CLIMSEC

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.”

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 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).

Agricultural dependence and armed conflict events among ethnic group settlements (von Uexkull et al., PNAS, 2016).

over time and draw wider insights. “We have statistics on weather conditions, economic conditions and political conditions, as well as on political violence within each country, over time. Then we can explore whether a country that has recently experienced a severe drought – for example – is more likely to be involved in an armed conflict than other comparable countries, or the same country during normal climatic conditions,” he says. Researchers also have access to more highresolution spatial data. “We can break up countries and focus on smaller, sub-national areas,” continues Dr Buhaug. The PRIO-GRID database is an important tool in this respect. This database is essentially an analytical framework for breaking up data into smaller units in order to study variation within countries, which opens up new research questions. “If drought increases conflict risk, does violence break out where the drought occurs? Or is there maybe a displacement effect where people migrate away from the drought and then violence breaks out elsewhere? These are some of the questions that we are trying to study,” says Dr Buhaug. The local context is a major factor in considering the extent to which a community is vulnerable to climatic shocks, so Dr Buhaug says it’s important to combine data at different levels of resolution. “It’s important to account for institutional factors, like the quality of governance or economic performance, when we study at the local level,” he continues. Researchers have statistics on armed conflict going back to 1946, but the data tends to vary in quality. The best quality data relates to conflicts since 1989, for which very detailed information is available on specific events. “Within an ongoing armed conflict, we have information such as geographical coordinates and the dates

of specific battles. We know which actors were involved, and we have statistics on the estimated number of casualties for each of those battles, within each conflict,” outlines Dr Buhaug. Researchers are aiming not just to detect whether climate variability has an impact on conflict risk, but also to assess its relative importance. “How large is this effect compared to the effects of, for example, poverty, economic marginalisation or political discrimination?” asks Dr Buhaug.

Climate in context

This is a key ambition in the project, with Dr Buhaug aiming to put the climate effect in context, in comparison to the other factors which may heighten the risk of conflict. Some areas of the world are known to be prone to drought or floods or other extreme weather events, yet have not experienced conflict in the recent past, and this is reflected in the data sample. “The sample includes both peaceful countries, and also peaceful periods

in countries that have experienced conflict in the past. This is important, because drought is a natural phenomenon to a large extent, and we have seen that it occurs in many different areas of the world, but conflict does not happen everywhere,” points out Dr Buhaug. “In order to provide an unbiased and scientifically sound estimate of the influence of climate variability, it is important to include both cases with conflict, and also cases without it.”

If drought increases conflict risk, does violence

break out where the drought occurs? Or is there maybe a displacement effect where people migrate away from the drought and then violence breaks out elsewhere?

These are some of the questions that we are trying to study.

Researchers in the project are also investigating what Dr Buhaug refers to as the dynamics of violence, relating to how the characteristics of violence in ongoing conflicts may change over time. This includes the intensity level of the conflict, the risk of diffusion across space, and the likelihood of reaching a peaceful end to hostilities; Dr Buhaug and his colleagues have gained some important insights in this respect. “This project has uncovered a bit more systematic evidence suggesting that adverse climatic conditions contribute to prolonging ongoing conflicts. So it becomes harder to end conflicts once they start,” he says. While the project’s primary focus is on the relationship between climate variability and conflict risk, this research also holds relevance in the context of climate change. “By understanding how societies respond to climate variability, we may also be in a better position to assess the likely future implications of climate change,” continues Dr Buhaug. The natural next step beyond the project would be to investigate the long-term implications of climate change, of humandriven and permanent changes in climatic conditions. This represents a major scientific challenge, but Dr Buhaug says it is on the horizon. “That is one of the motivating factors for doing this kind of research. When the CLIMSEC project ends, we hope to be closer to being able to study and understand the long-term implications of climate change,” he says. Some of the case studies in the project have sought to effectively quantify the average effect of an increase in temperature over time, but it is problematic to extrapolate such results over the longterm. “It is difficult to infer about long-term implications of warming based on a statistical link between short-term temperature changes and contemporary conflict because we don’t know how much societies will manage to adapt to shifting environments and thereby reduce vulnerability in the future,” outlines Dr Buhaug. A one degree rise in temperature above normal conditions today may incentivise people to use violence if it disrupts economies and livelihoods, but in future societies may be able to adapt as climatic conditions change. If they do adapt effectively, then even a three degree warming may not necessarily increase conflict risk, rather conflict will continue to respond ‘only’ to seasonal fluctuations. “Trying to understand what is driven by variability, and what is actually related to the underlying trends in climate change, is important,” stresses Dr Buhaug. This is a topic Dr Buhaug is keen to address in future. “We want to link this empirical research on climate variability with investigating the long-term implications, using scenario-based modelling,” he outlines.

Conflict risk as a function of agricultural sector size and economic transformation (Vestby et al., World Dev., 2021).

Climate Variability and Security Threats Project Objectives

CLIMSEC seeks to understand whether and how climatic variability and extremes affect dynamics of contemporary political violence through conscious theoretical and empirical assessment of indirect causal pathways and facilitating conditions around the world. Particular attention is devoted to the role of socioeconomic and political marginalization as determinants of vulnerability, drawing on statistical analysis and simulations.

Project Funding

CLIMSEC is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (no. 648291), 2015–21, with supplementary funds provided by the Research Council of Norway and in-kind contribution by PRIO. Total budget frame is around EUR 2.5M.

Project Partners

CLIMSEC is hosted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) with external project members based at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Uppsala University, Stockholm University, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, University of Nevada, Reno, and University of Utah.

Contact Details

Professor Halvard Buhaug Peace Research Institute Oslo Hausmanns gate 3 NO-0186 Oslo Norway T: +47 22 54 77 63 E: halvard@prio.org W: https://www.prio.org/projects/climsec : @buhaug

S. Schutte, J. Vestby, J. Carling, H. Buhaug (2021). Climatic conditions are weak predictors of asylum migration, Nat. Commun. 12: 2067. N. von Uexkull, H. Buhaug (2021) Security implications of climate change: A decade of scientific progress, J. Peace Res. 58: 3–17.

Professor Halvard Buhaug

Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has led several large, collaborative research projects on climate-related security challenges over the past decade and currently serves as Lead Author of the ‘Key Risks’ chapter of the forthcoming IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.