Author: Climate And Conflict

Bookshelves are getting heavy from dire portrayals of a hotter future with more conflict. Two of today’s most high-profile conflict cases – Darfur and the war theatre in Syria – have been strongly connected to environmental change, at least judging from media sources and pundits. While over a dozen studies have conducted statistical analyses on… Read more »

Food price fluctuations over the last decade and the corresponding unrest in several countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East have led to a renewed interest in the link between food and unrest. A recent policy brief highlights some of the main findings in the field and suggests avenues for future research related to… Read more »

One of the consequences of war is disrupted food provision. The connection between conflict and hunger is indisputable when we look at today’s locations of the major global hunger emergencies: Rakhine in Myanmar, the Kasai Region in DR Congo, north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen. It is estimated that 80 percent of the World… Read more »

In March, I argued that the connections between climate change and security are complex, contingent, and not fully understood.  Most of the academic literature has firmly focused on conflict onset with the broader security consequences largely understudied. For policy audiences, the nuance can be frustrating. It is difficult to know what to do with such… Read more »

Constant war drove Fazle, his wife and four children away from their home and farm in the Khyber region of Pakistan eight years ago. They loved their home, but with all the shooting and the armed extremist groups, he had to leave or endure the death, destruction and instability that comes with war. But seven… Read more »

I reported in this Blog on 25 January on the prospects for coverage of the link between climate and conflict in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scheduled for release in 2021–22. The number of chapters in the report for Working Group II has been cut to 18,… Read more »

This blog post was first posted on the Duck of Minerva. After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko,… Read more »

Last week, PRIO co-hosted a set of meetings for peers, policy, and the general public at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. These events marked the end of Climate Anomalies and Violent Environments (CAVE), a three-year research project supported by the Research Council of Norway’s FRIPRO program. The project has contributed… Read more »

Jihadists have succeeded in taking control of more than half of Mali, where many people in rural areas are now adherents of one armed group or another. This situation is largely the result of widespread frustration with the bad governance by the country’s corrupt ruling elites. While the jihadists have managed to take advantage of… Read more »

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is headed towards another round of assessing the world’s climate and how it affects our lives and livelihoods. Last September, the outline of the Sixth Assessment Report was approved and now the selection of authors is underway. ‘Climate change is fuelling wars across the world’. Thus, a heading… Read more »