· 24 min read
Introduction
Scarcity is no longer just a side effect of climate change or poor governance, it has become a deliberate strategy. Across conflict zones, water, arable land, and rare minerals are being transformed into tools of leverage. In environments already strained by droughts, floods, and rising temperatures, scarcity can be manufactured, manipulated, and weaponized to discipline populations, fund wars, and shift political balances.
I have seen firsthand how climate extremes amplify fragility and how infrastructure, pumps, pipes, power lines, and roads, can become as decisive as weapons on the battlefield. Once these lifelines are disrupted, the result is not only humanitarian suffering but also political control: the ability to dictate who has water, who eats, and who can survive another day.
This article explores how the scarcity–conflict cycle unfolds, how resource bottlenecks are exploited as instruments of power, and how climate-smart peacebuilding can provide an alternative path. Through the cases of Yemen, Sudan, Gaza, and the Sahel, we see how scarcity, when manipulated, locks societies into cycles of dependency and violence, and how reframing adaptation and resilience as peace infrastructure can help break that cycle.
1) The Scarcity–Conflict Cycle
The link between scarcity and conflict is rarely linear; it is circular, compounding, and often deliberately sustained. When a climate shock strikes, whether it is drought, flood, cyclone, or extreme heat — it does not simply reduce access to water, food, or energy in a temporary way. It reshapes the political economy of survival. Who controls the pump, who distributes the grain, and who has the ability to move across borders suddenly becomes decisive. In fragile states and contested regions, these decisions are rarely neutral.
Climate stress as a threat multiplier
Scarcity often begins with ecological stress. Groundwater levels drop from decades of over-extraction, rainfall becomes less predictable, soils lose fertility, or pastures dry prematurely. Climate change accelerates these pressures by amplifying volatility: rainy seasons become shorter and more intense, dry spells stretch longer, and extreme events destroy infrastructure in a single sweep. These disruptions make already stressed systems more fragile, and they occur in places where governance capacity is thin and social trust is brittle.
Conversion of scarcity into control
When survival is threatened, scarcity itself becomes a currency of power. Those who possess coercive or administrative authority, governments, militias, tribal leaders, or insurgent groups, can turn resource access into leverage. They restrict supplies at checkpoints, impose tariffs on food aid, block irrigation canals, or deliberately cut electricity and fuel deliveries. By controlling scarcity, they control populations. What begins as an environmental stress becomes a deliberate instrument of political strategy.
The social unraveling
Communities caught in this cycle are forced to improvise. Farmers dig deeper wells without permits, hastening aquifer collapse. Families migrate across borders in search of grazing, labor, or safety, sparking new disputes with host communities. Others turn to informal or illicit economies, charcoal, artisanal mining, smuggling, that provide short-term income but strip ecosystems and finance armed groups. Each coping mechanism is rational at the household level but destructive at the system level, sowing the seeds of future crises.
Feedback loops of fragility
This cycle is not just repetitive, it is self-reinforcing. Every climate shock weakens governance capacity and social cohesion, while every act of coercion entrenches the power of those who thrive on scarcity. Local economies shrink, trust erodes, and humanitarian actors are left filling gaps that grow larger with each passing year. Over time, scarcity becomes institutionalized. Entire generations grow up associating access to water or food not with rights and public goods, but with allegiance, bribery, or force.
Profit from perpetuation
Perhaps the most insidious element of the scarcity–conflict cycle is that it rewards those who maintain it. Warlords who tax water deliveries, state officials who profit from inflated food imports, or external actors who manipulate aid flows all stand to gain from a system that never fully resolves scarcity. In this sense, scarcity is not simply tolerated; it is engineered and preserved because it sustains political and economic hierarchies.
The strategic implications
Understanding scarcity as a cycle rather than a one-off event changes how we approach security, development, and diplomacy. It reveals why traditional humanitarian interventions, drilling new wells, trucking in food, or repairing power lines, often fail to break the pattern. Unless the political incentives to weaponize scarcity are addressed, every well can be captured, every shipment diverted, and every repair sabotaged. True resilience demands breaking the feedback loop: shifting scarcity from a tool of coercion to a foundation for cooperation.
