Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict

Mach, Katharine J.; Kraan, Caroline M.; Adger, W. Neil; Buhaug, Halvard; Burke, Marshall; Fearon, James D.; Field, Christopher B.; Hendrix, Cullen S.; Maystadt, Jean-François; Ο’Loughlin, John; Roessler, Philip; Scheffran, Jürgen; Schultz, Kenneth A.; Uexküll, Nina von

doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1300-6

Cited by 366 publications

(292 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…However, the widening gap between the supply and demand of critical resources is not sufficient to draw direct climate-conflict links. The wide body of literature has shown that links between climate and conflict variables are indirect and complex (Adams et al 2018;Buhaug 2015;Mach et al 2019;Scheffran et al 2012;Schleussner et al 2016). In North Africa, climate change is expected to negatively impact agricultural production (Sect.…”

Section: Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change vulnerability, water resources and social implications in North Africa

et al. 2020

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North Africa is considered a climate change hot spot. Existing studies either focus on the physical aspects of climate change or discuss the social ones. The present article aims to address this divide by assessing and comparing the climate change vulnerability of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia and linking it to its social implications. The vulnerability assessment focuses on climate change exposure, water resources, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. The results suggest that all countries are exposed to strong temperature increases and a high drought risk under climate change. Algeria is most vulnerable to climate change, mainly due to the country's high sensitivity. Across North Africa, the combination of climate change and strong population growth is very likely to further aggravate the already scarce water situation. The so-called Arab Spring has shown that social unrest is partly caused by unmet basic needs of the population for food and water. Thus, climate change may become an indirect driver of social instability in North Africa. To mitigate the impact of climate change, it is important to reduce economic and livelihood dependence on rain-fed agriculture, strengthen sustainable land use practices, and increase the adaptive capacity. Further, increased regional cooperation and sub-national vulnerability assessments are needed.

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Section: Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change vulnerability, water resources and social implications in North Africa

et al. 2020

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“…For instance, in the field of securitization of water resources, geopolitical uncertainty is added to model and data uncertainty [10][11][12]. Climate security is another example where the identification of linkages between climate change and violent conflict is difficult, although recent studies indicate that current climatic changes could exacerbate conflicts [13,14] and that the risk of future conflicts due to intensifying climate change might increase [14]. De Châtel [9] hints to this complexity of security, geopolitics and environmental change when discussing the interactions of a series of social, political and economic factors that, alongside severe drought, led to violent conflict in Syria.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opportunities and Challenges for Meeting the UN 2030 Agenda in the Light of Global Change—A Case Study of Swedish Perspectives

2019

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This study explores how geopolitical aspects can affect actors’ sense of agency to achieve the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its ambition to transform the world sustainably by studying the linkages between global change and the 2030 Agenda as described by Swedish change agents. Sweden has a self-declared ambition for leadership in the 2030 Agenda. The world’s high-income countries, including Sweden, have been given a specific responsibility to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The results of this focus group study show that the geopolitical landscape encompasses a multitude of actors and roles whose relationships are filled with tension, creating dichotomies between them. The analysis indicates that Sweden is assessed to be dependent on functioning ecosystems, both locally and globally, as well as causing global environmental change. Two narratives have emerged: (i) the narrative of the 2030 Agenda, referring to deliberate societal transformations that can be controlled and steered, and that have a direction; and (ii) the narrative of geopolitics, indicating perceptions of emergent transformations that appear uncontrollable, drifting aimlessly towards an unknown future. These narratives might influence the understanding of societal transformations, and need to be considered in the facilitation of platforms for deliberative transformations or responses to emerging transformations.

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“…Besides these direct costs, impacts can propagate into other sectors due to losses of ecosystem services (e.g., Palmer et al 2009;Mora et al 2018), disruption of global supply chains (e.g., Haraguchi and Lall 2015;in den Bäumen et al 2015;Cottrell et al 2019), and increased risk mitigation costs (e.g., Kreibich et al 2017). There is also a growing body of literature exploring the effects of droughts and floods on human health (e.g., Hajat et al 2005;Haines et al 2006;Fernandez et al 2015;Evans 2019), migration (e.g., Perch-Nielsen et al 2008;Feng et al 2010;Black et al 2011;Abel et al 2019), and conflicts (e.g., Gleick 2014;Maystadt and Ecker 2014;Kelley et al 2015;Ghimire et al 2015), although there is as yet no consensus on the causal linkages between these hydrological extremes and their impacts due to the complexity of physical and socioecological systems (e.g., Hajat et al 2005;Adams et al 2018;Mach et al 2019). Nevertheless, these studies highlight the societal value of an improved assessment of drought and flood risk, whose impacts may further increase as a result of climate change and economic development.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Global Drought and Flood Catalogue from 1950 to 2016

Pan

Wei

et al. 2020

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

117

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Hydrological extremes, in the form of droughts and floods, have impacts on a wide range of sectors including water availability, food security, and energy production. Given continuing large impacts of droughts and floods and the expectation for significant regional changes projected in the future, there is an urgent need to provide estimates of past events and their future risk, globally. However, current estimates of hydrological extremes are not robust and accurate enough, due to lack of long-term data records, standardized methods for event identification, geographical inconsistencies, and data uncertainties. To tackle these challenges, this article presents the development of the first Global Drought and Flood Catalogue (GDFC) for 1950–2016 by merging the latest in situ and remote sensing datasets with state-of-the-art land surface and hydrodynamic modeling to provide a continuous and consistent estimate of the terrestrial water cycle and its extremes. This GDFC also includes an unprecedented level of detailed analysis of drought and large-scale flood events using univariate and multivariate risk assessment frameworks, which incorporates regional spatial–temporal characteristics (i.e., duration, spatial extent, severity) and global hazard maps for different return periods. This Catalogue forms a basis for analyzing the changing risk of droughts and floods and can underscore national and international climate change assessments and provide a key reference for climate change studies and climate model evaluations. It also contributes to the growing interests in multivariate and compounding risk analysis.

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Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict

Cited by 366 publications

References 38 publications

Climate change vulnerability, water resources and social implications in North Africa

Climate change vulnerability, water resources and social implications in North Africa

Opportunities and Challenges for Meeting the UN 2030 Agenda in the Light of Global Change—A Case Study of Swedish Perspectives

A Global Drought and Flood Catalogue from 1950 to 2016

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