Green Giant, or Straw Man? Environmental Pressure and Civil Conflict, 1961–99

The proposition that environmental scarcity causes violent conflict attracts both popular and academic interest. Last year’s Nobel Peace prize awarded to Wangari Maathai is testament that many believe there is a strong relationship between environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and violent conflict. Neomalthusian writers have a well-developed theoretical argument explaining this connection, and have conducted numerous case studies that seem to support such a view. So far there have been few systematic quantitative or comparative studies, and the few that exist have focused on a small subset of resource indicators. In order to test a more general argument about the effects of resource scarcity, we look at the relationship between the environment and internal armed conflict using four different indicators of environmental sustainability: the Ecological Footprint, the World Bank’s Genuine Savings index, the Environmental Sustainability index, and the Ecosystem Wellbeing Index. We find that countries with a heavier ecological footprint have a greater chance of peace, a result that is substantively large. On the face of it, neomalthusian arguments might be supported by the findings that a higher ecological reserve and bio-capacity also predicts peace. However, the negative effect of the footprint on conflict is much stronger than the negative effect of bio-capacity and ecological reserve. Our findings support the link between consumption, development and peace, rather than the neomalthusian proposition. Since poorer countries are at highest risk of conflict, these results pose a cruel dilemma because reducing risk would entail increasing bio-capacity (increase size of national territory) or reducing the footprint, the only feasible option. Higher footprints relate to peace, however, and the poor already have comparatively low footprints. Despite the prominence of measures such as the ecological footprint in shaping policy, our results suggest that they are problematic when it comes to finding a strong link between environment and conflict, or for policy that seeks to end civil war.