This paper identifies three climate change processes could cause conflict and social instability: increasing resource scarcity; intensifying natural disasters; and bringing about a sea level rise. Risks associated with these processes are primarily destruction of infrastructure, increased health risks, and loss of livelihoods. Other ways climate change could affect conflict include: economic and political instability, social fragmentation, migration and and inappropriate responses. The paper finds little robust evidence that there is a correlation between climate change and conflict, but does note that the extent to which any of these mechanisms and processes increase the likelihood of organized violence depends on country-specific and contextual factors. It calls for further research to draw out the links between climate change and conflict, and for security issues to be drawn into IPCC assessments.
Insights based on evidence and projections include:
- Relatively developed, stable societies are likely to better manage and adapt to environmental conditions and environmental migrants. In these contexts increasing climate variability, and sea-level rise would not be expected as a security threat. However, in developing countries, climate change results in increased poverty and widespread loss of livelihoods – it is also likely to have negative impacts on sustained peace.
- In the longer perspective, climate change may lead to increased internal and international migration. There is a lack of robust evidence that climate-induced migration leads to violent conflict.
- Sudden climate-induced events, flash floods for example, appear to be a larger threat to human security and sustained peace than gradual resource reductions (e.g. desertification). When uncertainty is high adaptation tends towards creating shock-resilient buffers (e.g. infrastructure), while gradual change allows for more efficient, targeted solutions (e.g. introduction of alternative crops).
- While there are some single-case analyses, there is no robust evidence linking resource scarcity to increased conflict. Climate change may increase the risk of armed conflict, but only under certain conditions and in interaction with several other socio-political factors.
- Environmental impacts of climate change will vary according to region. For example: rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns and rainfall averages, which lead to critical subsistence resources will become scarce, will affect access to food; rising sea levels, which will lead to soil erosion and greater seasonal flooding, are projected to particularly threaten small island states and those living in low-lying urban areas. If exposed populations are prepared and able to response, a sustained increase in extreme weather events however need not be accompanied by corresponding trends in casualties.
A set of recommendations are provided for targeting future development and peacebuilding efforts:
- Investing in rigorous, systematic research into a number of areas including: plausible catalysts of conflict; time-varying measures of resource availability; regional implications; non-state conflicts; and the influence of climate change in the course and outcome of ongoing conflicts.
- Promote systematic environmental accounting.
- Assess the security effects of counter-measures to climate change.
- Targeting conflict-prone areas vulnerable to adverse climate change effects.
- Incorporate security issues in future rounds of IPCC assessments to ensure security implications of climate change are taken up seriously and the policy debate is grounded in evidence.