2) How Scarcity is Weaponized
Scarcity is rarely a passive condition. In conflict zones it is actively shaped, sharpened, and manipulated. What begins as a deficit of rainfall, fertile soil, or fuel supply often becomes a deliberate strategy of war. The transformation of necessity into leverage follows recognizable patterns that recur across regions and conflicts. These are not accidents of nature; they are calculated tactics designed to coerce, control, and profit.
Siege and denial
One of the oldest and most visible forms of weaponizing scarcity is the siege. When armed groups or state actors cut off access to water, food, fuel, or electricity, they do so not only to weaken opposing forces but also to discipline entire civilian populations. Siege politics makes survival contingent on submission. In modern conflicts, this can take the form of blocking humanitarian convoys, sealing borders, or cutting off municipal water flows into a besieged city. The intended effect is twofold: to force concessions from political opponents and to break the will of civilians caught in between. The siege transforms scarcity into a blunt instrument of control, where every sip of water or liter of fuel becomes a negotiated privilege.
Targeting infrastructure
Beyond withholding supplies, combatants frequently strike at the systems that deliver them. Power plants, desalination units, irrigation canals, treatment facilities, and pumping stations are often labeled as “dual use” and targeted under the guise of military necessity. In reality, disabling these lifelines rarely produces a decisive battlefield advantage; instead, it magnifies civilian suffering. Infrastructure attacks create cascading effects: without electricity, pumps cannot operate; without fuel, desalination plants sit idle; without functioning sewage treatment, cholera spreads. Each piece of broken infrastructure extends the reach of scarcity long after the guns fall silent, leaving communities vulnerable to disease, displacement, and dependency.
Market capture and exploitation
Scarcity also provides fertile ground for exploitation. When official supply systems collapse, informal markets emerge, often under the control of armed factions or local elites. Water from public pipes is siphoned off and sold at inflated prices; bread from humanitarian bakeries is redirected and resold; fuel imported for hospitals ends up on black markets. These practices transform public goods into commodities of war. Civilians are forced into dependency on those who control distribution networks, deepening cycles of inequality and resentment. For those in power, scarcity becomes a lucrative revenue stream: the less available the resource, the higher the price that desperate families must pay.
Resource-finance war economies
In many conflicts, the most durable form of weaponized scarcity lies not in water or food but in the minerals that finance warfare. Gold, cobalt, lithium, uranium, and other high-value resources become the backbone of war economies. Armed groups seize mines, extort artisanal miners, and control trade routes, converting underground wealth into cash for weapons, vehicles, and patronage. For local communities, this translates into both environmental degradation and exclusion: land is poisoned by mercury or stripped bare, while the wealth extracted flows outward to fund conflict rather than inward to build resilience. In this way, scarcity is deepened not by natural absence but by the diversion of abundance into violence.
The political logic of scarcity
Across these patterns, a common logic emerges: scarcity is more useful to armed actors than abundance. Where abundance might empower communities to be self-sufficient, scarcity ensures dependence. Where abundance might allow governments to build legitimacy through service provision, scarcity centralizes power in those who control access. This inversion, where the solution is less profitable than the problem, explains why scarcity is perpetuated. It is not a gap to be filled; it is a resource in itself, one that can be mined, taxed, or traded like oil or gold.
3) Case Studies
The dynamics of the scarcity–conflict cycle and the deliberate weaponization of necessity are not abstract. They are unfolding in real time across some of the world’s most fragile and contested geographies. While each context has its own history, politics, and culture, common patterns emerge: climate stress undermines already weak systems; armed actors seize control of critical resources; civilians are left balancing on the edge of survival; and international responses struggle to move beyond stopgap relief.
The following case studies: Yemen; Sudan; Gaza; and the Sahel, highlight how scarcity is manipulated in distinct ways. In Yemen, the collapse of groundwater governance collides with siege politics to turn water into a weapon. In Sudan, humanitarian blockades combine with the capture of mineral wealth to fuel one of today’s deadliest conflicts. In Gaza, lifelines of water, fuel, and electricity have become contested battlefields, showing how infrastructure itself can be weaponized. And in the Sahel, the slow grind of climate variability magnifies competition over land, mobility, and minerals, feeding a cycle of displacement and violence.
