Understanding the Connections Between Climate Change and Conflict: Contributions From Geography and Political Ecology
Publisher: Current Climate Change Reports
Author(s): Daniel Abrahams and Edward R. Carr
Date: 2017
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Cooperation, Programming
Countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Congo (DRC), Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, El Salvador, Guatemala
The connections between climate change and conflict inherently raise questions related to space, scale, and nature-society relations, all themes central to modern geographic thought. The geographic and political ecological literature — and the literature informed by geography and political ecology — generally explores the relationship between climate change and conflict through case studies, employing a wide range of methods that enable understandings not accessible through exclusively large-n quantitative studies. As a result, this literature focuses on questions and challenges that are generally overlooked in the wider climate-conflict literature, including the importance of spatial and temporal scale and the ways in which vulnerability and resilience frame this relationship. This literature uniquely challenges the dominant threat multiplier framing of climate change’s impact on climate, questioning this narrative’s unidirectional flow from climate vulnerability to conflict, exploring how climate change can create opportunities for peacebuilding as well as conflict, and identifying how climate adaptation activities can themselves become catalysts for conflict.