Barnett, Jon, and W. Neil Adger

Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but wellfounded bodies of research e on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. It explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of violent conflict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.

Smith, Dan, and Janani Vivekananda

As climate change unfolds, one of its effects is a heightened risk of violent conflict. This risk is at its sharpest in poor, badly governed countries, many of which have a recent history of armed conflict. This both adds to the burdens faced by deprived and vulnerable communities and makes it harder to reduce their vulnerability by adapting to climate change.

Policy discussions about the consequences of climate change are beginning to acknowledge the conflict and security implications. These concerns, however, are not being properly taken on within the complex negotiations for a new international agreement on reducing global warming and responding to climate change. In the negotiating context, the discussion focuses on how much money should be available for it and how that money will be controlled. This discussion pays scant attention to the complexities of adaptation, the need to harmonise it with development, or the dangers of it going astray in fragile and conflict-affected states and thereby failing to reduce vulnerability to climate change.

Policies for adapting to the effects of climate change have to respond to these realities or they will not work. At the same time, the field of development itself will have to adapt in order to face the challenge of climate change. Neither development, adaptation or peacebuilding can be regarded as a bolt-on to either one of the other two. The problems are interlinked and the policy responses must be integrated.

This paper outlines the climate-conflict interlinkages and the challenges involved in responding to their combined challenge. Establishing the overall goal of international policy on adaptation as helping people in developing countries adapt successfully to climate change even where there is state fragility or conflict risk, the paper makes and explains eight specific policy recommendations.

Buhang, Halvard, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and Ole Magnus Theisen

A number of high-profile individuals and policy reports have spurred alarmist claims that environmental change in general and climate change in particular will have enormous impacts on humanity. In a highly influential article The Coming Anarchy, Robert D. Kaplan (1994) envisioned the core foreign-policy challenge for the twenty-first century as the ‘political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels – developments that will prompt mass migration and, in turn, incite group conflicts’. More recently, a report from Christian Aid (2007: 2) claims that an estimated 1 billion people will be forced to leave their homes between now and 2050, which might ‘de-stabilise whole regions where increasingly desperate populations compete for dwindling food and water’. Along the same lines, Thomas Homer-Dixon (2007) argues that ‘climate change will help produce [..] insurgencies, genocide, guerrilla attacks, gang warfare, and global terrorism.’ More dramatic still, a report to the Pentagon on implications of climate change for US national security sketches scenarios of epic proportions, including the risk of reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature whereby humanity would be engaged in ‘constant battles for diminishing resources’ (Schwartz & Randall, 2003: 16). A recent report by retired US generals and admirals has added military authority to the issue, arguing that ‘Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world’ and that this ‘presents significant national security challenges for the United States’ (CNA, 2007: 1). The UK Treasury-commissioned Stern Review (2006) and the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) are generally more cautious in their references to conflict, but warn against potentially dire societal consequences of climate change.

Brock, Hannah

The likely future drivers of insecurity do not respect national boundaries, and will not be sustainably addressed by unilateral approaches. For example, as competition over energy resources increases with depleting supplies of fossil fuels, it will become more vital that positive collaboration between consumer nations in the West and resource-rich nations in the South occurs. In a globalised world in which no nation’s security is independent of their region or of the wider international community, the opinions of the majority world can no longer be neglected by the major powers who seek to dictate global security policies.

The sustainable security approach posits global justice and equity as key requirements of any effective response to global insecurity. Voices from the Global South remain on the periphery of discussions around global political and security issues, and particularly at the negotiating tables of international institutions. The implementation of a newly egalitarian approach to international relations can begin with a close engagement in western organisations with majority world thinking. Security analysts and policy-makers must continue to engage and collaborate with counterparts in the Global South, ensuring that the sustainable security project puts into practice the idea of a truly inclusive global politics.

Many future security problems, and also the solutions, will be found in the Global South, within the very populations whose marginalisation has resulted in much contemporary insecurity. Whilst climate change, for example, will hit the poorest communities hardest6, it is with emerging economies like China, India and Brazil that the West must engage if mitigating climate chaos is to have any success at all. These non- Western perspectives must be recognised and addressed in concrete policies in the countries of the Global North. Such policies should be focused on transforming tensions at their root rather than solely attempting to control violent conflicts.