Together, these cases illustrate the broader reality: scarcity is not just a backdrop to conflict, it is increasingly the battlefield itself.
Yemen: Groundwater Depletion and Siege Politics
If the scarcity–conflict cycle begins with the collapse of ecological foundations, Yemen is its clearest case. Often described as the most water-stressed country in the world, Yemen demonstrates how decades of groundwater mismanagement collide with active conflict to make survival contingent on politics and allegiance.
Historical depletion
Long before the first shots of war, Yemen’s water table was dropping. By the early 2000s, wells in the Sana’a basin were falling by several meters each year. Unregulated drilling, subsidized diesel fuel, and expanding irrigation made extraction unsustainable. Farmers increasingly turned to qat, a narcotic cash crop with cultural significance but a massive water footprint, consuming perhaps a third of national water withdrawals. The more farmers planted qat, the more the water table collapsed — a vicious cycle of dependency on both the crop and the resource it drained.
Solar pumping: innovation turned liability
When fuel shortages struck during the conflict, farmers pivoted to solar pumps. At first this was hailed as a breakthrough. renewable energy for survival. But without regulation, solar allowed nearly unlimited pumping at zero marginal cost. Wells that once operated a few hours a day now ran continuously, deepening the drawdown. What looked like resilience became acceleration toward collapse.
Water as a siege weapon
Once war took hold, water was no longer just an environmental issue; it became an instrument of coercion. The siege of Taiz is emblematic: armed groups blocked supplies into the city, forcing residents to rely on expensive trucked water. Civilians faced impossible choices, pay militia-controlled prices, fetch unsafe water under fire, or go without. In this context, a tap became as strategic as a checkpoint.
Health consequences
The result was catastrophic. Yemen endured one of the world’s largest cholera outbreaks in modern history, with millions of suspected cases. Cholera thrives where clean water is scarce and sanitation collapses. The outbreak was not just the consequence of broken infrastructure but of weaponized scarcity itself.
Lesson
Yemen shows that when ecological stress meets conflict, scarcity shifts from background condition to battlefield. Any peacebuilding must go beyond drilling wells to regulating extraction, depoliticizing service delivery, and treating water as a right rather than leverage.
Sudan: Siege and the Gold Economy
If Yemen highlights ecological depletion, Sudan illustrates the weaponization of services combined with the corruption of resource wealth. Sudan’s current war demonstrates how scarcity can be both engineered and financed.
Siege as strategy
Urban centers like El-Fasher and Omdurman have endured protracted sieges where water, electricity, food, and medicine are systematically blocked. These tactics are not side effects; they are strategies. By starving civilians of lifelines, armed actors weaken communities, punish dissent, and force allegiance. Every denied convoy, every sabotaged pipe, is part of the political calculus.
Collapse of humanitarian systems
With millions displaced and public systems destroyed, hospitals run without water, families drink from unsafe wells, and electricity is rationed to minutes a day. The result is not only immediate suffering but long-term institutional collapse. When municipalities cannot guarantee water or health, legitimacy drains away, leaving armed groups to fill the void.
The gold economy
Scarcity above ground is compounded by abundance below. Sudan is one of Africa’s largest gold producers, and control of mines and smuggling routes has become central to the conflict. Revenues from gold fund paramilitary operations, purchase weapons, and sustain patronage networks. Instead of financing development, gold entrenches war economies.
Dual scarcity
Sudan thus experiences scarcity on two fronts. On the surface, civilians are deliberately deprived of essential services. Beneath the surface, mineral wealth is diverted to sustain violence, leaving the state unable, or unwilling, to invest in resilience. This duality makes Sudan one of the starkest examples of how scarcity is both manufactured and monetized.
Lesson
Peace in Sudan requires not only corridors for aid but also governance of resources. Unless gold revenues are traced, taxed, and shared for the public good, they will remain fuel for conflict. Scarcity will continue to be engineered because those who profit from it face no cost.
Gaza: Infrastructure as a Battlefield
If Yemen and Sudan show scarcity as a siege tool, Gaza demonstrates the next level: infrastructure itself becomes the battlefield. Here, pumps, pipes, and power plants are not just collateral — they are targets.
