Sophie de Bruin

Little research has been done on projecting long-term conflict risks. Such projections are currently neither included in the development of socioeconomic scenarios or climate change impact assessments nor part of global agenda-setting policy processes. In contrast, in other fields of inquiry, long-term projections and scenario studies are establish...

This study presents three global scenario projections of conflict risk in transboundary river basins by combining scenario projection data on risks identified in the existing literature. Under a business-as-usual scenario, 920 million people are projected to live in very high to high conflict-risk basins by 2050. In the low ambition scenario, this...

The Half Earth (HE) and Sharing the Planet (SP) scenario narratives are two distinctly different scenarios on how to restore and conserve biodiversity while accounting for the need for agricultural production. Yet, the equity implications of both scenarios are not clear. We conducted a questionnaire to better understand what experts with various ba...

Integrated socioeconomic and environmental scenarios have matured over the past decades in terms of scientific methodology and policy relevance. Contrary to these advances, less progress has been made on scenarios of conflict, migration, and equity implications in the context of environmental and socioeconomic change. On the one hand, this is not s...

Rising urban food demand in Sub-Saharan Africa will put pressure on local resource boundaries, such as the available land area and water resources. In assessing the extent to which urban centres can source from nearby areas in future, earlier analysis has concentrated on agronomic measures, aiming at yield gap closure. Here, we address the potentia...

Projecting migration is challenging, due to the context-specific and discontinuous relations between migration and the socioeconomic and environmental conditions that drive this process. Here, we investigate the usefulness of Machine Learning (ML) Random Forest (RF) models to develop three net migration scenarios in South Asia by 2050 based on hist...

This background paper to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023 discusses the dynamics and drivers of urbanization, the associated changes in agrifood systems and the corresponding risks and opportunities to ensuring access to affordable healthy diets for all. The paper is based on a systematic review and meta-analysis of eviden...

This study The Geography of Future Water Challenges – Bending the trend shows that there is a great urgency to tackle global water and climate adaptation issues. This will require radical changes in the thinking about the value of water and in policy development worldwide, not only within the water sector itself, but also in adjacent sectors, such...

Climate change threatens core dimensions of human security, including economic stability and food production. More contested impacts of climate change entail diverse security risks, ranging from geopolitical tensions between countries to local armed conflict. Due to the potentially wide-spread and multifaceted impacts of climate change on security...

Decreasing yields due to water stress form a threat to rural livelihoods and can affect migration dynamics, especially in vulnerable regions that lack the capacity to adapt agriculture to water stress. But since migration is complex, non-linear and context-dependent, it is not feasible to predict the precise number of people that will migrate due t...

In the past decade, several efforts have been made to project armed conflict risk into the future. This study broadens current approaches by presenting a first-of-its-kind application of machine learning (ML) methods to project sub-national armed conflict risk over the African continent along three Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios and t...

Urbanisation is changing food systems globally, and in particular in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This transformation can affect rural livelihoods in multiple ways. Evidence on what enabling conditions are needed to materialise the opportunities and limit risks is scattered. Here we review scientific literature to elaborate on how urbanisatio...

In the past decade, several efforts have been made to project armed conflict risk into the future. One arising technique is the use of machine-learning (ML) models. In this study we explore its opportunities to project sub-national armed conflict risk for three shared socio-economic pathway (SSP) scenarios and three Representative Concentration Pat...

The growing demand for food, water, and shelter change the way people use land. These changes have affected or even caused conflict in several locations. However, conflicts do not erupt in isolation; they are the result of multiple interacting causes. There is limited structural understanding of these causes. In this study, we systematically coded...

Little research has been done on projecting long-term conflict risks in response to climate change. Such projections are currently neither included in the development of socioeconomic scenarios or climate change impact assessments nor part of global agenda-setting policy processes. In contrast, in other fields of inquiry, long-term projections and...

Urbanisation is a major driver of societal, environmental and economic change in both West and East Africa, affecting all aspects of food systems. This policy report provides insights into the current and projected dynamics of urbanisation and food systems in West and East Africa and assesses the potential impacts on rural livelihoods. The report c...

There is growing public awareness of global risks that are related to land degradation, poverty, food security, migration flows, natural disasters and levels of violence and conflict. In the past decades, a wealth of performance databases has become available, and these are used to quantify those risks and to influence governance globally. We name...

The potential links between climate change, environmental change, migration and conflict have received growing attention from scientists, media and global institutions over the last decade. This report aims to deepen scientific insights in these complex processes and to strengthen the knowledge-policy interface. To find conditions that may increase...

Climate change poses risks to poor and rich communities alike, although impacts on the availability and distribution of essential resources such as water, food, energy and land will differ. These changes, combined with other social, political and economic stresses and shocks, can increase tensions within and between states, which, if unmanaged, can...

The potential links between climate change, weather patterns, migration and conflict have received growing attention from scientists, media and global institutions over the last decade. This report gives an overview of available humanitarian security databases and evaluates uncertainty issues around these data. Despite the increasing role that cli...

Water is linked to many processes and events, affecting people, economic activities and ecosystems in numerous ways. Current water stresses are increasing and projected to keep on rising, as a result of climate change, economic development, population growth and inadequate water management. The possible adverse impact of increasing water- and clima...

Water is key to life and, thus, to a sustainable relationship between the human world and its natural environment. As such, water is a precious resource, but can also be a threat. Water issues (i.e. too much, too little or too dirty) are affecting the lives of many millions of people today, and cause billions of euros in economic losses, each year....