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Ecological and Economic Factors of Violent Conflict

Decreasing supplies of physically controllable environmental resources, such as clean water and good agricultural land, sometimes provokes interstate "simple-scarcity" conflicts or resource wars. Moreover, large population movements caused by environmental stress can induce "group-identity" conflicts, especially ethnic clashes.

Severe environmental scarcity can simultaneously increase economic deprivation and disrupt key social institutions, which in turn would cause "deprivation" conflicts such as civil strife and insurgency. It is expected that of the major environmental changes facing humankind, degradation and depletion of agricultural land, forests, water, and fish will contribute more towards social turmoil in the coming decades than climate change or ozone depletion.

When analysts and policymakers in developed countries consider the social impacts of large-scale environmental change, they focus undue attention on climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. But vast populations in the developing world are already suffering from shortages of good land, water, forests, and fish.