The collapse of lifelines
Since 2023, Gaza’s water and energy systems have been systematically degraded. Bombardments, blockades on fuel, and restrictions on spare parts have left only a fraction of water production facilities operational. Households ration mere liters of water a day, far below emergency standards. Without fuel, desalination plants sit idle. Without chlorine, contamination spreads.
Scarcity engineered through logistics
Unlike in Yemen, where aquifers were depleted, Gaza’s scarcity is logistical. The region has access to Mediterranean water and brackish groundwater, but treatment and distribution depend on energy, fuel, and chemical inputs. Restrict those, and water becomes undrinkable. Scarcity here is not natural — it is designed.
Health and dignity
Civilians bear the brunt: children queue for hours with jerrycans, families drink unsafe water, and disease spreads through overcrowded shelters. The denial of water, electricity, and sanitation is not incidental; it is a deliberate exertion of control that transforms lifelines into levers of war.
Potential pathways
At the same time, Gaza has shown glimpses of potential solutions. Proposals for water-energy swaps, solar power exchanged for desalinated water, demonstrate how interdependence could transform scarcity into stability. But such ideas require infrastructure to be protected, not weaponized.
Lesson
Gaza underscores that in modern conflict, infrastructure is both target and weapon. Any vision for peace must enshrine water and power systems as protected humanitarian assets, not bargaining chips.
The Sahel: Land, Mobility, and Minerals
If Gaza highlights infrastructure warfare, the Sahel reveals how climate variability itself becomes a stage for conflict. Here, scarcity is seasonal, spatial, and deeply entangled with mobility.
Climate volatility
The Sahel endures cycles of drought and flood that shrink growing seasons and shift grazing routes. Rainfall is erratic; soils degrade quickly. Farmers and herders who once coexisted are pushed into conflict as planting calendars and transhumance corridors overlap in smaller, more contested spaces.
Conflict over routes and rights
Disputes over cattle trampling crops or access to water points escalate into clashes, often inflamed by ethnic tensions and manipulated by armed groups. Where the state is absent or predatory, local grievances fester into cycles of reprisal. Climate stress magnifies these conflicts, making each dry season or flood a trigger for violence.
Displacement and fragility
The Lake Chad Basin epitomizes the crisis: millions displaced by the combination of violence, climate stress, and collapsed livelihoods. Families flee not only armed attacks but also the loss of pasture, fisheries, and fertile land. Displacement then feeds back into instability as host communities strain under new pressures.
Mineral exposure
Beyond land and water, the Sahel also illustrates the geopolitics of mineral scarcity. Niger’s uranium, vital for Europe’s nuclear energy, has made the region a strategic focal point. Political instability and shifting alliances show how dependence on concentrated supply chains can turn a regional crisis into a global one.
Lesson
In the Sahel, scarcity is about mobility as much as volume. Peace requires negotiated corridors, shared calendars, and regional institutions that manage rivers and routes. Without these, every drought or flood becomes a new ignition point.
Closing Transition
Taken together, these four cases demonstrate the many faces of weaponized scarcity: ecological depletion in Yemen, service strangulation and war finance in Sudan, infrastructure warfare in Gaza, and climate-driven mobility crises in the Sahel. Each illustrates a different mechanism, but the underlying logic is the same: scarcity is not simply endured, it is exploited. And until that logic is broken, humanitarian aid will remain a stopgap, and peace will remain elusive.
4) Rare Minerals: The Double Edge of Transition
The 21st century is being defined by a new scramble for resources. Unlike the 20th century, when oil shaped global power, today the focus is on transition minerals, cobalt, lithium, nickel, copper, graphite, rare earth elements, and uranium. These resources are the backbone of clean energy technologies: batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear reactors, and the digital infrastructure that underpins them. Demand is projected to soar several hundred percent by mid-century as countries race toward net-zero goals.
This surge in demand holds promise for development but also grave risks. Without strong governance, it threatens to reproduce the same conflict dynamics that surrounded oil: resource rents enriching elites and armed groups, local communities left dispossessed, and global competition over access sparking geopolitical friction. In this sense, transition minerals embody the double edge of scarcity, they can empower societies through green growth or destabilize them through exploitation.
