Publication: Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflict
Loading...
Files in English
4,162 downloads
Date
2011
ISSN
Published
2011
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Provides a brief assessment of how natural resource scarcity and global climate change may alter the risk of violent conflict in the future. Resource scarcity to meet basic needs such as food and land and water can be worsened by governmental ineffectiveness, and vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, economies, and institutions can outweigh the magnitude of climate or scarcity impacts themselves. Resource availability must be seen not as a stand-alone issue, but rather in the context of the overall political economy landscape. Policymakers can benefit from the use of surveillance, early warning systems, and risk anticipation to plan for coming natural disasters and associated scarcity. Development of resilience can offer valuable adaptation and risk reduction methodologies while international action needs to focus on improving cooperation and resilience of international markets through multilateral trade rules or stockpiling of key commodities.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Evans, Alex. 2011. Resource Scarcity, Climate Change and the Risk of Violent Conflict. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9191 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Improving Security in Violent Conflict Settings : Security and Justice Thematic Paper(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Acknowledges that security--both physical security and national security--needs to be addressed in contexts ranging from pre-conflict, conflict, to post-conflict, and in both national and local units. Solutions to stemming violence do not follow linear or sequential implementation. Capacity building requires security sector reform, peacebuilding, parliamentary oversight, civil society involvement, financial management, and transitional justice measures. The return of counterinsurgencies in rogue states or rebellions of secessionist movements has focused aid donors on the legitimacy of such groups. In countries like Colombia where disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs were left incomplete, gang violence has escalated, and in countries like El Salvador violence has mutated across generations into transnational gangs. DDR, a popular set of activities to fund, has the potential to achieve security objectives and social welfare, but requires confidence in the government, community acceptance, a sufficiently strong economy, integration of ex-combatants into new armed forces or national service corps, and community involvement.Publication Capital Flight and Violent Conflict-A Review of the Literature(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Reviews the literature on what happens to capital flight before, during, and after violent conflict and its implications for post-conflict economic recovery since by the end of the conflict a considerable amount of capital could have accumulated abroad. Capital flight refers to outflows of private capital from developing countries and is viewed as 'hot money' fleeing political and financial crisis, heavier taxes, capital controls, currency devaluation, or hyperinflation. Issues concern how to measure capital flight with multiple measures proposed depending on whether the estimator deems it a flow or stock. Capital flight is often studied as a portfolio-choice decision relative to a risk-adjusted expected return, which violent conflict directly affects by increasing the riskiness of the domestic environment, reducing risk-adjusted expected return, and thereby inducing capital flight. Indirectly, violent conflict affects the portfolio-choice framework by its impact on inflation and public debt. For countries facing much higher wartime inflation rates, much bigger reductions in capital flight could be realized through larger cuts in inflation.Publication Rethinking Resource Conflict(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Reconsiders how natural resource abundance in minerals, oil and gas, water, and land is frequently associated with various negative development outcomes. Policy making has been affected by the theories on (1) economic performance of resource abundance; (2) political behavioral variables; and (3) civil war onset, duration, and intensity. Mechanisms that abate the resource curse include short-term confidence and peacebuilding, reconstruction of war economies, corporate social responsibility (CSR), medium-term legitimacy and state-building achieved through fiscal transparency and sharing of resource revenues, and regional anti-corruption strategies. The need for more qualitative social and historical analysis demands a new approach to the socio-economics of resource governance which builds on current scholarly trends toward reinstating grievance alongside greed as a factor defining natural resource conflict and suggests the further study of contrasting resource epistemologies as another layer in such friction. Including a larger spectrum of conflict reveals the importance of civil society, and with it of bargaining and confrontation to secure public agreements on natural resource management and the distribution of rents.Publication Conflict Relapse and the Sustainability of Post-Conflict Peace(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Finds civil wars and their recurrence fall into three patterns: (1) the 'conflict trap,' meaning once a country experiences one civil war, it is significantly more likely to experience additional episodes of violence as shown by a 57 percent recidivism rate from 1945-2009; (2) the dominant form of armed conflict in the world today is recurring civil war; and (3) concentration of civil wars in a few regions, especially in the poorest and weakest states of sub-Saharan Africa. Renewed wars result primarily from factors such as grievances based on economic under-development and ethnic and religious differences, and opportunities for rebellion created by rebel recruitment, money and supplies, and constraints on state capacity. Political institutions are the key to explaining why some countries can escape the conflict trap while others cannot. How the war ends--whether by ceasefire or comprehensive peace treaty--appears not to matter, although the government's ability to credibly commit to a peace agreement likely affects its ability to avoid repeat civil war.Publication CDD in Post-Conflict and Conflict-Affected Areas : Experiences from East Asia(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011)Describes the World Bank's experience of using community-driven development (CDD) in conflict-affected and post-conflict areas of the East Asia and Pacific region and provides a framework for assessing the CDD's success in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. When beneficiaries manage project resources, communities see more efficient and effective fund use with 'spillover' impacts: building local institutions and leadership, enhancing civic capacity, improving social relations, and boosting state legitimacy. CDD operations effectively address local economic deprivation even in areas of high conflict although CDD projects cannot alone cannot be responsible for major infrastructure reconstruction. Overall, CDD�s effect on aggregate levels and impacts of violent conflict, whether it is localized violence or larger-scale violent unrest has not been fully studied; however, when projects work well, and have functioned in areas for a number of years, they can have indirect conflict impacts, affecting social relations and behavior in ways that may make communities more robust to dealing with local problems and preventing future conflict escalation.