No impact uniqueness – there’s no causal relationship between climate change and conflict – other factors are better indicators of conflict

(John, Environment editor at Ensia, “Is Climate Change Responsible for the Conflicts We’re Seeing Around the World Today?,” Ensia, 15 October 2019, https://ensia.com/features/climate-change-conflict-violence-extremism-draught-flood/,)

Today de Waal says there is no new evidence to directly link climate change and conflict.

“There has been an uptick in conflict in the past 10 years, but it is still in overall decline,” he says. “Everywhere you look at a specific conflict there are a whole lot of determining factors. In some you can identify a climate element. In Syria there was a drought exacerbated by poor water management coinciding with a spike in the price of world food, which was not climate related but due to commodity speculation. [Conflict] is never due to one factor; always many. A lot of research is by people looking for simplistic, causal links,” he says. “However, it is true that climate change is generating more extreme events and makes it more likely that bad things will happen.”

Halvard Buhaug, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), has studied civil wars in both Africa and Asia and has written that he finds no causal links with climate on either continent.

“[C]limate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict. Instead, African civil wars can be explained by generic structural and contextual conditions: prevalent ethno-political exclusion, poor national economy, and the collapse of the Cold War system,” he wrote in the journal PNAS. “The primary causes of civil war are political, not environmental, and although environmental conditions may change with future warming, general correlates of conflicts and wars are likely to prevail.”

Hakim Abdi, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, refutes research that climate has played a part in the Somali conflict.

He wrote in The Conversation in 2017: “Conflict in Somalia has deep political roots that go back decades. … [A]l-Shabaab takes advantage of the hunger and desperation caused by drought. In this way, climate worsens the conflict by giving al-Shabaab more manpower. … It is wrong to blame climate change for famine and conflict. These can either be prevented, or the impact minimised, if institutions and mechanisms of good governance are in place.”

Surprising Unanimity

Faced with such seemingly huge disagreements, it is hard to determine climate’s role in present conflict, says Katharine Mach. An associate professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, Mach is lead author of a recent paper in Nature that questioned 11 prominent conflict and climate researchers, including political scientists, economists, geographers and environmental academics.

Beneath the initial dissent among them, she says, she found “surprising unanimity” that climate can and does determine the risk of organized armed conflict. But in specific conflicts, the role of climate was judged to be small compared to other drivers.

“Across the experts,” Mach and colleagues wrote, “best estimates are that 3–20% of conflict risk over the past century has been influenced by climate variability or change.” But, they also wrote that the risk of conflict is likely to increase as climate change intensifies. “As risks grow under future climate change, many more potential climate–conflict linkages become relevant and extend beyond historical experiences,” the wrote.

“The scholarship is confusing,” Mach says. “It can be very convenient for politicians to say that a conflict is because of climate. The state of knowledge is limited. Everyone put climate change pretty low on the list of importance [but] at the same time we found strong agreement among experts that climate — in its variability and change — does influence the risk of organized armed conflict. But other factors, such as the capacity of the state or levels of socioeconomic development, play a much larger role at present.”