By Matt Ince
While countries around the world struggle to meet the manifold challenges posed by climate change, there are those who would use the issue in furtherance of their own, very particular ends.
Businesses are increasingly looking to mitigate the day-to-day impacts of global warming, as floods, heatwaves, and wildfires threaten their operations. Yet they must also begin to take heed of the wider impact of climate change on security and stability, including its fuelling of terrorism and violent extremism. Failure to do so risks leaving them unprepared and, ultimately, exposed to terrorist-related violence.
While the actions of many extremist groups have diminished in recent years, climate-induced events have the potential to bring about a fresh wave of incidents in emerging markets around the world. Environmental stress is imposing huge socioeconomic pressures on vulnerable communities in these jurisdictions, the loss of livelihoods driving young people into the ranks of terror groups.
Of all the terrorist incidents and plots recorded by colleagues at Dragonfly over the past year, the vast majority occurred in countries that are already among the world’s most climate-vulnerable. Many are already fragile and beset by conflict. But climate stress can destabilise them even more.
Climate stress drives terror group recruitment
In the past, young people would have joined extremist groups in such regions for largely ideological or domestic political reasons. There are growing suggestions that they are now doing so because they have no other way to support their families and communities. A case in point is the drought-impacted1 Lake Chad Basin, where the UN says2 Boko Haram insurgents have gained new recruits from local communities disillusioned by lack of economic opportunity.
There are also indications that terrorists are taking advantage of climate pressure to enlist the disaffected and impoverished. According to the UN3, extremists in central Mali have recruited by exploiting tensions between herders and farmers over crop destruction by cattle searching for water, while Islamic State insurgents bolstered their ranks in Iraq and Syria by exploiting water shortages.
In the future, global warming is set to further radicalise existing groups or spawn new ones as extremist ideologies become more appealing to communities subject to ever-harsher climate-induced conditions. So, in a country like Bangladesh, rising sea level and frequent cyclones — directly resulting from, or made more likely by, climate change — could lead to vulnerable sections of society adopting more radical political views.
Extremists embrace climate issues to draw support
Indeed, several terrorist groups have already started to weave climate change themes into rhetoric and propaganda to legitimise their causes and attract new followers. In the Philippines, groups like the New People’s Army have used concerns over large-scale mining and deforestation to justify armed resistance. Al-Shabaab in Somalia has sought to present itself as the defender of the natural environment, outlawing logging of native trees and famously banning plastic bags4. Such actions and sentiments resonate with communities suffering from the impact of climate change, especially if they believe that authorities are neglecting to address the root cause of the problem.
But climate-induced radicalisation is not confined to conflict-affected or already-fragile areas. It’s evident much closer to home, particularly in Europe. There, far-right movements – particularly in France and Germany – are seizing on ecological concerns in their opposition to immigration, blaming migrants for contributing to environmental degradation. Similarly, anarchist groups across Europe are exploiting societies’ growing anxieties over climate change to justify anti-establishment or anti-capitalist ideologies.
Exploiting demand for “green minerals”
While climate impacts are clearly serving as a recruiter and radicaliser of extremists, they might in time also help to finance them. There is a strong likelihood that at least some will look to derive profits from mining rare-earth minerals used in low-carbon, renewable-energy technologies that are integral to the global response to climate change. In Mozambique, for instance, IS affiliates could try to muscle in on the mining of critical minerals, notably graphite, used for battery storage.
All the signs are that, if unchecked, global warming is likely to accelerate terror-related violence. Just as — and perhaps even more — concerning is that
it may not meet with an adequate security response. As authorities devote more time and energy to dealing with the immediate first-order environmental impacts of climate events, resources will be diverted away from traditional counterterrorism operations and activities that have kept many groups at bay over recent years. That could ultimately provide extremists with increased space to train, recruit, and grow.
How businesses can mitigate climate-induced security risks
Businesses must improve their ability to predict and understand the security implications of climate change by building up internal expertise around the issue and incorporating appropriate risk frameworks into organisational decision-making processes.
Achieving this requires multinationals to undertake more-detailed analysis of the security implications of climate change, and to incorporate findings into wider risk assessments and contingency planning. Strategic foresight methods, including scenario analysis, can enhance organisations’ ability to anticipate how climate change will impact current and future security challenges, such as threats posed by terrorist groups.
Businesses should at the same time consider whether they need to adapt any existing processes to ensure that business-critical decisions are climate-informed by design. Introducing requirements to consider climate change’s cascading security consequences within risk assessments, and not just their physical or financial impacts, would be a good place to start. Convening war gaming exercises, like those organised by military planners and strategists, might help business leaders to stress-test future policies.
Global organisations would probably benefit, too, from investing additional time and resources in building institutional capacity on climate security, as this would help create a more vigilant workforce. Efforts to increase literacy in this area could include offering more training and educational opportunities to build understanding about how climate change influences economic, social, and political systems.
There’s clearly a cost to all of this. But, in the longer term, cost savings will be made if companies take proactive action to better understand the second- and third-order cascading impacts of climate change, as this will provide decision-makers with a more complete risk picture than they have at present.
This article was originally published in The World Financial Review on 25 October 2023. It can be accessed here: https://worldfinancialreview.com/climate-induced-terrorism-the-new-global-business-risk/
About the Author
Matt Ince is an Associate Director at Dragonfly, a geopolitical and security risk intelligence company. He spent a decade working within the UK’s national security community, including as the UK Ministry of Defence’s lead advisor on climate security policy and strategy. Prior to that, he worked at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the world’s oldest, and the UK’s leading, defence and security think tank. Matt is also a research associate at the Climate Change and (In)security Project, University of Oxford.
References
- The tale of a disappearing lake, UN Environment Programme
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/tale-disappearing-lake - People, Countries Impacted by Climate Change Also Vulnerable to Terrorist Recruitment, Violence, Speakers Tell Security Council in Open Debate, United Nations, December 9, 2021 https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14728.doc.htm
- People, Countries Impacted by Climate Change Also Vulnerable to Terrorist Recruitment, Violence, Speakers Tell Security Council in Open Debate, United Nations, December 9, 2021 https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14728.doc.htm
- Eco-Jihadism: Somali Terrorist Group Bans Plastic Bags, VoA News, July 13, 2018 https://www.voanews.com/a/somalia-terrorist-group-al-shabab-bans-plastic-bags/4465508.html
