Comment archive

Monday, 15 May 2023
What's Next in Climate Security Studies? Exploiting Synergies between Practice and Research

The increase in global temperatures by over 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times is already having broad and significant impacts. An ongoing multi-year drought in Eastern Africa, for instance, has been attributed to global warming. Hunger crises, displacement, and exacerbated conflict between pastoralist groups are some of the reported dire ...

Thursday, 10 Nov 2022
Armed Conflict and Climate Change: How These Two Threats Play Out in Africa

The world is falling miserably short of reducing Climate carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, a 2015 treaty to keep global warming well below 2℃. The results of this failure are a greater increase in the prevalence and severity of extreme weather events, more rapid sea-level rises and an ...

Wednesday, 23 Mar 2022
Climate Policy Must Be Inclusive to Be Successful

Climate justice is essential if we are to succeed in preventing global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. This is a point that receives far greater attention in the new Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report than in previous reports. The Intergovernmental Panel ...

Wednesday, 9 Mar 2022
New Report by the IPCC: Climate Adaptation Is Happening Too Slowly

When the first part of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was released last summer, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared “Code Red for humanity”. The report documented that climate change is more extensive and occurs more rapidly than previously assumed, and showed the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. ...

Tuesday, 1 Feb 2022
Hope and Despair in the Indus River Delta: Navigating the Treacherous Waters of Capitalism, Climate Change and Politics

Concern over the impacts of climate change is rising globally, and often seen in relation to migration. Drawing on MIGNEX fieldwork in Keti Bandar, a Pakistani fishing port in the Indus river delta, we sketch observed climate change impacts and scope for local action. Lost Glory What is today a ...

Wednesday, 5 Jan 2022
Can we predict climate change impacts on future peace and security?

In the same manner as societies are developing policies to strike the optimal balance between public safety and social and economic cost of COVID-19, the international community is negotiating strategies to address climate change. However, unlike lockdowns, vaccination, and other responses to the ongoing pandemic, risk-reducing effects of alternative climate ...

Thursday, 29 Jul 2021
Obscuring the True Causes of Conflicts

Is Norway’s mission on the Security Council to reinforce the myth that climate change is a root cause of violent conflicts? This will make finding lasting solutions more difficult. As a new member of the UN Security Council, Norway has identified climate security as one of four key thematic priorities ...

Tuesday, 15 Jun 2021
Climate and Security: What will Norway do during its term as an elected member of the Council?

Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. While climate change is rarely, if ever, the root cause of conflict, its cascading effects make it a systemic security risk. The UN Security Council will increasingly be forced to respond to the security impacts of climate change. ...

Thursday, 8 Apr 2021
Can the effects of climatic change predict asylum migration to Europe?

Five years after the European migration and refugee crisis, displacement remains a pressing issue worldwide. According to the UNHCR, the global number of forcibly displaced people passed 80 million during 2020 – the highest estimate ever recorded. Several factors have contributed to this increase, including a rise in political violence ...

Friday, 5 Mar 2021
Climate-conflict research: A decade of scientific progress

The last decade was the warmest on record, with 2020 tied with 2016 for the all-time high average annual global temperature. This 10-year period also saw armed conflicts at severity levels not seen since the Cold War era. Could there be a causal link between these trends? To the frustration ...

Monday, 22 Feb 2021
Climate, Crop, and Conflict: a matter of space?

Anthropogenic climate change poses unprecedented threats to socio-ecological systems, affecting the lives of millions of people around the world. Among others, global warming has resulted in an increased frequency, intensity and duration of extremes, such as heatwaves, droughts and heavy precipitations. Climate-related impacts include alteration of ecosystems, disruption of food production and water ...

Thursday, 29 Oct 2020
The World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize. Does food aid boost peace?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee named this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, recognizing the World Food Program (WFP) for “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and ...

Monday, 27 Jul 2020
COVID-19, Food Access, and Social Upheaval

According to the World Food Program’s (WFP) latest report, the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to an 82 percent increase in global food insecurity, affecting around 270 million people by the end of the year. On June 29, the organization announced it is undertaking its largest humanitarian effort to assist an ...

Tuesday, 3 Mar 2020
Development aid increases local resilience to drought

The recently concluded UN Millennium Development Goals framework documented significant progress (although not complete success) in halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015, compared to 1990. However, in the most recent years, the global rate of undernourishment has again been on the rise. According to the UN ...

Friday, 10 Jan 2020
Big Data Applications for Climate-Conflict Research

‘Big data’ analytics – the collection and analysis of large amounts of data – is having a transformative impact on scientific research across disciplines. Although there is no single and consistent definition, there are three commonly agreed upon indicators of big data, the three ‘V’s: volume, velocity and variety. Volume ...

