Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard to start a fight in a place like that. As the Sudanese government did, you just find a divide - racial, political, cultural, religious - and promise one side as much land as they can steal. But the immediate spark shouldn't be allowed to detract from the war's underlying cause. Says Michael Klare, director of the Peace and World Security Program at Hampshire College in Massachusetts: "In Darfur, global warming exacerbates divisions along ethnic lines and produces ethnic wars that are, at root, resource conflicts...
...tribes and armed gangs murder and rob each other in a cycle of violence fuelled by eight years of drought. In Rwanda, there is an increasing consensus that Africa's other recent genocide is at least partly understood as a contest between too many people on too little cultivable land. The U.N. Development Program predicted as long ago as November 1999 that one in two Africans would face water shortages by 2025, and said it expected violent flashpoints to erupt along the Nile, and in the Niger Volta and Zambezi deltas...
...volatile parts of the world. The next day, then British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett hosted a debate on climate change and conflict at the U.N. Security Council in New York City. "What makes wars start?" asked Beckett. "Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use. There are few greater potential threats to our economies, too, but also to peace and security itself." Speaking outside the debate, Philip E. Clapp, former president of the New York City-based National Environmental Trust (who died this year), warned: "Global warming is no longer just an environmental issue...
...Darfur be saved? We already know what needs to be done. The immediate priority is to end the fighting by brokering a truce and sending in peacekeepers. In the longer term, Darfur needs sensible land-use policies and careful water management, while the rest of the world has to cut emissions. But at the Security Council, Beckett faced opposition from China, the U.S. and the two main groups representing developing countries. They complained that the forum was an inappropriate place to discuss climate change. That is, they disputed that climate change leads...
...hours later we were in Iriba, northeastern Chad's logistics base for six refugee camps for families from Darfur. Aid workers in Iriba told me that, as horrific as the suffering was, it was surely going to get worse. "The water is going. The firewood is gone. The land has lost its ability to regenerate," said Palouma Ponlibae, an agriculture and natural-resources officer for the relief agency care. "The refugees are going to have to move. There's going to be nothing here to sustain life...