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10 INSIGHTS ON CLIMATE IMPACTS AND PEACE: A summary of what we know
Abstract
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors are indebted to Oli Brown and Paige McClanahan for their many helpful comments and a great edit.
... The region is strongly affected by increasing temperatures, extreme drought, and destructive tropical storms, and Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua all rank within the top 50 countries that have shown to be most impacted by the climate risks from 1999-2018 (Eckstein et al. 2019). Such climate dynamics are set to continue undermining access to, and the availability and productivity of, key natural resources, thereby contributing to local competition -and potentially violence -over access and usage (Detges et al. 2020). This is particularly significant in the context of the Dry Corridor, given the extent to which the regional economy is dependent on smallholder agriculture: In Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, more than two thirds of the population rely on agriculture, the viability of which is intimately tied to ecosystems increasingly threatened by climate variability Baca et al. 2014). ...
... A lack of institutional trust remains pervasive amongst many indigenous communities to this day, partially due to a continued absence of restorative justice for affected communities and individuals. Climate impacts are therefore set to increase pressure on contexts already characterized by low social trust, low institutional capacity, and high degrees of socio-economic marginalization, thereby lowering the prospects of climate-induced competition being resolved equitably and peacefully (Detges et al. 2020). These conditions also make Central America vulnerable to agricultural shocks, disruptions in food prices, and food insecurity. ...
... Increasing and unregulated movement -whether permanent or temporary, over short or longer distances -may create new challenges in receiving areas. Already overstretched city infrastructure and services may not be able to keep up with population growth, which, combined with poor labor market absorption, can give rise to growing poverty and socioeconomic marginalization (Detges et al. 2020). Migrants are also often forced to work in informal, poorly regulated sectors such as construction, transport, or household services, leaving many open to exploitation and abuse. ...
This paper aims to understand the linkages between climate, conflict, agriculture, and
migration in the Central American Dry Corridor and offer a road map for the region while
emphasizing the role of research and development.
EN STUDY Requested by the AFET committee
Since the European Parliament issued its resolution on climate diplomacy in June 2018,
several important trends have been shaping this area of the EU’s external action, enabling
progress and posing new challenges. The EU started its comprehensive low-emission
transformation with the Green Deal, established a progressive policy framework for
sustainable finance and had to cope with the impacts of the pandemic in a way that is
compatible with its transformative ambition. At the same time, its role on the international
stage has evolved substantially, and sustainability has been playing an ever-stronger role
across its external relations. Against the backdrop of these developments, this study
assesses the progress of climate diplomacy since 2018, with a focus on climate security,
trade, development cooperation, sustainable capital flows, gender equality and science,
research and innovation. Based on this assessment, it outlines the tasks for a European
climate diplomacy of the future and highlights the role of the European Parliament in
shaping this policy field
Significance
We show that for thousands of years, humans have concentrated in a surprisingly narrow subset of Earth’s available climates, characterized by mean annual temperatures around ∼13 °C. This distribution likely reflects a human temperature niche related to fundamental constraints. We demonstrate that depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, over the coming 50 y, 1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 y. Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.
Climate-related disasters are among the most societally disruptive impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Their potential impact on the risk of armed conflict is heavily debated in the context of the security implications of climate change. Yet, evidence for such climate-conflict-disaster links remains limited and contested. One reason for this is that existing studies do not triangulate insights from different methods and pay little attention to relevant context factors and especially causal pathways. By combining statistical approaches with systematic evidence from QCA and qualitative case studies in an innovative multi-method research design, we show that climate-related disasters increase the risk of armed conflict onset. This link is highly context-dependent and we find that countries with large populations, political exclusion of ethnic groups, and a low level of human development are particularly vulnerable. For such countries, almost one third of all conflict onsets over the 1980-2016 period have been preceded by a disaster within 7 days. The robustness of the effect is reduced for longer time spans. Case study evidence points to improved opportunity structures for armed groups rather than aggravated grievances as the main mechanism connecting disasters and conflict onset.
Climate-related costs and benefits may not be evenly distributed across the population. We study distributional implications of seasonal weather and climate on within-country inequality in rural India. Utilizing a first difference approach, we find that the poor are more sensitive to weather variations than the non-poor. The poor respond more strongly to (seasonal) temperature changes: negatively in the (warm) spring season, more positively in the (cold) rabi season. Less precipitation is harmful to the poor in the monsoon kharif season and beneficial in the winter and spring seasons. We show that adverse weather aggravates inequality by reducing consumption of the poor farming households. Future global warming predicted under RCP8.5 is likely to exacerbate these effects, reducing consumption of poor farming households by one third until the year 2100. We also find inequality in consumption across seasons with higher consumption during the harvest and lower consumption during the sowing seasons.
