPM is almost identical to the old one.

The policy’s stated purpose is to “improve human rights, encourage the rule of law, foster free markets and free enterprise, and promote democracy” by restricting financial flows to the Cuban government. It reaffirms Trump’s support for the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which explicitly requires regime change — that Cuba become a multiparty democracy with a free market economy (among other conditions) before the U.S. embargo will be lifted.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.