Climate Change Will Drive Genocide

By 2030, more than half the world's population will live in areas under "severe water stress."

Unmet demand for food, water and energy, are now seen as reliable indicators of looming genocide or mass killing.

 “We must remain open to the possibility that the past is not necessarily a predictor of where and when mass atrocities will occur, or the means by which they will,” said Chris Kojm, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a government agency, which will release its first estimate on the threat of genocide and mass killings later this year.

...In areas where there are disproportionate numbers of young men, Mr. Kojm said, the risk of genocide also rises. And, in much the same way that democracies are less likely to go to war than autocracies are, so too, participants said, are autocratically governed countries more likely to engage in genocide or other mass atrocities.

Climate change acts as a “multiplier of other resource crises,” according to Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, causing uncertainty about resources, leading to “the ecological panic that I’m afraid will lead to mass killings in the decades to come,” Mr. Snyder told the symposium.

“We’ve entered into this moment of ecological panic,” he said. “Global warming will itself almost certainly directly cause mass killing, but it will likely indirectly cause it” as major states like China and the United States seek to feed their citizens, possibly touching off shortages elsewhere, in places that would then be at risk. China has already begun to act and, in a potential harbinger of future problems, has been investing in farmland in Ukraine and in parts of Africa for a few years.

 With the specter of mounting violence in some countries, the threat of future mass killings was a prime concern.

“The United States and our partners must act before the wood is stacked or the match is struck,”[Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton said, “because when the fire is at full blaze, our options for responding are considerably costlier and more difficult.”

The remarks were made at a conference of foreign policy experts in Washington/