The rationale behind my background

I didn't get a chance/forgot to explain how the background of my blog relates to the topic.

The painting is by Cy Twombly named 'Could Stream' 1966. The scribbling symbolizes disorder and at the same time it is arranged in specific way. This encompasses the idea that disorder is created by human (in this case Towmbly himself) and at the same time it can be managed and be stabilized. It is highlighted in the blog exploring potential areas of disorder, but at the same time exploring the solutions to stabilizing and preventing them from occurring. However, similar to the painting the world today looks ever more disorderly and unstable.

Summary

Coming into this topic few months back I was determined that the future looked bleak because of the lack of progress with the reduction in CO2, the unrest in Middle East and the world's general progress on climate change. I have say that looking through the different factors I explored in the blog it confirms my initial thoughts. A comprehensive review has been given to examine these factors. This blog has given summary of the different factors, which in most cases tends to be evidence for greater future societal disorder. At the same time, drawing from historical examples we get to see how our ancestor coped with the problems they faced.

The Mayans was an example of civilization thinking they had the technologies to cope with climate changes but in the end failed to do so and payed for their exploitation of nature. This is a lesson for the world and that we shouldn't overly relay on technologies as a method of mitigation. Climate related problems should be tackled at the onset. Indeed there are global targets that are in place to prevent climate change by curbing the levels of emissions, but the world is way too inefficient at working together and a new framework is needed.

However, there are many different ways to reduce the likeness of societal disorder. For example water and food insecurity could be tackled in many ways, but it mainly depends on the effectiveness of local institutions. Weak and corrupt institutions especially in the developed world reduces level of mitigation and increases vulnerability, as in the case of most African countries.

One thing to mention is that societal disorder doesn't mean societal collapse. Societal  disorder refers to factors that hinder the progress of societies. This blog has given physical and human factors that leads to that. The future looks bleak and given the lack of progress with climate related international/regional/national policy, coupled with ineffective government in developing countries, people are looking more vulnerable to climate induced disorder that ever before!

Migration and Climate Change

"Resilient people migrate to capture adaptation opportunity. Vulnerable people migrate to avoid climate crisis," wrote Koko Warner, head of the environmental migration section at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). 

The above perfectly captures the problems that might arise in the future and it is important to understand the mechanism behind the theory of climate change led migration. The discourse are usually in two extremes; the alarmist and the skeptics. The wider media usually take the view of the alarmist since it makes a better story. 

Alarmist

The alarmist believes that the observed increased number of environmental hazard (few of the examples displayed in previous entries) have believed to have led to mass displacement (Hunter 2005) and these will be region concern. Myers (2002) had predicted that by the end of the century there will be 200 million environmental refugees. They believed that that "migration is not only a consequence of environmental degradation but represents a catastrophe in itself (Piguet 2013). It is likely that extreme events (as i have talked about like the hurricane examples) and mean temperature, rainfall, sea level changes will all contribute to increases in mobility for reasons I have explored previously. 

One reason that this has became a pressing issue is because of the prospect of million of climate refugees moves from the poor to rich nations. Could this happen?  A rather alarmist paper by Reuveny (2007) shows a list of 38 cases of environmental migration as evidence that support the alarmist argument. (please refer to page 664 for details). The analysis backs up the claims by the alarmist that LDCs are more vulnerable, and several environmental factors like land degradation, drought, deforestation, water scarcity, floods, storms and famines are all present in these cases with large degradation representing the largest share of incidences. More importantly, 19/38 showed intrastate migrations, 6 involved interstate migration and 13 cases involved both. Reuveny (2007)  presented a strong case and has given evidence that climate change induced migration will led to migration between international borders and in some instances contributes (not a singular cause) to conflicts.

Skeptics 

The skeptic believed that these alarmist are under-looking the role of governments. Firstly, the view that alarmist undermines Western Governments hostile attitude towards migrates. Secondly, skeptics are denying that the western countries would assist the victims of climate change. In essence, they believe the skeptics are focused on the mechanical flow between environmental risk and equating that to population risk and displacement, without taking into consideration of the societal factors like past experiences, local governmental and culture. In turn, simplifying the model of climate-migration and underscoring the complexity of socio-environmental factor.

Tacoli (2009) acknowledge that migration would happen but would not be in the hundreds of millions, implicated by alarmist. Tacoli (2009) also argues that traditionalist view of migration from poor to rich (trans-boundary migration) and rural to urban (within countries) have to be changed. He argues a better understanding of these socio-economic effect would help analysis how other elements would affect migration. In turn a more complex view is given and more research is needed.