Conflict rents and war finance
In fragile states, minerals can become lifelines for war economies. Militias, paramilitaries, and corrupt officials capture mines or levy “taxes” on artisanal miners. Revenues are funneled into weapons, vehicles, and patronage networks, ensuring that violence pays better than peace. This pattern is already visible in gold-rich Sudan, cobalt-mining regions of the DRC, and artisanal lithium sites emerging across the Sahel and South America. For local communities, resource wealth rarely translates into development. Instead, it deepens exclusion: land is seized, water polluted, and labor exploited while profits flow to those who wield the gun rather than those who wield the shovel.
State competition and strategic leverage
At the international level, the mineral transition risks becoming a new theater of great-power rivalry. States and corporations are racing to secure access to supply chains, signing exclusive contracts, and locking in long-term offtake agreements. This concentration creates vulnerabilities: if one state controls cobalt refining or uranium exports, it holds leverage far beyond its borders. For example, Niger’s uranium has long been critical for Europe’s nuclear power; when instability disrupted that flow, the tremors reached energy markets far away. The geopolitical logic of scarcity — dependence, leverage, and coercion — remains alive, only with new minerals.
Environmental and social fractures
Resource extraction does not only destabilize through finance and geopolitics, it also tears at the social and ecological fabric of communities. Mining projects often strip indigenous groups of land, poison rivers with tailings, and fracture traditional livelihoods. Promises of jobs or royalties frequently fail to materialize, creating resentment that armed actors can exploit. As global demand intensifies, the pressure to extract “at any cost” increases, raising the risk that the green transition itself fuels the very instability it seeks to prevent by reducing fossil fuel dependency.
The governance gap
The central challenge is that governance mechanisms have not caught up with the speed of mineral demand. Transparency initiatives, conflict-mineral regulations, and ESG reporting exist, but enforcement is uneven. Artisanal and small-scale mining, employing tens of millions worldwide, remains largely outside formal oversight. Meanwhile, consumers in the Global North often remain unaware of the violence embedded in the minerals powering their electric vehicles or smartphones. Unless supply chains are made radically transparent and benefit-sharing mechanisms strengthened, the global energy transition could become another chapter in the weaponization of scarcity.
A choice between two futures
Rare minerals can either lock us into cycles of exploitation or provide a foundation for shared prosperity. If extraction is paired with robust community benefit-sharing, strong environmental safeguards, and transparent global supply chains, minerals can help finance stability, build infrastructure, and support development. If not, they risk reproducing the same violent logic of oil, dependency, corruption, and coercion.
The double edge of the mineral transition is clear: the same cobalt that powers a battery for renewable energy can finance a militia. The same uranium that provides low-carbon electricity can destabilize a fragile region. The outcome depends not on geology but on governance.
5) Climate-Smart Peacebuilding
Breaking the cycle of weaponized scarcity requires moving beyond conventional diplomacy and ceasefire texts that focus only on guns, borders, and power-sharing. In the 21st century, true peace will be determined as much by who controls the pumps and pipelines as by who commands the battalions. Climate-smart peacebuilding reframes water, land, energy, and minerals not as peripheral humanitarian concerns but as the very foundation of security and stability.
This approach recognizes that scarcity is not a backdrop to conflict, it is the battlefield itself. Negotiations that ignore resources leave civilians vulnerable and guarantee relapse into violence. By contrast, embedding resource management into peacebuilding ensures that communities see tangible improvements in daily survival, which builds confidence in political settlements and weakens the incentives for armed actors to exploit scarcity.
Protecting lifelines as ceasefire conditions
Traditional ceasefires often call for halting offensives, withdrawing troops, or opening corridors for humanitarian aid. Yet they rarely specify protections for the infrastructure that sustains civilian life. Climate-smart peacebuilding makes this explicit: water networks, power grids, irrigation canals, and fuel pipelines must be treated as “objects indispensable to survival.” Damaging or obstructing them should be considered a breach of ceasefire. This elevates pumps, wells, and treatment plants to the same status as hospitals or schools — critical humanitarian assets whose protection is non-negotiable.
