Priorities for empirical research on climate and conflict (von Uexkull & Buhaug, J. Peace Res., 2021).
Can climate variability spark conflict? While it is widely agreed that climate change represents a major threat to prosperity and development, the relationship between climate and the risk of armed conflict is unclear. We spoke to Dr Halvard Buhaug about the work of the CLIMSEC project in investigating how climate variability affects contemporary conflict and violence. The underlying reasons
behind outbreaks of conflict are often highly complex, but issues like discrimination against particular groups, a poor and stagnant economy, and badly functioning political institutions are often at the forefront. Alongside these issues, it has been suggested that climate variability and food insecurity may also be important factors in triggering or prolonging conflict, a topic that Dr Halvard Buhaug is exploring in the CLIMSEC project. “The project is geared towards understanding how climate variability affects contemporary conflict and violence,” he explains. There is a clear distinction here between climate variability and climate change. “Climate variability refers to short-term changes in weather and climatic conditions, while climate change is a more or less permanent change in what is considered normal weather,” says Dr Buhaug. It’s much easier, from a scientific point of view, to attribute observed social changes to short-term changes in the weather system.”
considered ‘normal’ weather. While the focus of CLIMSEC is in principle global, with four separate workpackages within the project centered on statistical and quantitative analysis, a lot of the empirical material Dr Buhaug and his colleagues are working on is based on conflicts in Africa. “That’s where much of the violence in the world today is located, and most societies in Africa are also considered among the most vulnerable to climatic changes,” he outlines. “This is
because the economies and livelihoods of many people on the continent are dependent on agricultural production, which we know is sensitive to droughts and floods.” A wide variety of different statistical datasets and databases are being used in the project, on the basis of which researchers are analysing the relationship between climate variability and political violence. Some of this data relates to the national level, which enables Dr Buhaug to monitor changes in countries
Relative importance of climatic, economic, and political factors in predicting asylum migration to the EU (Schutte et al., Nat. Commun., 2021).
Climate variability Many of these short-term changes relate to shifting weather conditions, including extreme events like droughts, floods, heatwaves and other deviations from what would typically be
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