Conclusion 

So after all the background view, what would happen in the future? would migration lead to the mass displacement has the alarmist had suggest? or would the skeptic be right? I have given a balance view and in turn you can decide which spectrum you believe it to be, but I believe that more research are needed within this sector because insufficient data means modelling would be less accurate. At the same time, both skeptics and alarmist noticed that migration will occur due to climate change. But the dispute comes within the numbers of migration, the scale and lastly the ability for governments to reduce vulnerability climate change and thus amount of migration  

Diseases and Climate change; who will be at risk

I came over this article  talking about how climate change would lead to Malaria becoming more common. Climate change will lead to warmer climate and since mosquito thrives better in those climate the are more likely to increase. This got be thinking about other diseases such as the Avian Influenza and Plague.Avian influenza was especially deadly in 2003 (H5N1) were it spread quickly throughout Asia which reached Europe in 2005. In January 2012 the second death due to H5N1 was recorded in China. Death was also confirmed in Canada.

Wu et al (2011) used econometric models to explore the impact of H5N1 due to future climate change. There result found that outbreak coincided with temperature, precipitation, and regional characteristics. Probability of of outbreak is also found to be higher when there was has been previous events. As in the case of Hong Kong which experience outbreak in 1998 and 2003. Elvander (2006) found that there close occurrence of these two events has might that the H5N1 virus was still circulating within the poultry population. Wu et al (2011) also looking backwards, the changes in rainfall and temperature in the past 20 years is the causes of increase outbreak in ALL countries. An estimation between 8% to 1160%. The form of disorder is not so much as mass infection and the associated economic damage! US is one of the largest producer and exporter of meat. An outbreak would lead to $29 million of economic losses. China also had multiple break since 2003 and this could lead to $106-$146 million because of climate change.

The other threat is the reemergence of Plague, and Ari et al (2011) looked at how the transmitting mechanism is affected by climate change in order to fully understand the future probability of outbreak. Research in Africa have shown that plague were less frequent where the weather was hot (greater 27 degree) and cold (less than 15 degree). The overall transmitting mechanism for a vector-borne diseases is complex to analyse. But climate change  will effect the dynamics of flea vectors and rodent host (fig 2). Rodents are affected by temperature, rainfall, humidity which largely determines flea survival. Moisture which is key for determining the number of fleas. If these changes, the number of diseases spreading vehicle will be affected, hence infection rate as well. Currently, modeling of plague have been done in individual places, but they all confirm that climate changes are associated with the occurrences of plague both in the local and regional scale. For example Stenseth et al (2006) showed that one degree rises in temperature in Kazakhstan would increase plague prevalence among gerbils. The research did not say how this would affect humans. But is important to know that human impact in the environment would Is important to note that component of all the plague cycles (host, vector and pathogen) are affected in different ways and the interaction between hose and vectors also contributes largely to the spread of the disease.

fig 2
Source Ari et al (2011)

A paper by Redshaw et al (2014) looks at the relationship between disease patterns and pharmaceutical uses in response to climate change. This paper looks at the emerging threat of new diseases in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change is likely to lead to an increase in diseases like mental illness and cardiovascular disease. These are through emotional distresses from natural disasters of severe environmental degradation. They have also shown that climate change will lead to respiratory diseases like asthma and allergies becoming more server and in turn, leading to a increase the use of drugs. Growth in human and animal diarrhea disease will become more common. This will be transmitted through water-faecal contamination which will also lead to the use of antibiotics. Other diseases will become more promoent, like the liver and lung helminths. And to treat these it requires medications for parasitic diseases and will experience an increase in these types of medicine too.

Cordovez et al (2014) explored the impact of climate change and its effect in the risk of Chagas disease transmission in Colombia. They uses basic reproduction numbers in their modeling to explore these changes induced by climate change. They result is interesting and different from the above two for two reasons. Firstly, they found increases in temperature due to climate would decrease the reproduction rate and thus, lowering the chances of mass outbreak. The eastern part of Colombia will see a reduce in R. At the same time, they highlighted the significance of movement of urban settlements. They explored that changes in human settlement is a better method of tracking the geographic location of infection risk. Since these urban centers have the environmental characteristics that sustain higher chance of reproduction. For example, one way of being infected is through insects (who carries the diseases) invade houses to feed on human. This example shows that climate changes doesnt necessarily work in favor of higher infection rates and thus societal disorder through economic and social burden for governments and individuals.

I have shown how increase in certain types of disease will become more common. The emergence of plague and the spreading of Avian influenza (eg H5N1) are looking to affect both humans, but more importantly the economic effect would be large as well. Climate change will also lead to a higher burden in Norther Hemisphere's government since common illnesses will become more server and the emergence of other diseases will also have an affect on society. This is an area where societal disorder will be largely causes by the related economic losses and burden. Unlike the bubonic plague in the 1300s, medical advances are likely to prevent large numbers of death.

