The vast majority of scientists believe Earth’s climate is changing.
A growing contingent of theorists, including those at the Pentagon, believe that the ripple effects of this changing global environment will cause sociopolitical strife, and even outright war, as the world warms.
A think tank of 14 experts came together and authored a study contending climate change is not going to be the most major driver of future wars and state violence, but it may just tip the balance in future scenarios, as they report in the journal Nature.
“These experts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries,” they write. “However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate-conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty.”
The study was the product of 11 climate and conflict experts from international institutions, and three assessment facilitators.
The assessment started with each of the 11 experts undergoing expert-elicitation interviews.
The experts were then then led in a group deliberation following an agenda set by the assessment facilitators.
The dialogues eventually resulted in 950 pages of documentation.
Then, the group set about synthesizing it into a single manuscript, led by qualitative content analysis by Katharine Mach, lead author, who is director of the Stanford Environment Assessment Facility.
The resulting 18-page paper concludes that climate change plays a part, but not as much as other pressures acting upon societies themselves.
The factors that were more influential were: low socioeconomic development; low state capability; intergroup inequality; recent history of violent conflict; conflict tin neighboring areas; external intervention; economic shocks; natural resource dependency; population pressure; political shocks; illiberal democracy; mistrust of government; and corruption, according to the paper.
Climate change ranked only slightly above factors of physical geography and vertical income inequality.
However, climate change carried the most uncertainty of all cited factors—especially since its effects on exacerbating other pressures, like economic shocks or natural resources, would be hard to predict.
The numbers they produced indicated climate accounts for somewhere between 3 and 20 percent of armed conflict risk over the last century. The range increases to 10 to 50 percent for a 4 degrees Celsius rate of warming, according to the estimates.
“Intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future risks of conflict,” the authors conclude.
Other studies have tied such conflicts as the Syrian civil war to extreme climate swings, and the ripple effects. For instance, a paper in Global Environmental Change published in January looked at asylum applications and conflict deaths from then years 2011 to 2015.
Fari Awade draws water from a well in the community of Natriguel, Mauritania. Climate-related hazards, such as droughts, can cause economic shocks to agricultural communities, which may heighten the risk of armed conflict, according to a new Stanford-led study. Photo: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam.