Climate Extremes and Conflict Dynamics (Chapter in "Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment")
Publisher: Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment
Author(s): Jürgen Scheffran
Date: 2020
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Disasters, Governance
A growing body of literature analyzes interactions between climate extremes and conflict dynamics, with a focus on the social, political, and economic consequences of climate extremes which can destabilize and transform societies. Evidence of disaster-conflict linkages remains contested and depends on research methodology, assumptions, and interpretations of causal pathways. Conditions that can contribute to conflict risk are poverty and weak economies, ethnic division and inequality, economic marginalization and exclusion, political fragility, weak institutions, and preexisting conflicts. The potential conflict dynamics arises from mechanisms such as threats to human living conditions, destruction of infrastructures, the distribution of loss of wealth and income among populations, competition for scarce resources, unequal distribution of aid, human migration, changing power relationships, and compound risks. The impacts can outweigh the governance and adaptive capacities, especially in fragile regions where extreme events can act as risk multipliers and have specific social consequences and instabilities, possibly requiring policy measures beyond disaster management and humanitarian aid