Evans, Alex

This paper provides a brief assessment of how natural resource scarcity and global climate change may change the risk of violent conflict in the future. The resource scarcity element of the paper is primarily focused on resources required to meet basic needs such as food, land and water, as opposed to high-value commodities associated with the ‘resource curse’, such as diamonds, coltan or hardwood (although oil is touched on in the paper, primarily because of the linkages between oil and other scarcity issues). The paper begins with an overview of projected trends in resource scarcity and climate change. It emphasises that problems of resource availability may be as much the result of poor governance as physical constraints, and that the risk posed by climate change or resource scarcity depends as much on the vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, economies and institutions as on the magnitude of climate or scarcity impacts themselves. Resource availability must be seen not as a stand-alone issue, but rather in the context of the overall political economy landscape. The paper then discusses ways in which these trends may affect conflict risk, including already-established links and ways in which such links may evolve in the future, including under abrupt change scenarios. The paper concludes with some brief remarks on possible avenues of exploration for conflict prevention and building resilience in the light of scarcity and climate change.

Péclard, Didier

With the current attention given to climate change and global warming, the issue of “environmental security” is back high on the agenda of the international community. Environmental degradation is increasingly considered as a potential cause for the [re-]emergence of violent conflicts due to shrinking natural resources such as drinkable water and land. However, research on the issue has shown that there is very little empirical evidence of a direct causal link between environmental degradation and violent conflict. In order to set effective priorities for environmental peacebuilding, it is important to understand - particularly in situations of environmental stress - how natural resource conflicts are embedded in social and political dynamics, how they are managed by local institutions, and how these institutional arrangements can be supported through outside intervention. Based on a research project conducted by swisspeace within the framework of the NCCR North-South, the swisspeace annual conference 2007 explored those complex linkages and formulated entry points for improving intervention strategies by external actors.

Dankelman, Irene, Khurshid Alam, Wahida Bashar Ahmed, et al.

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a major human security issue that poses serious global threats. For the world’s poor the impact will be most severe, disproportionately affecting their livelihoods and security. Women comprise 70% of those living below the poverty line. As a result, they are most likely to bear the heaviest burdens when natural disasters strike. At the same time, women are more often overlooked as potential contributors to climate change solutions, and thus to the security of all human beings. The Hyogo Framework for Action that emerged from the United Nation’s 2005 World Conference on Disaster Reduction states that “a gender perspective should be integrated into all disaster risk management policies, plans and decision-making processes, including those related to risk assessment, early warning, information management, and education and training” (ISDR, 2005: 4). It is, therefore, imperative that governments and other stakeholders build into their policies and programs strong links between gender, human security and climate change.

Warner, Koko, Tamer Afifi, Olivia Dun, et al.

Migration—whether permanent or temporary, internal or international—has always been a possible coping strategy for people facing environmental changes. Pre-history and history are marked by [episodic and localised] human movement from one climate zone to another, as people have sought out environments that would support survival as well as aspirations to a more stable existence. Some waves of migration have been associated with cultural collapse, as familiar landscapes no longer provided safe or supporting habitats and livelihoods for people.

The time to address the effects of dangerous environmental change including climate change is now. Action must be concerted and swift: Policy makers, the scientific community, civil society and other actors must seek solutions for those people who are currently migrating and who may be induced to migrate in order to seek safe and sustainable existences. Human security requires freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from hazard impact. Most importantly, achieving human security in the face of environmental change requires urgent policy attention and action today.

Waslekar, Sundeep

The objective of this report is to provide a comprehensive, long-term and regional framework for thinking about water in the Middle East, which can be implemented with specific policy decisions, beginning in the immediate future, by individual countries or small groups of countries without waiting for all the countries in the region to move forward.

Such a framework recognises the potential of water to deliver a new form of peace – the blue peace – while presenting long term scenarios of risks of wars and humanitarian crisis. The report takes a comprehensive view of rivers, tributaries, lakes and underground water bodies. It is based on the recognition of linkages between watercourses. It is not only impossible for any one country to manage a water body in isolation from other riparian countries but it is also impossible to manage a water body without examining its linkages with other watercourses in the region.

