Climate, Scarcity and Conflict
Publisher: Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, IISS
Author(s): Shiloh Fetzek and Jeffrey Mazo
Date: 2014
Topics: Climate Change
Since 2007, evidence that climate change poses a risk to international peace and security has strengthened and deepened. Climate change will act as a conflict multiplier by amplifying existing environmental stresses, creating new ones, exacerbating water and food insecurity, and adding to the pressures on weak, corrupt or repressive governments (which by their nature will find it harder to respond to such situations) but also threatening more stable and effective ones. In most cases, the role of environmental stress and resource availability is indirect, as they aggravate or amplify the effects of drivers such as poverty, inequality, ethnic tensions, corruption, weak or bad governance or institutions, regime type, high population growth, rising expectations, economic shocks (including degree of exposure to globalised hazards) and history of past conflict. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 5th Assessment Report in 2014 concluded that, although the influence of climate change and resource scarcity on conflict risk cannot yet be quantified and the precise mechanisms have not yet been established, ‘climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks ... Multiple lines of evidence relate climate variability to these forms of conflict.’