People say that good oil is an easy and cheap form of energy but it's not the truth.
Good oil may be cheap, it's only because people are not paying the price of good oil.
If you see what is going on in the fields, in the oil fields, the pollution, the degradation,
the human rights abuses, the murders and the killings, I would like you to tell me how much one drop of oil should cost.
The price of oil.
Yes, scarcity is coming up as a new historical fact and sure, business, science, politics will react to that fact.
Now there are four possible reactions, logically possible, I would assume.
Many of the local conflicts that we will have, especially in East Africa, many of these conflicts were being felt by competition over resources,
especially over land, pasture, farming land, water, watering points and many of these conflicts are unavoidable unless we learn to manage the resources in a responsible way,
in an accountable way and also we learn to share these resources in a more equitable way.
There was a study by former admirals and generals in 2007, they suggested that climate change would be a threat multiplier.
It's using the term threat and it says that climate change combines different factors that are threatening to human beings
and that could lead to military responses, it could lead to extremism, it could lead to terrorism and to violence in general.
There was a comprehensive study in the same year by the German advisory council on global change and that was a little more differentiated.
Suggested on the one hand climate change can lead to more destabilization of violence, on the other hand it can lead to more cooperative climate change, climate policy.
So now we'll go to the data. A simple assumption would think more temperature, more conflict. It's not that simple if you look at previous data.
This is the temperature curve, the upper curve, the lower curve of the conflict over time and you see there was a drop of conflict with the end of the Cold War.
Despite the fact that there was temperature rise, you cannot make that simple link here because conflict has many reasons.
But it's interesting to look at the distribution of these conflicts all over the world and you see that many of them are located in Africa and many of them are located in southern Asia.
These will be the areas affected in the future most dramatically by global warming that may combine with existing conflicts and may aggravate these conflicts.
States but also war on the sub-state level, it's relevant to civil war or violence between societal groups.
Another thing you can look at is that existing conflicts over the last 25 years and you see that many of these conflicts had indeed an environmental component.
Africa is mostly blue and brown, this means water and salt or food.
Other parts of the world such as East Asia, fishery as an issue or Latin America by diversity.
So the German Council has looked at major conflict constellations that may be relevant in the future.
One is water, one is food, one is natural disaster such as floods and storms and the fourth one is migration.
As a factor in peace, as you see here, could contribute to each of themselves but also in their combination.
Because water and food are related and water and food could become more and more migration.
If you look at the existing situation, you see that there are already areas in the world with extreme climatic conditions.
The key question now is water more a factor of conflict or more of cooperation.
It has been in discussion since the 1990s.
It is actually impossible to stop people fighting if there is no water and there is only one watering point.
People were fighting for that watering point.
If the emerses stop flowing and they do stop flowing when the watershed is destroyed, people will fight.
And usually when people fight, that's when people, of course, who are very far like you here and you begin to wonder, why are they fighting?
Well, they are fighting over resources because either those resources are degraded, they are diminished or they are exhausted
or they are not being shared equitably.
Because in some places water has contributed to conflict in others, water has led to more cooperation.
Because the water cooperation agreements have actually also, if there is a problem, the solution also increases.
And one of the most affected areas in the world will be, as you may guess, Africa.
You see a distribution of existing environmental conflicts in Africa and they all combine water and food scarcity.
I come from a part of the world, the center of the world.
Africa is the center of the world.
But we also stay in the center of the world where all the problems keep falling upon that continent.
Africa has not contributed much to the store of carbon in the atmosphere.
But the most impacts are inflicted upon the continent.
There was a very new study, just three weeks ago, in a scientific journal that came up with a headline that said,
warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa.
And it's an empirical study that looks at how in previous cases environmental factors contributed to conflict in Africa
and is extended in the modeling to the future, to the year 2030.
And it suggests that it could lead to a 50% increase of conflict in Africa.
And this is a distribution from that chain population that looks at the statistical correlation on the left-hand side
for precipitation and temperature rise, and on the right-hand side the increase of conflict.
And they see a clear statistical link that could lead to several hundreds of thousands of people more killed in these conflicts in the future.
This is one of the first empirical studies that suggests such a link.
Especially countries that are threatened with global warming are becoming so water-scarred
that that would be the battlefront.
That's the source of conflict in the future.
Very often you see Sudan mentioned, therefore Sudan as a case, of course the conflict is very complex.
It has a lot of factors that shape that conflict.
The environment is just one of them.
And the question that has been discussed in a study by the United Nations Environmental Program is
that there is a link because of that conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan
as it is in many other parts of North Africa, because the desert is moving,
that means the herders are moving into areas of farmers and aggravates the situation between them
and distorts traditional stability between these groups.
That doesn't mean that Sudan was crossed by it, it's only aggravated by that.
Another conflict that may become more relevant in the future is the Nile Basin area,
and that connects a lot of countries in North and East Africa.
And the problem is that projections say there will be less water available along the Nile River.
And the second problem is that we will see a level rise of water coming into the delta.
And that makes the living for the people and the rural areas more difficult
and they either have more conflict with each other or move into urban areas
and aggravate the situation there.
Keep in mind that, for instance, Cairo is already a very densely populated city.
Another area that's very prone to droughts and lack of water.
What you see from this diagram here is the increase of droughts on the ground areas
by the year 2040 to 2069.
And that, interestingly, connects industrialized countries, southern Europe,
with developing countries in Northern Africa.
And the question is how they will deal with that problem in the future.
Will they develop more cooperative agreements or will they discontinue to my immigration?
And these don't show points where in the past these cyclones led to social instability,
at least temporarily.
These are 11 cases, 13 cases.
And the last one is here, you see the one in the United States was Hurricane Katrina.
The most significant one of those in South Asia, such as in Bangladesh,
where the effect of the tropical cyclones had at least temporarily to instability and looting
and also conflict about the distribution of assistance mechanisms and the money.
The first logical answer is, well,
keep out people who might have, who might add to the escalations.
So it is a logical answer to go for exclusion.
Exclusion is a logical answer which is politically present.
Second logical answer when scarcity is looming.
We should mobilize our last efforts and resources to push the frontier, to get more on our table,
to find more of these resources.
So expansion.
Third, when things get tight, it is a very intelligent answer to say,
well, we should get better in the way we use things.
So efficiency is another logical answer in the face of scarcity.
And the fourth, the fourth answer is as logical as the other ones.
Well, if we have a conflict between escalations and means,
we might discuss to revise the escalations.
You could say that is the perspective of sufficiency.
You might also say it is the perspective of degrowth.
Again, it is a logical answer which is politically present.
This is the choice that the world is facing.
Are we moving towards the upper part of the diagram which means more environmental destruction,
more instability and war, and they are linked between these two?
Or are we moving to the lower part, the green part here,
the sustainable development, emission reduction, peace and security,
and the mutual links between peace, security, and environmental and sustainable change.
So this is, I think, the choice the world has, and this is the choice we all have.
You've heard about land graphs.
You've heard about ocean graphs.
Now we're talking about the sky graphs.
And we are saying that all this grabbing is enough.
This grabbing has to stop.
All of that is what we have to account.
