Climate disasters up armed conflict risk in vulnerable countries

The risk for armed conflict goes up after climate-related disasters, but only in vulnerable countries, according to a new study.

Disasters include storms, floods, and droughts—the frequency and intensity of which will increase in the future due to climate change.

“Bushfires in Australia will not spark a civil war as the state is democratic and able to provide relief,” says Tobias Ide from the University of Melbourne and lead author of the paper in Global Environmental Change.

“But when it comes to droughts in Nigeria or storms in Pakistan, where you have large marginalized populations and little state presence, the picture may well change.”

The paper provides invaluable evidence for policy makers such as the United Nations Security Council, called on to invest in climate adaptation and risk reduction for the millions of people already suffering from the effects of climate change.

“The question ‘Will a warming world also be a world with more violent and armed conflicts?”‘ has been a very real one for political leaders and civil societies across the world,” Ide says. “Climate change makes tense social and political situations even worse, so climate-change disasters may act like a ‘threat multiplier’ for violent conflicts.

“Only countries with large populations, the political exclusion of ethnic groups, and relatively low levels of economic development are susceptible to disaster-conflict links. Measures to make societies more inclusive and wealthier are, therefore, no-regrets options to increase security in a warming world.”

“This does, however, not mean that disasters cause conflicts, but rather that occurrence of disasters increase the risks of an outbreak.”

Research on the effects that climate change has on armed violence have previously been open to interpretation, but Ide and his colleagues say the new study shows that climate-related disasters enhance armed conflict risks.

“We find that almost one-third of all conflict onsets in vulnerable countries over the recent decade have been preceded by a climate-related disaster within seven days,” says coauthor Carl-Friedrich Schleussner of Climate Analytics.

“This does, however, not mean that disasters cause conflicts, but rather that occurrence of disasters increase the risks of an outbreak.”

“If we look at what happened in Mali when a severe drought occurred in June 2009,” Ide says, “we can see that the militant Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group exploited the resulting state weakness and desperation of local people to recruit fighter and expand its area of operation.

“The Philippines were another country where recurrent disasters weakened government structures in contested regions, hence opening a space for rebel groups.”

In the large majority of cases, opportunity factors drove the onset of armed violence. Rather than aggrieved populations, rebels exploited the temporary weakness of the state after a disaster to stage attacks.

“The most surprising result of our study for me was the prevalence of opportunities for armed violence over those related to grievances in post-disaster situations,” says coauthor Michael Brzoska, associate senior researcher at the University of Hamburg.

Source: University of Melbourne

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