On 7 March 1985, the railway workers of Sudan’s north-eastern town of Atbara took to the streets to protest against the rise in the price of basic foods decreed by the regime of President Jafa’ar Nimeiri.¹ These protests continued for two and a half weeks before the outbreak in Khartoum of the main Intifada, which toppled Nimeiri, his ruling party, and his main state security service. On 19 December 2018, similar protests against rising food prices erupted once again in Atbara, and spread to the rest of the country much more rapidly. As in 1985, these protests have shifted from their early focus on the cost of bread toward a resolutely political emphasis on the toppling of the President Umar al-Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party—hence the slogan ‘tasgut bas’, or ‘just go’. At time of writing, the uprising has lasted just over two months, far longer than those that unseated Sudan’s last two military regimes in 1964 and 1985, which needed just 5 and 11 days, respectively, to bring down the government. It is less Khartoum focused than the previous movements,² as demonstrated by the prominence of the hashtag ‘cities of Sudan rise up (mudun al-Sudan tantafid)’. This not because the previous uprisings did not witness substantial regional revolt, for they certainly did,³ but because the rise of social media activism has enabled dissent to spread from regional cities such as Atbara to Khartoum and elsewhere much more speedily.
There is extensive evidence that higher temperatures increase the probability of local conflict. There is also evidence that emigration represents an important margin of adaptation to a warming climate. In this article, we analyse whether migration influences the link between warming and conflicts by either attenuating this connection in countries of origin and/or by exacerbating it in countries of destination. We find that in countries where the propensity to emigrate—as measured by past diaspora—is higher, increases in temperature have smaller effects on the probability of armed conflict, compared to countries with lower migration propensity. This is consistent with emigration functioning as ‘escape valve’ for local tensions. We find no evidence that climate-induced migration increased the probability of conflict in receiving countries.
In this paper, we move from the large strand of research that looks at evidence of climate migration to the questions: who are the climate migrants? and where do they go? These questions are crucial to design policies that mitigate welfare losses of migration choices due to climate change. We study the direct and heterogeneous associations between weather extremes and migration in rural India. We combine ERA5 reanalysis data with the India Human Development Survey household panel and conduct regression analyses by applying linear probability and multinomial logit models. This enables us to establish a causal relationship between temperature and precipitation anomalies and overall migration as well as migration by destination. We show that adverse weather shocks decrease rural-rural and international migration and push people into cities in different, presumably more prosperous states. A series of positive weather shocks, however, facilitates international migration and migration to cities within the same state. Further, our results indicate that in contrast to other migrants, climate migrants are likely to be from the lower end of the skill distribution and from households strongly dependent on agricultural production. We estimate that approximately 8% of all rural-urban moves between 2005 and 2012 can be attributed to weather. This figure might increase as a consequence of climate change. Thus, a key policy recommendation is to take steps to facilitate integration of less educated migrants into the urban labor market.
African cities are facing challenges arising from climate change. Increased severity of rainfall threaten huge parts of urban settlers living in flood prone areas. Coincidently, projections of population trends suggest that urbanization rates will remain at high levels. The impacts such climate change conditions can have on local livelihoods already under socio-economic stress, may contribute to the onset of urban violence. In sharp contrast to these possible developments, contemporary scholarship on the relation between climate change and conflict has a strong rural focus.
A novel systematic literature review of academic articles looking at trends and patterns of the climate change-conflict nexus was conducted to explore whether there is an urban neglect in the literature. The results suggest that scholarly attention on the urban is very limited and focus rather on rural dynamics. A second main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a conceptual framework on the climate change-conflict nexus in urban areas. It combines existing streams of literature into a single model to further theorize and understand dynamics of the climate change-urban violence linkages. Finally, the paper argues for more research on multi-causal pathways leading from adverse climate conditions to urban political violence.
This paper contributes to the debate whether climate change and global warming cause conflicts by providing novel evidence about the role of extreme temperature events for armed conflict based on high-frequency high-resolution data for the entire continent of Africa. The analysis of monthly data for 4826 grid cells of 0.75° latitude × longitude over the period 1997–2015 documents a positive effect of the occurrence of temperature extremes on conflict incidence. These effects are larger the more severe the extremes in terms of duration, and are larger in highly densely populated regions, in regions with lower agricultural productivity, and in regions with more pronounced land degradation. The results also point towards heterogeneity of the effect with respect to the type of violence and the crucial role of population dynamics. Considering the consequences of increases in the frequency of extreme events in a long-differences analysis delivers evidence for a positive effect on conflict.
Afforestation is considered a cost‐effective and readily available climate change mitigation option. In recent studies afforestation is presented as a major solution to limit climate change. However, estimates of afforestation potential vary widely. Moreover, the risks in global mitigation policy and the negative trade‐offs with food security are often not considered. Here, we present a new approach to assess the economic potential of afforestation with the IMAGE 3.0 integrated assessment model framework. In addition, we discuss the role of afforestation in mitigation pathways and the effects of afforestation on the food system under increasingly ambitious climate targets. We show that afforestation has a mitigation potential of 4.9 GtCO2/yr at 200 US$/tCO2 in 2050 leading to large‐scale application in an SSP2 scenario aiming for 2°C (410 GtCO2 cumulative up to 2,100). Afforestation reduces the overall costs of mitigation policy. However, it may lead to lower mitigation ambition and lock‐in situations in other sectors. Moreover, it bears risks to implementation and permanence as the negative emissions are increasingly located in regions with high investment risks and weak governance, for example in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Afforestation also requires large amounts of land (up to 1,100 Mha) leading to large reductions in agricultural land. The increased competition for land could lead to higher food prices and an increased population at risk of hunger. Our results confirm that afforestation has substantial potential for mitigation. At the same time, we highlight that major risks and trade‐offs are involved. Pathways aiming to limit climate change to 2°C or even 1.5°C need to minimize these risks and trade‐offs in order to achieve mitigation sustainably.