The increase in global temperatures by over 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times is already having broad and significant impacts. An ongoing multi-year drought in Eastern Africa, for instance, has been attributed to global warming. Hunger crises, displacement, and exacerbated conflict between pastoralist groups are some of the reported dire consequences. This blog post reports… Read more »
Author: Nina von Uexkull
Nina von Uexkull is Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and Associate Senior Researcher at PRIO. She holds a PhD from Uppsala University. Her current research concerns security implications of climate change as well as rural armed conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa, combining advanced statistical methods with surveys and field interviews.
Can we predict climate change impacts on future peace and security?
In the same manner as societies are developing policies to strike the optimal balance between public safety and social and economic cost of COVID-19, the international community is negotiating strategies to address climate change. However, unlike lockdowns, vaccination, and other responses to the ongoing pandemic, risk-reducing effects of alternative climate policies cannot be observed in… Read more »
Climate-conflict research: A decade of scientific progress
The last decade was the warmest on record, with 2020 tied with 2016 for the all-time high average annual global temperature. This 10-year period also saw armed conflicts at severity levels not seen since the Cold War era. Could there be a causal link between these trends? To the frustration of policymakers and laymen alike,… Read more »
– No Land, No Life
Why are individuals willing to join armed groups and fight over land access? To find answers to this question I studied a militia in the Mt Elgon conflict in Kenya. A key finding of interviews with 75 ex-members of the SLDF militia was that the economic importance of land for farming communities is important for… Read more »