General vulnerability of Africa

In 2010 Niger experienced a coup where they displaced the government, largely in the support of its people (Guardian 2010, Aljazeera 2010). At the same time, this military government had to tackle problems extending from floods and terrorist activities in their uranium mining region (BBC 2010, Guardian 2010). Additionally, South Sudan is currently in dangers of civil war breakout. According to AFP news (Youtube link 1) and CNN news (Youtube link 2) it has been linked to poor governance. I will use Busby et al (2013) research to extend my discussion on food security and go more in-depth into the general vulnerability of African nations to climate change.  

Component of their model

Source Busby et al (2013)

Busby et al (2013) research looks exactly at this interaction between governance, household resilience, climatic vulnerability, population density and their interaction with vulnerability (fig 1). It is measured in terms of relativity to other African nations. That means nations that are shown as not vulnerable in fig 2, could still be vulnerable compared to other nations outside of the continent   

Last entry, I emphasised one of the ‘threat multiplier’ that is food insecurity. Busby et al (2013)research looks into a range of these threat multiplier caused by climate change-drought, floods, storms-such as dislocation, migration, and competition over scarce resources. In turn these act as threat multiplier that could lead to interstate or/and civil war (CAN 2007). However, their method only uses historic data for all the factors seen in fig 1 and doesn’t take into account future projections.  

source Busby et al (2013)

Results

A number of interesting patterns were from fig 2. Areas that have the highest composite vulnerability appears in DRC, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia and South Sudan. More interestingly, Busby et al (2013) used their method to find the causes of vulnerability for the above countries.

·        Common to DRC and Somalia is the fact that vulnerability largely driven by low household resilience and poor governance. Additionally, DRC is also exposed to droughts in the north and wide fire in the South. 

·        In West African countries, Guinea and Sierra Leone, their vulnerability is large driven by climatic security concerns. More than 6% of Guinea’s area is located in the most vulnerable score, while more than 10% of Sierra Leone’s population live in extreme vulnerability. The cause of vulnerability was found to be high population density and low household resilience.

·        In Somalia, although climatic vulnerability is moderate, vulnerability is found to be exasperated by low household resilience and “terrible governance”, which represented 30% of the overall vulnerability score.

·        For South Sudan, their result showed that governance and physical exposure is the main driver of Sudan’s vulnerability. 

Figure 3 is a composite of 4 different maps that has the weighting of the 4 variable discussed changed (from equal weighting to 40% and 20% for the other three variables).  It shows although the weighting was changed, the above listed countries are still deemed the most vulnerable in Africa and with a few others like Ethiopia and Niger etc.

source Busby et al (2013)

More importantly, this piece of research gives a lot of insight into how policy maker could target specific areas of needs so that it could be targeted to reduce vulnerability in the future. This research represents a worrying future. Those who are exposed most to the climate changes in North Africa are less vulnerable when governance and resilience is taken into account. On the other hand, the above four countries although have less physical exposure have higher vulnerabilities when governance and resilience is taken into account.

 

Source Transparency international 

Since future projections isn’t taken into account we should also ask ourselves what kind of other factors could lead to the worsening of governance and household resilience in the future. In turn, how it would lead to greater/lesser vulnerability in the future. As mention in the last entry, food insecurity (induced by climate change) is likely to increase in certain countries and would act as a threat multiplier. The outlook for improve governance and household resilience is low. Most of the countries in Africa are not likely to meet their MDG goals which strongly effects household resilience (MDG 2013). The CPI 2013 as shown in fig 4 also gives a bleak image of good governance; many of the countries are perceived to be highly corrupted in 2013. When government budget goes disappears public investments are likely to suffer. That could contribute to reduction in resilience since early warning system for wild fires or plans to improve water supply cannot be implemented. This could suggest if future projections are taken into account by Busby et al, the levels of vulnerability could be even higher.  Although it might not be true, I think here is a strong case that current countries with poor governance will likely to experience societal disorder. Cooch (2013; Ted video below) also make an interest case study which highlights the problem of corruption about Equatorial Guinea and how its vast oil wealth have not led to elevation of poverty despite (the ted video would give more insight into corruption).   

The above have showed countries that have low levels of resilience, induced by a whole range of factors which was captured within the modelling. In turn, the maps can be indicators of where future societal disorder would rise because these countries lacks economic, social and governmental ability to compact the direct and indirect effect of climate change.