Climate wars or climate cooperation: Imagining our future in the age of scarcity

The world will rapidly warm within the next ten years; by 2034, scientists expect the globe to be 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. By 2051, this figure will be 2°C. If global superpowers don’t implement aggressive climate policies in the next few years, I may live to see our world permanently warm by 2.5°C. New studies and climate models shed light on what such a future might look like environmentally. But what about the social sciences? How do climate disasters, scarcity, and insecurity affect the foundations of our social relationships? Will we see more cooperation or conflict in light of climate change? Climate conflict research deals precisely with these critical questions and often attempts to extrapolate future scenarios from observations of current dynamics. After all, climate conflicts are not only a thing of the future. They are already happening. But mainly in a different way than widely assumed. Thus, there are not only climate conflicts in which the environment or climate interacts with conflicts but also, in turn, how conflicts lead to massive environmental degradation and increased greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, there are case studies of how even climate change mitigation and adaptation measures can lead to conflicts on a local level.

Three recent papers are used to give an overview. Mach, Kraan, Adger, Buhaug, Burke, Fearon, Field, Hendrix, Maystadt, Loughlin, Roessler, Scheffran, Schultz, and Uexkull’s 2019 Nature piece “Climate as a risk for armed conflict” reviews some of the most influential areas in the field of climate conflict. Together, they establish common ground in a contested field through expert interviews and discussions. The second paper, Sharifi, Simangan, and Kaneko’s 2020 publication in Sustainability Science, “Three Decades of Research on Climate Change and Peace: A Bibliometrics Analysis,” is a classical quantitative literature review of 1,337 publications in the field of climate conflict research. Ide, Johnson, Barnett, Krampe, Le Billon, Uexkull, and Vélez-Torres address the lack of interaction between different approaches to analyzing and researching the climate conflict nexus in their 2023 article titled “The future of environmental peace and conflict research.” The paper, published in Environmental Politics, also highlights proposals for future research.

Climate Conflict Research Matters

Climate conflict research is necessary because uncertainty about the possible social effects of climate change obscures the actual “cost of carbon.” The risk of climate change taking a central role in future conflict is not static – this risk increases as emissions rise. The sooner we have in-depth research results on climate conflicts, the more damage we can prevent through targeted policy interventions.

The earth’s population is increasing, more and more resources are being depleted, and more greenhouse gasses are emitted globally. In contrast to our socio-economic indicators, trimmed for indefinite growth, the limits of our home planet are not growing. Climate conflict research sits at the heart of these complex and interconnected dynamics of climate change, environment, society, conflict, and peace. 

It is often claimed that the climate catastrophe will inevitably lead to devastating civil wars, conflicts over water, and millions of climate refugees. However, what does science have to say about such horror scenarios? The reviewed papers make clear that there is currently not much evidence for such scenarios. After all, we, as humanity, and not the “climate,” have the steering wheel in our hands. Let’s make use of it.

The Evolution of Climate Conflict Research

Various streams of climate conflict research have developed over the last 30 years – these differ methodologically, epistemologically, and ontologically. The field began during the academic and geopolitical transition in the early 1990s. Along with the end of the Cold War, the flare-up of a series of brutal civil wars, and the influential United Nations “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, researchers shifted away from focusing on protecting states to protecting people. The focus of conflict research generally shifted from interstate confrontations to intrastate conflicts, i.e., civil wars. The potential threats to human security were also expanded to include climate change. However, the topic of climate conflicts did not reach a real breakthrough until after 2007. This was followed by a second significant increase in academic publications after 2015. According to the keyword analysis of academic papers by Sharifi et al., the three most frequently used words in this context before 2007 were “war,” “migration,” and “risk.” Between 2007 and 2015, “civil war,” “conflict,” and “migration,” and after 2015, “climate change,” “civil war,” and “politics.” This shift coincides with the broader evolution away from interstate conflicts towards the analysis of intrastate conflicts. In recent years, the importance of the research topic of climate migration has also decreased, but the importance of politics in all those interconnected processes has increased. 

And indeed, it has taken some time to bring politics back into the field of climate conflicts. Historically, this field has suffered from a strong influence of so-called climate determinism. This means that social and political outcomes and developments are attributed to a large extent to environmental and climate influences while important social and political mechanisms, systems, and contextual conditions are sidelined. However, other fundamental concepts that were frequently used at the outset of the research field of climate conflicts have undergone analysis through new lenses over time. For example, while the notions of scarcity or vulnerability were initially treated as a product of finite natural resources and climate change, most researchers today see the two concepts as inherently socially, politically, and economically determined and constructed. Thus, scarcity and vulnerability are not naturally determined but created by systematic power mechanisms. This challenges the somewhat provocative title of this article since perhaps we do not live in a supposed “age of scarcity” after all but can actively construct and deconstruct notions of scarcity! This ascribes a higher degree of importance to human agency and influences the outcome of human-environment and human-climate interactions. We are, therefore, not at the mercy of the environment or climate change when it comes to shaping social systems and preserving peace. We can actively intervene, adapt, identify, and reduce vulnerabilities, and implement resilient and sustainable solutions and policies.

