Climate Change Is Aggravating the Suffering in Yemen
Yemen has never had enough arable land (less than 3 percent) to support its population (28 million people). Now its population is starving today not because food can’t grow there, but because of a long-standing economic crisis exacerbated by the three-year war. “Both sides are using food as a weapon of war, but the crisis is caused primarily by a brutal air, land and sea blockade imposed by a Saudi Arabia-led coalition,” according to CNN. As The Guardian explained last year, “Although remote rural areas are able to grow corn and other basic crops during the rainy season, climate change has had an impact on their ability to survive during conflict. In the past, villages would store enough food to last for three or four months in times of emergency. In recent years less rainfall, resulting in reduced harvests, means little if any food is stored for periods of crisis.”  In Yemen, people have been warning about its effects for almost a decade, well before the civil war began. “Possible climate change impacts, such as more violent and less predictable rainfall and a hotter and possibly drier climate,” a 2010 World Bank report read, “would place Yemen’s people and economy under further stress.”
As The Guardian explained last year, “Although remote rural areas are able to grow corn and other basic crops during the rainy season, climate change has had an impact on their ability to survive during conflict. In the past, villages would store enough food to last for three or four months in times of emergency. In recent years less rainfall, resulting in reduced harvests, means little if any food is stored for periods of crisis.”

Drought has also contributed to water scarcity, which, Elayah argues, is driving conflict. “The civil war in Yemen seems to be a politically-motivated competition for power among many actors with varying motives,” he wrote in his paper. “But underlying all other motives is the ongoing need by all parties to secure access to the diminishing water supply.”

The idea that climate change is an exacerbating factor of conflict—such as the war in Syria—isn’t new. “The countries suffering from wars and conflicts are the same countries who are also struggling from problems of climate change,” Elayah said. That the effects of climate change have partly caused these wars, however, is still a controversial theory within the scientific community.