“Environmental degradation . . . has a huge impact on human security and thus on the potential for outbreaks of violent conflict.”

You might expect this kind of statement to come from an environmentalist, especially when it is quoted at a conference of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the UN body that attempts to reverse land degradation. But the author, Harmut Behrend, is a military specialist working for the German armed forces. His article in Global Affairs soberly documents links between environmental breakdown and security threats worldwide.

The UNCCD’s current Conference of the Parties (COP12), in Ankara, is a curtain-raiser for the UNFCCC COP21 on climate change in Paris next month. Its deliberations mostly move at a pace slower than that of drying paint. But there is a palpable sense of urgency about the dangerous relationship between land degradation, forced migration and war.

The proximity of the host country, Turkey, to the conflicts in neighbouring Syria and across the Middle East was underlined by the horrific bombings that killed at least 100 people in the capital, just before the conference opened last week. And a Turkish official reminded The Irish Times his country had already absorbed more than two million refugees in recent years. Turkey is also, of course, a key transit route for refugees and migrants.

Productive land

Many delegates at the COP, especially among the 300 accredited NGOs, argue there are deep environmental underpinnings to the Mediterranean migration crisis, and to the multiple armed conflicts associated with it, stretching from

Nigeria

to

Afghanistan

. They say these events can only be adequately understood in the context of the loss of productive land, a loss invisible for far too long from the perspective of the well-fed nations of

Europe

.

"If you find that you can no longer feed your family from your own land, you do one of two things: you move somewhere else, or you fight," says Louise Baker, policy coordinator at UNCCD.

And if you move somewhere nearby, it’s not unlikely you will have to fight anyway. Whatever neighbouring productive land you may still be able to find is likely to be already occupied by people unwilling to share it. So some people decide to take the appalling risks of making the journey towards Europe.

Migration is not a new phenomenon, and in many cultures local seasonal movements of people, between high and low pasture or between town and country, have long been a normal part of life. People have always moved for better economic opportunities elsewhere.

The current waves of migration, however, are very different, say Barbara Bendandi, from Italy, and Mariam Traore Chazalnoël, from Mali, representatives of the International Organisation of Migration at the conference. Most people migrating to Europe today are not leaving home for "a better life". They are leaving because their home places no longer support any life at all. They may not, initially at least, be refugees from war. But their life-or-death choice is just as stark.

The Lake Chad basin offers one illustration of how land degradation is associated with migration and conflict. In the early 1960s, Lake Chad covered 25,000sq km, and straddled the borders of Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Today, a vicious cycle of overgrazing, deforestation, unsustainable irrigation and climate change have reduced it to 1,400sq km.

There have been several high-profile conflicts in the region in the last decade, most recently the insurgency by the Islamist Boko Haram group in northern Nigeria, the poorest area in the country, and closest to the shrinking lake. It is less well-known more than 100 major village-on-village clashes have occurred in northern Nigeria since 2003, unconnected to Islamist fundamentalism. Manyare attributed to acute shortages due to land degradation.

These in turn lead to large movements of displaced populations, with many eventually heading for Europe.

Migration patterns

Another example of the degradation-migration-conflict pattern, frequently given at conference sessions, is the role of drought in the build-up to civil war in Syria. From 2006 to 2010, the country suffered its worst dry period ever, pushing a million people, many of them young men, to cities already almost overstretched by refugees from

Iraq

and Afghanistan.

“You can’t necessarily establish a direct causal links between land degradation, migration and conflicts,” says Bendandi, “but it provides an aggravating, amplifying context to other factors”.

"Land degradation in hotspots of global instability is like putting a flame where the bomb has a fuse . . . but the bomb is not local, it is global," Italian diplomat and environmental writer Grammenos Mastrojeni told The Irish Times.

Since the world is losing 12 million hectares of productive land each year, these are problems that are not going to go away, unless we start to rehabilitate land .

The major proposal before the conference is that the UNCCD should commit its 168 signatory states to rapidly achieve “land-degradation neutrality”. That is, the restoration of productive land each year should be the equivalent of the land lost.

EU taxpayers might like to note the cost of rehabilitating land is generally a great deal less than the cost of supporting millions of displaced people in refugee and migrant camps.