Thomas Homer-Dixon

Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases

Within the next fifty years, the planets human population will probably pass nine billion, and global economic output may quintuple. Largely as a result, scarcities of renewable resources will increase sharply. The total area of high-quality agricultural land will drop, as will the extent of forests and the number of species they sustain. Coming generations will also see the widespread depletion and degradation of aquifers, rivers, and other water resources; the decline of many fisheries; and perhaps significant climate change.

On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict

This article is an abridged version of a paper prepared for the Global Environmental Change Committee of the Social Science Research Council and for a conference on ”Emerging Trends in Global Security” convened by York University in October, 1990. The full paper is available from the author. Portions have appeared in ”Environmental Change and Economic Decline in Developing Countries,” International Studies Notes, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 18-23; ”Environmental Change and Human Security,‘’ Behind the Headlines, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Toronto: Canadian Institute for International Affairs, 1991); and “Environmental Change and Violent Conflict,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Occasional Paper No. 4 (June 1990). For their helpful comments, the author is grateful to Peter Cebon, William Clark, Daniel Deudney, Darya Farha, Peter Gleick, Ernst Haas, Fen Hampson, Roger Karapin, Jill Lazenby, Vicki Norberg-Bohm, Ted Parson, George Rathjens, James bsbey, Rchard Rockwell, Thomas Schelling, Eugene Skolnikoff, Martha Snodgrass, Janice Stein, Urs Thomas, Myron Weiner, and Jane Willms. Financial support for research and writing was received from The Royal Society of Canada, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation

This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to escape the current lock-in. Large-scale transformations in information technology, nano- and biotechnology, and new energy systems have the potential to significantly improve our lives; but if, in framing them, our globalized society fails to consider the capacity of the biosphere, there is a risk that unsustainable development pathways may be reinforced. Current institutional arrangements, including the lack of incentives for the private sector to innovate for sustainability, and the lags inherent in the path dependent nature of innovation, contribute to lock-in, as does our incapacity to easily grasp the interactions implicit in complex problems, referred to here as the ingenuity gap. Nonetheless, promising social and technical innovations with potential to change unsustainable trajectories need to be nurtured and connected to broad institutional resources and responses. In parallel, institutional entrepreneurs can work to reduce the resilience of dominant institutional systems and position viable shadow alternatives and niche regimes.

Environmental Change and Violent Conflict

Within the next 50 years, the human population is likely to exceed nine billion, and global economic output may quintuple. Largely as a result of these two trends, scarcities of renewable resources may increase sharply. The total area of highly productive agricultural land will drop, as will the extent of forests and the number of species they sustain. Future generations will also experience the ongoing depletion and degradation of aquifers, rivers and other bodies of water, the decline of fisheries, further stratospheric ozone loss and, perhaps, significant climatic change.

Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict: The Case of South Africa

The causal relationship between environmental scarcities - the scarcity of renewable resources - and the outbreak of violent conflict is complex. Environmental scarcity emerges within a political, social economic, and ecological context and interacts with many of these contextual factors to contribute to violence. To examine this relationship, we outline a theoretical framework defining scarcities, the social effects arising from these scarcities, and the ensuing movement towards violence. We subsequently apply this framework to analyse the link between environmental scarcities and violent conflict in South Africa. Within South Africa, violence arose at precisely the same time that many anticipated a transformation to a more peaceful society - upon the release of Nelson Mandela, the end of the ban on political activity and the official end to apartheid. This article provides a new perspective on these events by analysing the link between South Africas environmental scarcity and violent conflict.

Environmental scarcity and violent conflict: the case of Rwanda.

On April 6,1994, President Juvenal Habyarimanas plane exploded in the skies above the Kigali region of Rwanda. Violence gripped the country. Between April and August of 1994, as many as 1 million people were killed and more than 2 million people became refugees. Until this recent violence, Rwanda had a population of 7.5 million, a population growth rate estimated at about 3%, and a population density among the highest in Africa. Ninety-five percent of the population resided in the countryside, and 90% relied on agriculture to sustain themselves. Land scarcity and degradation threatened the ability of food production to keep pace with population growth. Rwanda can be described as a country with severe demographic stress, relying for subsistence on a limited resource base. Although environmental factors were significant development issues, environmental scarcity had at most a limited, aggravating role in the recent conflict.

Strategies for Studying Causation in Complex Ecological-Political Systems

This article shows that some commonly advocated methodological principles of modern political science are inapprapriate for the study of complex ecological-political systems. It also provides conceptual tools for thinking about the causal roles of environmental and demographic factors, and it discusses various strategies for hypothesis and inference testing.

Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis

Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this patterns deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes. The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that systems behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. Case studies of the 2008-2009 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate the framework. Suggestions are offered for future research to explore further the frameworks propositions.

Detecting and Coping with Disruptive Shocks in Arctic Marine Systems: A Resilience Approach to Place and People

It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems—small and large—beyond tipping points and into new regimes. Ongoing changes include warming, freshening, acidification, and alterations to food web structure. In anticipation we pose three distinct but interrelated challenges: (1) to explore existing connectivities within components of the marine system; (2) to seek indicators (if they exist) of approaching regime change through observation and modeling; and (3) to build functional resilience into existing systems through adaptation-oriented policy and to have in hand transformative options when tipping points are crossed and new development trajectories are required. Each of the above challenges is scale dependent, and each requires a much deeper understanding than we currently have of connectivity within existing systems and their response to external forcing. Here, we argue from a global perspective the need to understand the Arctic’s role in an increasingly nonlinear world; then describe emerging evidence from new observations on the connectivity of processes and system components from the Canada Basin and subarctic seas surrounding northern North America; and finally posit an approach founded in “resilience thinking” to allow northern residents living in small coastal communities to participate in the observation, adaption and—if necessary—transformation of the social-ecological system with which they live.

A Common Misapplication of the Lanchester Square Law: A Research Note

I n his article ”The Laws of Combat? Lanchester Reexamined,” John Lepingwell discusses in detail Lanchester’s square law and its usefulness for modeling the dynamics of conventional engagements. But it is often not immediately clear, for people new to these modeling techniques, where the ”square” in the square law comes from. I provide here a very simple explanation of Lanchester’s argument, which will be used to support my conclusion that a number of analysts have not been faithful to the compelling logic of the battlefield that Lanchester represented in mathematical form. Specifically, in his equations Lanchester was careful to separate the variable for the number or ”quantity” of fighting units on the battlefield from the coefficient for the effectiveness of those units. However, several analysts use aggregated firepower scores (originally developed by the U.S. Army) as the measure of quantitative capability in their Lanchester calculations. As I will indicate, the use of this measure in such calculations produces invalid results, because it confounds the quantitative and effectiveness factors. As Lepingwell notes, the equilibrium condition derived by Lanchester for aimed fire in conventional combat is as follows: