What is the connection between climate change and conflict? This study suggests that the desire to identify a clear causal path between climate change and conflict overlooks the complexity of both phenomena; it is important to take a more nuanced view of climate change and to understand better the causes of conflict. The multifaceted nature of climate change reduces the effectiveness of using predictive modelling to frame policy. Instead, empirical analysis is needed of particular contexts of conflict and collaboration in a changing climate.
The view that scarce natural resources drive conflicts is prevalent in policy circles. But climate change is not a single cause of conflict (a ‘smoking gun’) that once removed will allow return to peaceful and stable conditions. There are many causes of conflict and these change with time. Furthermore, while there is a rightful concern over the social impacts of climate change, vulnerability is often believed to be only just emerging in relation to future climate change, rather than a state created over time by multiple and overlapping processes of change.
There is a tendency to treat climate change as an environmental issue requiring technical fixes. Many believe that all that is needed is political will and financing and then adaptation will happen in a straightforward manner. However, adaptation is highly politicised both at the level of global climate change negotiations and in local power structures, within which people negotiate their interests and rights.
Instead of focusing on external pressures and shocks that create new vulnerability, analysis should focus on structures, including the role of development and policy processes that have made certain groups and individuals more vulnerable over time.
- Climate change shocks will overlay existing stresses and some groups will be more resilient to these shocks than others.
- While it is uncertain how institutions will function in response to climate change, institutional failure and social breakdown is not inevitable.
- Climate change could bring innovations in the way societies organise the use of resources as well as changes in access structures that help reduce vulnerability.
- Impacts of climate change will vary between different bio-physical environments and governance contexts and for different social groups.
- As with other types of aid, external assistance for adaption will involve intervening in political struggles and negotiations between various actors.
To move beyond the impasse, researchers and policymakers must allow new thinking and evidence to emerge and to shape strategies concerning the relationship between climate change and conflict. A political economy approach will allow vulnerability to be seen as the outcome of intersecting political and economic structures and processes involving multiple actors.
- Rigorous research on situations of conflict can help tease out the nuances and specificities of how societies adjust to climate variability and the role of conflict and collaboration within this.
- Adaptation should not be seen as a route to peace. It is a political process involving negotiations around the allocation of resources and rights that people require to adjust their livelihoods.
- It is important to support learning from innovation that is happening in households as well as local and national institutions. Such innovation will provide a more useful guide for policy and practice than technical fixes.
