Climate change can worsen ethnic conflict, climate scientists have shown in a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of U.S.A. The main hypothesis of the paper, that was first published online on Monday, July 25, is that climate-related disaster enhances the risk of armed conflict outbreak in ethnically divided countries. They conclude that climate change acts as a threat multiplier during conflict, though not a direct trigger.
The authors of the report, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Reik V. Donner and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, are affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany; and Jonathan F. Donges is with the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Using event coincidence analysis, they tested their hypothesis based on data on armed-conflict outbreaks and climate-related natural disasters for the period 1980–2010. Globally, the researchers found a coincidence rate of 9 per cent regarding armed-conflict outbreak and disaster occurrence such as heat waves or droughts. The analysis also reveals that during the 30-year study period about 23 per cent of conflict outbreaks in ethnically highly divided countries robustly coincided with climatic calamities.
The authors note that several of the world’s most conflict-prone regions, including North and Central Africa as well as Central Asia, are both exceptionally vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change as well as characterised by deep ethnic divides. To make the study findings more realistic, the authors have based their analysis on disaster occurrence characterised by the economic impact of a climate-related event, so as to account for the effects of population vulnerability, instead of only using meteorological data that may miss out on the social impact of climate disasters.
The scientists have admitted to the challenge of accounting for damages by climate disasters that do not directly affect economic assets but rather living conditions and subsistence agriculture, such as droughts, as they are difficult to quantify in economic terms. Nevertheless, the paper is clear that African as well as Central Asian nations, are potential hot spots for further conflict enhanced by climatic disasters.
The scientists also clarify that there is no evidence that climate-related disasters act as direct triggers of armed conflicts. However, they do warn about increased risk of armed-conflict outbreak for climatological events globally because of a projected drying trend in already drought-prone regions such as Northern Africa and the Levant, which includes Egypt and Syria
“It is clear that the roots of these conflicts are case specific and not directly associated with climate-related natural disasters. Nevertheless, such disruptive events have the potential to amplify already existing societal tensions to further destabilise several of the world’s most conflict-prone regions,” the authors conclude.
