Climate Change, Conflict and Displacement: Five Key Misconceptions
Publisher: Humanitarian Policy Group / Overseas Development Institute
Author(s): Caitlin Sturridge and Kerrie Holloway
Date: 2022
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Prevention, Humanitarian Assistance, Land, Livelihoods, Programming
Many of today’s displacement crises are driven by a complex mix of climate and environmental change, disasters, conflict and fragility. While nuanced debates exist in academia around whether, and how, these may trigger and drive each other, media and policy attention has often taken a more alarmist tone. This has contributed to the popular narrative that climate change will lead to mass-scale displacement, which in turn will lead to increased conflict. While the causal linkages between conflict, climate and displacement are real, they are not inevitable, and are often bound up in wider pressures and politics. Nevertheless, this prevailing narrative has changed little since the early 1990s and has been ‘cited uncritically from one source to the next’, with repeated claims building on their predecessors, rather than grounded in new evidence