Interventions addressing conflict in communities hosting climate-influenced migrants: Literature review

Abstract

Existing scholarship hypothesizes a causal chain from climate change to resource availability constraints, to forced migration and conflict risks. Limited research, however, synthesizes findings about the efficacy of interventions to alleviate resources conflict in communities hosting climate migrants. This systematic literature review identified and analyzed 33 studies that explore interventions contributing to climate conflict resolution and environmental peacebuilding in receiving and migrant communities. Despite limitations of current research, the review shows that multi-scale and cross-sectoral interventions are necessary though challenging to establish. Community-level initiatives and local support networks that create social capital are key interventions leading from conflict to cooperation between climate-driven migrants and host communities. However, such interventions often require external resources that come with strings attached. Our analysis also identifies gaps in the extant literature. First, few scholars explore how adaptive capacity—especially influenced by power relations among stakeholders in newly formed communities—evolves over time in response to multiple repeated threat factors. Second, there is limited research on whether and how external interventions can help climate refugees gain access rights to natural resources for long-term conflict avoidance. Finally, there is a lack of community-based performance evaluation metrics to assess long or short-term impacts of interventions.

Environmental (in)security, peacebuilding and green economic recovery in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine

“…In Italy, for example, the Po River dried up, resulting in crop losses for the food industry and France's nuclear power plant operators faced a scarcity of cooling water. These compounding crises show the danger of risk cascades and the complicated political challenges in a climate-changed world (see also He et al, 2024;Medina et al, 2024;S ˇedova´et al, 2024). The European Commission went so far as to call agriculture a security issue (Fortuna & Foote, 2022) and there has been mounting pressure to weaken or delay European agricultural reforms aimed at sustainability to prioritise food production output over environmental standards (Dahm, 2022;Mamonova, 2022).…”

A review of climate security risk assessment tools

“…For example, climatic events drive migration (Petrova, 2021;S ˇedova´et al, 2021). Migration can increase social unrest in the host (He et al, 2024;Petrova, 2021) and peri-urban areas (Gizelis et al, 2021) and contribute to perceived insecurity among migrant populations. Adverse climate impacts in major food-producing regions can affect global food prices (Bren d'Amour et al, 2016;Gaupp et al, 2020;Kalkuhl, 2016), and climate impacts on the spread of infectious diseases could lead to the outbreak of epidemics (Gibb et al, 2020;Shuman, 2010).…”

Be a man: A theory of climate change, masculinities and violence

“…This relationship between climate change and an increased likelihood of violence through restrictions on available non-violent masculine gender roles is the basis of the theory presented here. However, it is important to recognize that local dynamics can mediate the relationship between climate change and violent conflict (He et al, 2024) and the role that factors such as socioeconomic marginalization, instability and state institutions play in regulating the instability caused by climate change for their populations. That is to say that such factors can serve as preconditions for the causal mechanism theorized here.…”