Global Environmental Politics Problems, Policy and Practice

Introduction

One of the greatest impediments to environmental sustainability is the mismatch between people's material desires and the world's natural resources. Human needs and desires are constantly expanding. No state really considers itself as ‘developed’: all states aim to expand their economies and improve the living conditions of their citizens. The advertising industry spends enormous amounts of money to ensure that needs and desires continue expanding in all countries (see Chapter 4). So although we tend to divide the world into developed and developing countries, all countries are effectively developing countries.

But the planet's natural resources are not expanding to meet these needs and demands: some renewable resources maintain a stable level of supply while many non-renewable resources are being depleted. Irrespective of whether the supply is stable or shrinking, under conditions of growing demands, both renewable and non-renewable resources become scarce to some degree. The common wisdom accompanying this dilemma tends to be that states (and perhaps individuals) will resort to conflict to secure their own access to scarce resources. Water is perhaps the archetype resource in these narratives. The alliteratively appealing phrase of ‘water wars’ has rolled off the tongue of many politicians, past and present:

In this chapter we examine how the international community has responded to resource scarcity, with a particular focus on freshwater. Given the prevalent assumption that conflict over natural resources is somehow inevitable, pervasive, or highly likely in the future, the chapter begins with an analysis of the relationship between conflict and the natural environment. In this section we define the concept of conflict and review the existing research into whether resource abundance or resource scarcity tend to drive violent conflict. We find that there is no simple answer: all violent conflicts have multiple causes, and in some circumstances the availability of resources can contribute to the onset of violent conflict, or affect the duration of existing conflicts.