Repair windows and humanitarian engineering
In protracted conflicts, infrastructure will inevitably break down. Pipes crack, transformers blow, desalination membranes clog. Climate-smart peacebuilding institutionalizes “repair windows” within conflict management, pre-negotiated periods, often facilitated by neutral third parties, during which engineers can safely restore essential systems. These repair windows should be as routine as food convoys, ensuring that water and energy supply are never left to decay while diplomats haggle. In practice, this could mean weekly safe-passage corridors for chlorine deliveries in Yemen, or emergency access for technicians to power substations in Gaza. The principle is simple: resilience is built not only through words at the negotiation table but through the uninterrupted operation of the systems people depend on to live.
Humanitarian minimums as red lines
In most conflicts, civilians survive at levels of deprivation far below international standards. Families ration liters of unsafe water per day, or subsist on calorie intakes that guarantee long-term malnutrition. Climate-smart peacebuilding establishes humanitarian minimums as red lines: at least 15 liters of safe water per person per day, minimum nutritional standards, baseline electricity for health facilities. These thresholds must be codified into agreements and monitored transparently. Falling below them is not just a humanitarian failure but a violation of the peace framework. By tying dignity to peace, humanitarian minimums ensure that the most vulnerable are protected not as an afterthought but as the measure of success.
Negotiated mobility and land use
Nowhere is the scarcity–conflict cycle more evident than in disputes over mobility and land. In the Sahel and Horn of Africa, herders and farmers clash when traditional transhumance routes overlap with expanding cultivation. Without negotiated calendars, corridors, and compensation schemes, every drought or flood becomes a flashpoint. Climate-smart peacebuilding therefore requires structured dialogue on resource use: mapping migration routes, agreeing planting and grazing seasons, establishing compensation funds for crop damage. These agreements turn land and water from zero-sum disputes into shared systems managed by rules and trust. They also strengthen local governance, creating mechanisms of accountability that can endure beyond the immediate conflict.
Minerals as peace projects
Rare minerals and extractives must be reframed not as spoils of war but as peace projects. This means embedding traceability, benefit-sharing, and community oversight into the supply chain. Contracts should be transparent by default, royalties channeled into public trust funds, and local communities given a direct stake in revenues. Conflict minerals become peace minerals when their extraction finances schools, clinics, and infrastructure rather than militias and warlords. For countries like Sudan or the DRC, where gold and cobalt have entrenched war economies, international buyers and regulators must demand conflict-free certification. The principle is straightforward: if minerals power the global transition, they must also power local peace.
Intelligence and foresight for peace
Peacebuilding has often lagged behind reality because negotiators lack timely intelligence on the conditions that fuel scarcity. Climate-smart peacebuilding embeds foresight directly into peace processes. This means integrating climate forecasts, market prices, displacement flows, and hydrological data into negotiation rooms. Imagine ceasefire committees that monitor rainfall anomalies, or peacekeepers equipped with dashboards showing which water systems are close to collapse. By making scarcity visible in real time, peacebuilders can intervene before scarcity is weaponized. Intelligence ceases to be the domain of militaries alone and becomes a shared tool for protecting civilians and stabilizing fragile environments.
A new mindset: resources as security
At its core, climate-smart peacebuilding demands a mindset shift. Pumps, pipelines, and pastures must no longer be treated as technical afterthoughts to diplomacy. They are the frontlines of peace. A ceasefire that leaves families without water is not a ceasefire; it is a postponement of violence. A political agreement that fails to manage land use or mineral revenues is not sustainable; it is a prelude to relapse. True peace requires acknowledging that resources, who controls them, who accesses them, and how they are governed, are the currency of stability.
6) Why this mindset shift matters
Scarcity will define global politics this century. The key question is whether scarcity remains a weapon, or becomes a design constraint for cooperation. Water, land, and minerals can either divide societies or bind them together. When managed cooperatively, they form the basis of resilience and peace. When manipulated, they become instruments of control.
The path forward lies in designing interdependence, trading solar for desalinated water, sharing transboundary river flows, creating transparent mineral contracts, and building early-warning systems that anticipate shocks before they cascade into crises.
Climate-smart peacebuilding is not an abstract ambition. It is the practical recognition that in the 21st century, resource management is conflict prevention.