The report provides a regional perspective. Since watercourses, both surface and underground, do not understand political boundaries, it would be natural to have a regional approach to water management. The nation centric approach is unnatural and therefore unsustainable

Busby, Joshua, Kaiba White, and Todd Smith

Climate change is increasingly recognized to have implications that extend beyond impacts on people’s quality of life and into the security sphere. Scholars and analysts have invoked a host of purported problems that climate change could contribute to, from armed conflict to migration flows to complex emergencies that require humanitarian intervention. A number of these concerns apply directly to North Africa, which, for the purposes of this study, is the region including the countries along the Mediterranean, south to the Sahelian countries of Mali and Niger, and extending across to Sudan and the Horn of Africa. North Africa is a strategically important region for Europe largely because of its proximity, with the broader transatlantic policy community exercising particular concern where Africa’s problems spill over to Europe.

The purpose of this study is to reach a better understanding of how climate change and physical sources of vulnerability to natural hazards might intersect with the region’s various demographic, social, and political sources of weakness. Using Geographic Information Systems [GIS], we map the confluence of those sources of vulnerability, extracting maps of regional vulnerability from a broader research effort on the entire continent of Africa. We couple those maps with illustrative narratives from two sites of high vulnerability — Niger and Sudan — and seek to explain their significance for the transatlantic policy community, drawing on broader scholarly and policy literature.

Goulden, Marisa, and Roger Few

This report examines the links between environmental stress, climate change, human security, conflict and adaptation at different scales and localities along the Niger River. Despite a growing interest in the possible linkages between climate and conflict, limited evidence on these linkages exists, much of which is contradictory. The Niger Basin has experienced significant climate variability during the 20th century, making it suitable for studying the links between climate and conflict.

This report explores a number of issues. Firstly, it examines how climatic and environmental stresses influence water resources and human security in the Niger Basin. Secondly, the report examines whether climate stress on water resources increases the risk of conflict. Thirdly, it asks what types of adaptations, conflict resolution and governance mechanisms provide resilience to climate stresses and reduce the risk of conflict.

Hendrix, Cullen, and Idean Salehyan

Water is a critical natural resource. However, a significant share of the world’s poor lacks access to clean water, and in many developing countries, irrigation, water transmission capacity, sanitation facilities, hydroelectric capacity, and so on, are lacking. This is especially true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where according to the United Nations World Water Development Report, 340 million people lack access to clean drinking water, only 4 percent of annual renewable flows are stored, compared with 70-90 percent in developed countries, and for most countries, less than 5 percent of cultivated areas are equipped for irrigation. Thus, many countries depend on rainfall to supply water for crops, livestock, and human consumption; yet, this often means unreliable access to a vital resource. Flooding and extended droughts can destroy individual livelihoods, seriously undermine macroeconomic growth, and place strains on government revenues.

In this paper we examine the relationship between rainfall, water, and socio-political unrest in Africa. In particular, we are interested in how deviations from normal rainfall patterns, and extreme events such as flooding and drought, affect political behavior and the propensity for individuals and groups to engage in disruptive activities such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, communal conflict, and anti-government violence. Do extreme weather events exert a significant influence on political disturbances and social conflict? What forms of conflict are most likely and do they potentially threaten the stability of the government? This topic is especially pressing as the process of global climate change accelerates, potentially making rainfall more erratic and severe weather events more likely.

Brochmann, Marit

Transboundary rivers may contribute to increased hostility between riparians. This may contribute to increased hostility between riparians. This article accepts earlier arguments about water scarcity. Structural Scarcity occurs in river basins with unequal resource distribution, often created by geographic asymmetries. Hence, this article argues that the geographic asymmetries present in many river basins are key determinants of conflict risk among riparians. In a river basin the upstream state enjoys an inherent advantage and upstream river use is likely to produce unidirectional externalities that harm the states downstream. This in turn, is likely to produce grievances or claims downstream that may contribute to worsen overall state relations and consequently increase the risk of dyadic conflict.

Elliott, Lorraine

Migration and displacement are among the range of pressures on people and their communities likely to arise from the economic, social and environmental consequences of climate change. Despite fragmented data, the climate security literature has focused on the potential for climate change-induced migration to trigger social tensions and conflict within states and across borders. A human security approach seeks to ensure that people are placed at the centre of concerns about mobility and migration in response to climate change. This requires more than identifying those who are vulnerable to migration pressures. It necessitates an understanding of how migration and mobility choices are made, how vulnerabilities can be managed in ways that are participatory and responsive to local needs and circumstances, and how local, national and regional policy responses can strengthen the knowledge base and improve collaborative platforms for action.