Based on these findings, six streams have emerged over the years in climate conflict research, as Ide et al. write. The classic approach follows the lines of “climate change and armed conflict.” This stream sees climate as one of the multiple drivers of conflict. It is described as a “predominantly positivist, empirical, and quantitative approach that seeks to identify causal links between climate and conflict.” The next stream is “environmental change and human security, ” prioritizing basic human needs and rights. This approach sees social processes as the leading cause of climate insecurity and vulnerability. The third stream is “environmental peacebuilding.” It challenges the assumption that climate change unidirectionally leads to conflict. This more qualitative approach based on case studies focuses on how cooperation and far-sighted management of natural resources can lead to peace and cooperation, as environmental issues are usually less contested than other issues. “Political ecology” sees the environment as a human construct and concludes that climate conflicts are always socially mediated. The approach identifies uneven power relations as the cause of unequal access and control over natural resources and climate conflicts as sites of struggle against said unequal power structures. This stream utilizes field-based, historically grounded, and empirically driven research. The penultimate stream is “securitization of the environment,” which argues that security issues and threats are always constructed through human discourse, ideas, and interactions and thus can bring about change but also run the risk of bringing about short-term, populist, or superficial lip service instead of sustainable change. The last approach is “decolonizing environmental security” and focuses on identifying and disrupting oppressive, extractive, and exploitative power structures. Proponents of this approach see social and environmental violence as a consequence of capitalism and the expansion of the Western cultural imaginary. At the same time, it seeks to amplify non-Western voices.

Finding an Academic Consensus on Climate Conflicts

Over time, this field of research has become far more than just an attempt to find linear links between climate and conflicts. A conflict dataset usually only shows when it is too late, and violence has broken out. But what happens before that? How do potential climate conflicts end? Those classic approaches to climate conflict research utilizing big datasets produce different results. Some analyses see a clear correlation between environmental and climate impacts and conflict, some see no correlation, and some even see a negative correlation, i.e., a rather pacifying effect of climate stressors. Most of those studies are quantitative but use different methods, definitions, and datasets.

It isn’t easy to find a consensus among experts on the current state of research. What is clear, however, is that current research is taking a more nuanced approach to problems in this area than was the case ten or twenty years ago. It can be agreed that climate change is a non-traditional security threat, with a traditional security threat being terrorism, for example, and a potential threat multiplier interacting with more traditional security threats. The impact of climate change on conflict and peace can be direct and indirect. As described by Mach et al., the experts agree that climate variability, hazards, and trends have affected armed conflict within countries. Still, other conflict drivers seem more influential in this context. Factors like low socioeconomic development, low state capacity, intergroup inequality, and a recent history of violent conflict are excellent predictors of conflict compared to climatic changes. The panel of experts surveyed estimates that only around 3%-20% of disputes in the last century were noticeably influenced by climate variability or climate change. 

On the other hand, there is also consensus among the experts that substantial investments in reducing known drivers of conflict and climate change adaptation can contribute to peace. Examples include introducing crop insurance, agricultural training services, cash transfer programs, improved crop storage after harvest, more secure land tenure, and dismantling structural hierarchies between groups. Functioning institutions are significant in an environment where resources are scarce. This is demonstrated, for example, by the fact that water flows in transboundary rivers are very well regulated peacefully in most cases by agreements and institutions, despite the high potential for conflict in such spaces. 

However, experts need more confidence in the mechanisms through which climate affects the risk of conflict. One frequently cited pathway is climate shocks, caused by severe climate disasters such as floods or droughts and translated into economic shocks, which interact with broader societal issues. 

The Holy Grail of Climate Conflict Research

Researchers must now understand the factors and context that might contribute to more climate conflict or cooperation. The field sees a window of opportunity in which targeted policies can intervene in climate catastrophes and great climate uncertainty. It may be possible to prevent a looming climate conflict and steer the situation toward cooperation. However, these considerations remain hypothetical for the time being. However, it is essential to note that climate conflict research only has a positive impact if theory is reflected in practice. Therefore, effective, just, and scientifically grounded policy recommendations are the holy grail of the research field.

The Way Forward

In the last chapters, I outlined the evolution and the current state of research in the hunt for the holy grail of climate conflict research. But where is the journey going? It is encouraging that different streams have emerged. Adding more perspectives is undoubtedly an enrichment. However, the respective proponents should communicate much more with each other and look beyond the boundaries of their silos. In future research, it is essential to remember that climate conflicts are not just, as initially thought, a linear link between climate change and more conflict. Instead, climate conflicts appear inherently complex, non-linear, bi-directional, and context-dependent.

Consequently, and this is atypical in orthodox academic approaches, we often won´t be able to universalize geographically limited findings in the field of climate conflict, as the regional factors and framework conditions have too significant an influence on the study’s outcome. In the future, it is, therefore, essential to appreciate local dynamics and to accept that the observations cannot be applied to possible climate conflicts in different spaces. It would be helpful to supplement the current mainly quantitative results with qualitative ethnographic field research. Climate conflict research rarely occurs in the field, but it is done on the desk instead. 

This would also be an excellent opportunity to give affected voices more weight. The literature review by Sharifi et al. shows that most climate conflict authors come from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Australia, and they mostly write about places in the Global South. Together with a lack of fieldwork, this can lead to distortions in the results. However, imbalances can also be observed in the regions studied. Most current publications on climate conflicts focus on Africa and the Middle East. 

Future research should also recognize that climate change, at present, does not start conflicts but instead prolongs or perhaps intensifies them. Essential questions about mechanisms and what happens before climate conflicts occur remain unanswered and require further research. Finally, it is high time to pay more attention to the critical topic of climate cooperation and to design more studies that focus on climate conflicts on the one hand and climate cooperation beyond water-sharing agreements on the other. This bias towards conflictual visions of the future is still evident in- and outside of academia.

Climate conflict research is a vibrant and vital topic. Nowadays, climate conflict considerations are increasingly finding their way into the mainstream. Still, there are always new evolving questions and gaps to explore and investigate. Because, as described at the beginning, my children and I will experience dramatic climatic upheavals well within our lifetime. Now, it is up to us, and the new research supports this, to actively shape the social side of this future and prevent the worst from happening.