How We Misunderstand the Magnitude of Climate Risks – and Why That Contributes to Controversy

Jan 24, 2021 | Peter Schwartzstein
View Original

The Syrian civil war has raged for almost a decade now, and in the climate security community it can feel as if we’ve spent at least that long arguing about its causes. For every claim about the impact of extreme drought in the lead up to 2011, there’s been blowback, with some scholars arguing that the climate angle has been exaggerated at the expense of other causes of the conflict. And for every argument about rural-to-urban migration, there have been suggestions that its impact in precipitating protests has been overstated. Amid some overly forceful media assertion about the significance of climate change—and valid fears that invoking the environment might be seen as absolving guilty parties, despite efforts to highlight the regime’s ultimate culpability—climate security analysts have struggled to fully pinpoint climate’s precise contribution to the conflict. Cue uncertainty, controversy, and sometimes fierce academic polemics.

But although the now decade-old war in Syria has most publicly laid bare this failure, it is, in some ways, just the latest example of the difficulty in articulating—and proving—the nature of climate risks. You can conduct all the quantitative analysis in the world, but that won’t necessarily yield much when climate change can cut in such small, often imperceptible ways. You can conduct groundwork, but that can be tricky when the hardest hit areas are inaccessible or prohibitively dangerous. And even then much of the best evidence can be anecdotal. In the absence of sufficient scientifically rigorous ‘proof,’ it’s only natural that skepticism over climate change’s full destabilizing potential persists.