Perspective: Climate & hybrid warHow Climate Change Will Help China and Russia Wage Hybrid War

Americans and Europeans may not yet notice the existential threat climate change poses, but they had better pay attention to it. Their adversaries could use climate change as a new front in hybrid warfare.

Elizabeth Braw writes in Defense One that the term “climate change” describes deteriorating climate which leads not only to extreme heat but also to extreme cold and other perils such as more frequent droughts and extreme-weather events. And while most Europeans and North Americans are not yet experiencing the life-altering effects of climate change, other parts of the world are.

As the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center notes in its 2019 report, “cyclical and protracted displacement [of people] continues to be driven by political instability, chronic poverty and inequality, environmental and climate change”. Climate change is exacerbating already severe droughts in the Horn of Africa. An average 21.8 million people are already forced to leave their homes as a result of climate change – every year. Parts of Southeast Asia risk becoming uninhabitable, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies reports. The Maldives may disappear altogether.

Braw writes:

Here’s the thing: people don’t lie down and die when their home community becomes uninhabitable. They find an inhabitable place to live. Climate change risks creating enormous population movements in the direction of North America and Europe. Will those refugees collectively flee to Russia or China as well? Unlikely. Most migrants make their way to a neighboring country – which is why Lebanon and Jordan are now home to so many Syrians – or to countries that hold promise of a significantly better future. Today, that is “the West”.

“China and Russia are disruptors of the world order, whether by design or not, and climate change is the biggest disruptor of them all,” noted Howard Jones, CEO of the Born Free Foundation, a conservation NGO. “In several African countries we’re already seeing rural settlements disrupted by development projects funded and executed by China. Those projects include altering the flows of entire river systems and putting good land to use for export of food and resources to China. Put this together with climate change and pre-existing poverty and we have a huge problem. And why would China care?”

Indeed, China, Russia, and other hostile states can use climate change as a new tool in blended aggression (often called hybrid warfare) against the West. The Horn of Africa offers a taste of things to come. Chinese development projects there are already displacing rural populations, and displacement leads to food insecurity – which is, of course, worsened by climate change. 

Braw adds:

How will the Western community respond to large new migration flows? The 2015 refugee crisis opened rifts within the European Union that have not gone away – on the contrary. The EU still hasn’t managed to establish a quota system for asylum seekers because some Central and Eastern European countries refuse to participate. The European Commission’s new Commissioner position with responsibility for “protecting our European way of life”, meanwhile, has been labeled xenophobic by some EU parliamentarians. Regardless of who is right or wrong in the debate, large migration flow will further deepen the discord. 

That’s exactly what our adversaries want. Today their aim is less to conquer territory than to weaken the cohesion within countries and alliances. “Mass population movements and human emergencies will put Europe under huge pressure, economically, politically, socially, and morally, which China will only benefit from,” Jones told me.