As the war in Syria shows no signs of letting up, a recent article in Middle Eastern Studies put forward the hypothesis that the brutal conflict was triggered by government mismanagement of the country’s recent drought, which lasted from 2006 to 2010. It’s a story we’ve heard before.

Over the past few years, climate change has been increasingly portrayed as a threat to security and stability across the world. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the war in Darfur as “arising at least in part from climate change” in 2007, and the same year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Prize – not for physics, but for peace.

I recently co-edited a special issue of Climatic Change, alongside Jon Barnett, Neil Adger, and Geoff Dabelko, in which we sought to review the recent history of climate change and conflict work published by NGOs, think-tanks and advocacy groups – the so-called “grey literature” – and highlight aspects of the nexus that had been under-researched and overshadowed so far.

Focus on Root Causes

Debate on the human security dimensions of climate change has often been cast from a deterministic perspective, where global warming will automatically translate into mass migrations, competition for resources and land, and ultimately conflict and devastation. There are two problems with this rhetoric.

The IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Prize not for physics, but for peace.

First, it risks skewing responses by states towards defensive measures and reinforcing external borders rather than addressing the root causes of the problem. When climate change was first presented as an issue for the UN Security Council to take up in 2007 (by the United Kingdom), many countries – and especially developing countries – stood against the idea, insisting it was a matter of sustainable development rather than security.

Second, claims about the impacts of climate change on conflict are insufficiently supported by scientific evidence. There are many ways by which climate change will and indeed likely already is affecting the security of populations; the IPCC recently acknowledged this through the addition of a chapter looking specifically at human security in the Fifth Assessment Report, to be released later this month. But most of the literature on the climate-conflict links, so far, has been published in the form of policy briefs or reports by NGOs, think tanks, and government agencies. And though these works have done a great job convincing the national security community that climate change will lead to conflict, they haven’t been able to provide equally convincing explanations as to why and how this might happen.

As a result, though strong statistical correlations have been observed between climate anomalies and violent conflicts, the causality for such correlations has triggered virulent debates and controversies, especially (but not only) between quantitative and qualitative studies, as argued in a recent paper by Andrew Solow.

For the complete article, please see New Security Beat.