Jus Ad Bellum An Engineering Perspective

Climate change—leading to loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and mass displacement of peoples, causing civil unrest, intercommnnal violence and international instability. 

Competition over resources—including food, water and energy, especially involving unstable parts of the world. 

Marginalisation of the majority world— increasing socioeconomic divisions and the political, economic and cultural marginalisation of the vast majority of the world s population. 

Global militarisation—the increased use of military force as a security measure and the further spread of military technologies, including chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.  

There is good evidence for these root causes, some of it surprisingly quantitative. For example, in the tropics there is a climate oscillation known as the El Nino/ Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with a 3 °C variation in sea temperature occurring approximately every 5 years between El Nino (warm) and La Nina (cool). Studies of data from 1954 to 2004 have shown that the risk of organised poMcal violence ( civil conflict ) doubles, from 3 to 6 %, in affected nations during the warm part of the cycle, with less developed countries being particularly badly affected. The oscillation may have had a role in 21 % of conflicts (out of a total of 230) in the period smdied [34]. Many factors are involved, but food availability and cost may be important as crop yields are greatly reduced in El Nino years. 

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