Climate Change and Conflict: Findings and Lessons Learned From Five Case Studies in Seven Countries

Given the many potential risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts on human security resulting from climate change detailed in the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, it is natural that policymakers, researchers, and development experts should ask, “Will climate change cause conflict in the developing world?”

These five field-based case studies in seven countries (Uganda, Ethiopia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Peru) demonstrate that trying to isolate a single chain of climate-conflict causality is not particularly helpful or productive. With many factors potentially contributing to conflict in each of these countries, answering the question with a flat “yes” is inaccurate and inadequate. Yet, answering the question with a flat “no” is counterproductive and misleading, since there are significant and identifiable interactions between climate change (or variability) and known conflict risks in each of these fragile locales.

What can be said is that trying to understand conflict dynamics in northeast Uganda, Ethiopia’s pastoralist regions, Niger’s arid zones, Burkina Faso’s high-demand land areas, the low-lying slums of coastal West Africa, and the water-stressed Andes of Peru without taking into account the impact of climate change would result in an incomplete and flawed analysis. Climate-related impacts are directly and indirectly affecting the populations that are already the poorest, most vulnerable, and most aggrieved groups in each of these countries. The task is to investigate how climate events associated with credible climate change projections may contribute to conflict within that larger context.

The five case studies in these seven countries show that climate change—especially as reflected in observed temperature data; reports by local inhabitants of increases in severe, erratic weather; and consistent accounts from agriculturalists and pastoralists of marked changes in seasonality—has an appreciable impact on livelihoods and economic development, rights and responsibilities of citizens and the state, resource governance and the performance of political institutions, and relations among privileged and disadvantaged identity groups. A large body of literature indicates that these are important and enduring conflict variables.

Setting aside simplistic questions of direct causality and replacing them with more pragmatic and productive questions about how climate change may be consequential for conflict, making use of some of the well-established categories of conflict analysis, facilitates the construction of a more substantive, qualitative analysis that goes beyond general references to climate change as a threat multiplier, stressor, or potential trigger for conflict. It also generates discussion of specific issue areas with linkages to programmatic interventions that United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or other international assistance agencies may wish to undertake or may already have underway.

Equally important, because they incorporate the input of the agents who actually decide whether to take part in or refrain from conflict (i.e., the affected individuals, communities, and institutions), the case studies identify some of the specific stakeholders in government and society whose interests are threatened by climate change and whose participation may be key to the success or failure of climate related program initiatives aimed at strengthening resilience.

While these five case studies provide only a limited comparative base, it is possible to identify three climate-related patterns of change and four areas of institutional challenges that are likely to be relevant and consequential for many other developing countries in Africa and Latin America.

Source: USAID
Year: 2014