No impact – their evidence extrapolates to conflict using assumptions that don’t isolate climate as an independent driver of conflict

(Nina, Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, and Halvard, Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, “Security implications of climate change: A decade of scientific progress,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 58, Iss. 1, 2021, pp. 3-17)

Research on climate and security has expanded significantly in recent years. Progress has been made in spatial and conceptual disaggregation, evaluation of plausible indirect pathways, identification of key scope conditions, and consideration of alternative insecurity outcomes through diverse methodological approaches. This special issue continues along these lines and addresses important research priorities identified in earlier reviews of the field. The contributions provide more evidence for significant climate impacts on social unrest in urban settings; they emphasize the complexity of the climate–migration– unrest link; they investigate how agricultural production patterns affect conflict risk; they study new outcomes, such as interstate claims and individual trust, that hitherto have received scant attention; and they explore the relevance of this research for user groups across academia and beyond. A red thread across these contributions is a nuanced, context-sensitive approach, further underlining that sweeping statements about climate– conflict relationships are neither helpful nor warranted.

Yet, the seven historical research priorities presented above remain valid today, despite notable scientific progress over the past decade (cf. Mach et al., 2020). In conclusion, we would like to highlight three research gaps that we consider particularly pertinent. First, our stocktaking exercise has revealed a critical need for climate–conflict research to move beyond empirical analyses of climate variability and natural hazards and consider potential long-term security impacts of climate change. Science is making rapid progress in modeling potential future impacts of climate change on crop yields (Deutsch et al., 2018), economic productivity (Murakami & Yamagata, 2019), and the prevalence of hunger (Hasegawa et al., 2018). In contrast, there is a distinct lack of scenario-based projection studies that estimate future climate change impacts on conflict risk (though see Witmer et al., 2017). Addressing this lacuna is hardly trivial. When assessing impacts in the future, the conditional and complex relationships documented in this special issue and elsewhere need to be accounted for. Departing from mere extrapolation of empirical results under a ceteris paribus assumption and carefully assessing conflict implications of alternative social, political, and climatic pathways is an important task for future research.