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-10-07)Previous Poverty and Shared Prosperity Reports have conveyed the difficult message that the world is not on track to meet the global goal of reducing extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. This edition brings the unwelcome news that COVID-19, along with conflict and climate change, has not merely slowed global poverty reduction but reversed it for first time in over twenty years. With COVID-19 predicted to push up to 100 million additional people into extreme poverty in 2020, trends in global poverty rates will be set back at least three years over the next decade. Today, 40 percent of the global poor live in fragile or conflict-affected situations, a share that could reach two-thirds by 2030. Multiple effects of climate change could drive an estimated 65 to 129 million people into poverty in the same period. “Reversing the reversal” will require responding effectively to COVID-19, conflict, and climate change while not losing focus on the challenges that most poor people continue to face most of the time. Though these are distinctive types of challenges, there is much to be learned from the initial response to COVID-19 that has broader implications for development policy and practice, just as decades of addressing more familiar development challenges yield insights that can inform responses to today’s unfamiliar but daunting ones. Solving novel problems requires rapid learning, open cooperation, and strategic coordination by everyone: from political leaders and scientists to practitioners and citizens.Publication The African Continental Free Trade Area(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-07-27)The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement will create the largest free trade area in the world, measured by the number of countries participating. The pact will connect 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined GDP valued at $3.4 trillion. It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. But achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures. The scope of the agreement is considerable. It will reduce tariffs among member countries and cover policy areas, such as trade facilitation and services, as well as regulatory measures, such as sanitary standards and technical barriers to trade. It will complement existing subregional economic communities and trade agreements by offering a continent-wide regulatory framework and by regulating policy areas—such as investment and intellectual property rights protection—that have not been covered in most subregional agreements. The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects quantifies the long-term implications of the agreement for growth, trade, poverty reduction, and employment. Its analysis goes beyond that in previous studies that have largely focused on tariff and nontariff barriers in goods—by including the effects of services and trade facilitation measures, as well as the distributional impacts on poverty, employment, and wages of female and male workers. It is designed to guide policy makers as they develop and implement the extensive range of reforms needed to realize the substantial rewards that the agreement offers. The analysis shows that full implementation of AfCFTA could boost income by 7 percent, or nearly $450 billion, in 2014 prices and market exchange rates. The agreement would also significantly expand African trade—particularly intraregional trade in manufacturing. In addition, it would increase employment opportunities and wages for unskilled workers and help close the wage gap between men and women.Publication Doing Business 2020(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)Doing Business 2020 is the 17th in a series of annual studies investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. It provides quantitative indicators covering 12 areas of the business environment in 190 economies. The goal of the Doing Business series is to provide objective data for use by governments in designing sound business regulatory policies and to encourage research on the important dimensions of the regulatory environment for firms.Publication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-10-17)The World Bank Group has two overarching goals: End extreme poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity by boosting the incomes of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each economy. As this year’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity report documents, the world continues to make progress toward these goals. In 2015, approximately one-tenth of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and the incomes of the bottom 40 percent rose in 77 percent of economies studied. But success cannot be taken for granted. Poverty remains high in Sub- Saharan Africa, as well as in fragile and conflict-affected states. At the same time, most of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries, which tend to have higher national poverty lines. This year’s report tracks poverty comparisons at two higher poverty thresholds—$3.20 and $5.50 per day—which are typical of standards in lower- and upper-middle-income countries. In addition, the report introduces a societal poverty line based on each economy’s median income or consumption. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle also recognizes that poverty is not only about income and consumption—and it introduces a multidimensional poverty measure that adds other factors, such as access to education, electricity, drinking water, and sanitation. It also explores how inequality within households could affect the global profile of the poor. All these additional pieces enrich our understanding of the poverty puzzle, bringing us closer to solving it. For more information, please visit worldbank.org/PSPPublication Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-10-02)Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016 is the first of an annual flagship report that will inform a global audience comprising development practitioners, policy makers, researchers, advocates, and citizens in general with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. This edition will also document trends in inequality and identify recent country experiences that have been successful in reducing inequalities, provide key lessons from those experiences, and synthesize the rigorous evidence on public policies that can shift inequality in a way that bolsters poverty reduction and shared prosperity in a sustainable manner. Specifically, the report will address the following questions: • What is the latest evidence on the levels and evolution of extreme poverty and shared prosperity? • Which countries and regions have been more successful in terms of progress toward the twin goals and which are lagging behind? • What does the global context of lower economic growth mean for achieving the twin goals? • How can inequality reduction contribute to achieving the twin goals? • What does the evidence show concerning global and between- and within-country inequality trends? • Which interventions and countries have used the most innovative approaches to achieving the twin goals through reductions in inequality? The report will make four main contributions. First, it will present the most recent numbers on poverty, shared prosperity, and inequality. Second, it will stress the importance of inequality reduction in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity by 2030 in a context of weaker growth. Third, it will highlight the diversity of within-country inequality reduction experiences and will synthesize experiences of successful countries and policies, addressing the roots of inequality without compromising economic growth. In doing so, the report will shatter some myths and sharpen our knowledge of what works in reducing inequalities. Finally, it will also advocate for the need to expand and improve data collection—for example, data availability, comparability, and quality—and rigorous evidence on inequality impacts in order to deliver high-quality poverty and shared prosperity monitoring.