Scarcity is emerging as the central axis of global politics in the 21st century. How humanity manages it will shape not only the trajectory of individual conflicts but also the stability of entire regions and the credibility of international governance. The defining question is stark: will scarcity remain a weapon wielded by those who profit from fragility, or can it be transformed into a design constraint that forces cooperation and innovation?
Scarcity as a fork in the road
Water, land, and minerals represent more than natural endowments, they are the building blocks of legitimacy, resilience, and peace. When they are hoarded, captured, or manipulated, they divide societies and perpetuate war economies. But when they are managed equitably, transparently, and sustainably, they bind communities together. Shared aquifers can create cross-border institutions; mineral royalties can finance schools and clinics; negotiated grazing calendars can prevent cycles of violence. Scarcity can drive division, or it can drive interdependence — the difference lies in governance.
Interdependence by design
The path forward is not to wish scarcity away but to design systems that transform it into opportunity. This means embedding cooperation into the architecture of resource use. Examples already exist:
- Water–energy swaps, where solar power is traded for desalinated water, turning scarcity into mutual dependence rather than unilateral leverage.
- Transboundary river agreements, where flows are shared not through ad hoc arrangements but through permanent institutions with enforcement power.
- Transparent mineral contracts, where revenues are published and communities see direct benefits, ensuring that extraction supports peace rather than conflict.
- Early-warning systems, where climate, market, and mobility data are fused into dashboards that anticipate shocks and allow interventions before crises spiral out of control.
These are not utopian ideas; they are practical mechanisms already tested in parts of the world. The challenge is scaling them and embedding them at the heart of peace processes and development strategies.
A shift in peacebuilding logic
For too long, peacebuilding has treated water, land, and energy as background issues — technical details to be addressed after political settlements are signed. But the evidence is overwhelming: when resources are left outside the negotiation room, conflicts relapse. A ceasefire that does not guarantee water supply is not a foundation for stability. A power-sharing agreement that ignores mineral rents simply shifts the competition from the battlefield to the treasury. Recognizing that resource management is conflict prevention requires peacebuilders, diplomats, investors, and humanitarian actors to operate with a new logic: one that treats pipelines, pastures, and pumps as seriously as parliaments and power-sharing formulas.
Why now
This mindset shift is not optional; it is urgent. Climate change is accelerating the scarcity–conflict cycle. Megadroughts, floods, and heatwaves are no longer once-in-a-generation events, they are annual shocks. Populations are growing fastest in regions already stressed. The energy transition is intensifying demand for critical minerals at precisely the moment when governance systems are weakest. Without a new paradigm, the 21st century risks being defined not by cooperation over shared challenges but by the weaponization of scarcity at scale.
The imperative for leadership
Breaking this cycle requires courage and creativity. Governments must treat resource-sharing as national security, not as technical aid. Investors must demand transparency across supply chains, refusing to finance conflict minerals or water grabs. Humanitarian actors must insist that WASH and energy systems are protected as frontline assets in ceasefires. And global institutions must empower climate-security mechanisms with the same seriousness they afford to arms control.
Climate-smart peacebuilding is not an abstract ambition. It is the practical recognition that in this century, resource management is conflict prevention. If leaders adopt this mindset, scarcity can be the force that pushes societies toward interdependence and cooperation. If they do not, scarcity will remain a weapon, and conflict will be the predictable result.
Epilogue: Scarcity is the New Frontline
Scarcity is no longer just a humanitarian concern. It is the frontline of geopolitics, the quiet battlefield where survival is negotiated and power is enforced. Whether it takes the form of a besieged city’s water pipes, a herder’s right to cross a border with cattle, or a community living on top of cobalt reserves, scarcity is shaping the choices of nations and the fates of families.
The danger is clear: if left unmanaged, scarcity will continue to be weaponized, rewarding those who profit from fragility. But the opportunity is equally clear: scarcity can force us to design systems of cooperation that make peace practical and resilience durable.
The stakes could not be higher. In this century, the measure of leadership will not be who commands the most weapons, but who manages resources most wisely. The real test of power will be the ability to transform scarcity from a weapon of control into a bond of interdependence.
Scarcity is the challenge of our age. How we respond will determine whether the future is defined by conflict, or by cooperation.
This article is also published on PSCG Global. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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