Friday, 22 Nov 2019
Common climate impact assessments underestimate future vulnerability

Climate-related disasters are a major source of human and material losses. Poverty and low level of economic development are important determinants of environmental vulnerability. Achieving stable and sustainable development thus represents an important strategy to reduce adverse impacts of climate change. However, present efforts to evaluate possible consequences of climate ...

Friday, 18 Oct 2019
How conflict leads to biased development aid

With two special reports (here and here) released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just after the summer, the awareness of the consequences of climate change and the measures needed to limit these impacts is higher than ever before. Regrettably, there is not a one-to-one relationship between responsibility ...

Tuesday, 24 Sept 2019
Advancing United Nations Responses to Climate-Related Security Risks

The security implications of climate change have increasingly been debated in the United Nations Security Council. Yet, there is a growing concern by many UN member states about the lack of adequate responses to the risks that climate change poses to peace and security. In recent years, some modest but ...

Thursday, 18 Jul 2019
A new approach to assessing the climate-conflict relationship

Focusing in on both the agreement and the disagreement sheds new light on the linkages between climate and armed conflict. In our recent analysis, published in the journal Nature last week, we conducted an expert assessment of the relationship between climate and conflict. Previous studies have both asserted and refuted ...

Tuesday, 9 Jul 2019
Heating up: mediation and climate change

Mediation – the process of helping groups in, or at risk of, armed conflict settle their differences peacefully – rarely gets the attention it deserves given how much bloodshed it has averted. In the twenty years following 1988, most of the world’s major armed conflicts were resolved by agreement, leading ...

Tuesday, 14 May 2019
Climate Adaptation as a Pathway to Conflict Mitigation

Climate change has the potential to increase violent conflict risk. This suggests the need for a specified subfield of peacebuilding research and practice to address this issue. Environmental peacebuilding is growing in prominence among scholars and practitioners, even though the debate as to how much climate change increases conflict risk ...

Thursday, 2 May 2019
What can we learn about the environment in conflict areas, without going there physically?

Remote sensing can provide valuable insights into the environmental dimensions of armed conflicts. Access to areas affected by armed conflicts is often limited, posing problems for research into environmental change. Because of this, remote sensing using satellite imagery is one of the tools that is increasingly used to monitor how ...

Friday, 29 Mar 2019
The Human Security of Migrants is Key to Sustainability for Growing Cities

The Human Security Link The sustainability of cities depends on the human security of new migrant populations. Human security, in this context, means the ability and real prospect of living a meaningful life. A shorthand for human security is ‘freedom from want and freedom from fear’. Many migrant populations globally ...

Thursday, 28 Feb 2019
Is Climate Change Denial the Biggest Problem with Trump’s New Panel?

It’s clear the Trump administration takes a skeptical stance toward human-induced climate change, but the recently proposed climate and security panel might pave the way for having their cake and eating it too. Last week news broke that the Trump Administration may assemble a panel on climate change and security, ...

Tuesday, 12 Feb 2019
Climate Change and Conflict Generates Clicks, but What about Scientific Claims?

Does global warming really increase armed conflict? Recently, a new study joined a wave of research (e.g., here and here) that seeks to illustrate the effects of climate change on political violence. The most recent study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change and conducted by Guy J. Abel and ...

Tuesday, 8 Jan 2019
International Water Cooperation Opens the Door to Peacemaking

Although water is an essential input for agriculture and industrial production, it is also scarce in many regions. When it crosses international borders via shared rivers, lakes and aquifers, it can become a source of conflict and contention. Yet while water can be a source of instability, especially in the ...

Monday, 10 Dec 2018
Climate Change Economics and the Climate-Conflict Nexus: Some Takeaways for Policy-Makers

On the occasion of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, which was awarded to William Nordhaus for his work on climate change economics (alongside Paul Romer for his contribution to macroeconomics), we highlight some essential findings of that research and then link them to research on climate change and ...

Thursday, 6 Dec 2018
Achieving Sustainable Peace and the Climate Target of 1.5°C

Presently, the 24th Convention of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is occurring in Katowice, Poland and the negotiators are pressed to complete the negotiations on the implementation of the Paris Agreement. While fewer world leaders and substantially less fanfare is accompanying this meeting ...

Tuesday, 27 Nov 2018
Stretched Thin: When Fragile States Face Climate Hazards

With its population of more than 190 million, Nigeria’s fate is central to the success of West Africa. Armed opposition groups like Boko Haram have plagued the north of the country for years — spilling over and destabilizing neighboring countries — and violence involving Fulani militias in the Middle Belt ...

Wednesday, 31 Oct 2018
Drought displacement and implications for conflict

Human migration driven by weather variability and environmental change (see, e.g., here, here, and here) has been identified as a possible link between global warming and violent conflict (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Despite academic and public policy discussions about these and similar topics, the relationship between climate change ...