CCAPS researchers Ashley Moran and Clionadh Raleigh, with co-author Yacob Mulugetta, published a new paper with the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change (GMACCC), exploring how local-level conflict and environmental data can assist policymakers and researchers in assessing links between environmental patterns and violence.

The paper explores the difficulties of bridging between physical and political phenomena, and it offers ways to parse the challenge of designing policy responses to such a complex set of intertwined climate and security issues. It does so by observing three ongoing conflicts across Africa – Darfur, Mali, and South Sudan. Each conflict is occurring in impoverished states, with governance capacity constraints, and subject to environmental shifts and disasters. By examining these recent conflicts and their patterns, environmental problems, and seasonal vulnerabilities, the paper seeks to show empirically supported examples exploring where climate change is and isn't related to conflict.

The cases provide examples of how climate change influences conflict by increasing the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that change the operating environment and, with it, the opportunities and grievances that influence conflict. Interventions can thus target the locations and times where climate factors accelerate or amplify conflict in that location. In Darfur, this is during the transition from the rainy to dry seasons; and in Mali, this is increased rebel activity in the late dry season and increased communal militia activity in the rainy season. Such intervention tactics target the points where climate factors increase opportunities for conflict, seeking to reduce specific actors' ability to take advantage of such changes in the environment.

For the complete article, please see The Robert S. Strauss Center.