Since the 1990s, water has been called the “oil of the 21st century” or the “blue gold” over which wars will inevitably be waged. This bleak future is particularly relevant to the Middle East and North Africa, the world's most water-poor region, where the effects of climate change are adding to the perennial problem of declining rainfall.
But as Hossam Hussein notes in The mill“The empirical evidence linking water scarcity and interstate armed conflicts is inconclusive.” The equation “ignores social and economic issues and questions about who has access to how much water and why.” Political processes of inclusion and exclusion are central. In India, for example, lower caste women are denied access to wells; While in the West Bank, water scarcity is an issue of structural discrimination.
Purely technical solutions to scarcity, such as building dams and other massive market-oriented projects, often have disastrous effects on poor communities. Conversely, treating limited resources as an issue of accessibility and equity can lead to real solutions. “Water diplomacy can contribute to broader regional cooperation, stability, peace and security,” Hussein wrote.
Food as a public good
Threats to food security tend to be viewed primarily in terms of scarcity. However, global agricultural production grew by 53 percent between 2000 and 2019, compared to a 26 percent increase in global population over the same period. According to Marco Clemente and Martino Tognocchi, “food security can be affected more by access problems than by food shortages.”
Russia's war in Ukraine has put the issue of food security at the top of the political agenda. The decline in grain and fertilizer production and the consequences of the war on the global food supply chain certainly played a role. However, the main effect of the war was a sharp rise in food prices, Clemente and Tonucci write.
Despite technological and agricultural progress in countries like India, access to food has become more ambiguous as “the relationship between state and market in food production has evolved.” Although beneficial in terms of efficiency, the reduction of public oversight of the agricultural sector in the early 1990s affected food aid policies among countries and increasingly exposed food to market price fluctuations.
The new anthropocentrism
There is a fundamental rift in environmental thinking that has developed over a century and a half, write Mauro Cerutti and Roberto della Citta. On the one hand there is the idea of natural harmony independent of man. This rejects anthropocentrism in the name of a “biocentric” view of individual rights and an “ecocentric” view of ecosystems as superorganisms. On the other hand, there is the Darwinian thread that takes man out of the foundation of creation and returns him to the logic of nature.
Now that the world faces the threat of climate catastrophe and the call for radical change is widely recognized, environmental thinking must resolve this contradiction between the “outsider” and the “renaturalized” human.
The human being must declare himself “differently human-centered,” as Cerutti and Della Citta write: “to expect it.” A wise man It can place the abstract and general causes of “nature”…before the pursuit of its individual, family, social group, and species well-being is the ultimate expression of an anti-environmental point of view.
The Anthropocene “requires that we interpret nature and society as one complex phenomenon, thus overcoming the distinction between human history and natural history.” Part of this consists of interpreting climate change and its solutions not as the product of undifferentiated humanity, but of specific social, political and administrative realities.
