With further warming, climate change risks will become increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. Multiple climatic and non-climatic risk drivers will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions.

Climate-driven food insecurity and supply instability, for example, are projected to increase with increasing global warming, interacting with non-climatic risk drivers such as competition for land between urban expansion and food production, pandemics and conflict.

Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5°C in the near term.

Continued global warming is projected to further intensify the global water cycle, including its variability, global monsoon precipitation, and very wet and very dry weather and climate events and seasons. Compound heatwaves and droughts are projected to become more frequent, including concurrent events across multiple locations. 

Low

Medium

High or very high

Confidence in attribution to climate change

Categories

Key

People around the world are already experiencing the havoc caused by climate change. Rising temperatures and more frequent as well as more severe extreme weather events have already reduced food and energy security. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change has – combined with non-climatic drivers – caused roughly half of the world’s population to currently experience severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. 

Individual livelihoods have been affected through, for example, destruction of homes and infrastructure, and loss of property and income, human health and food security, with adverse effects on gender and social equity. 

It has also caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people. Economic damages have been detected in climate-exposed sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, fishery, energy, and tourism.

Climate change, through resource competition or migration, increases the risk of conflict. 

In short

Their reasoning usually follows this logic

Although academics have expressed doubts about the links between climate change, conflict and security, the consensus among Western public policy makers is striking. 

And similarly, Nigerian leaders drew upon climate change as a factor in the Boko Haram crisis in their strategy of portraying the crisis as an external intrusion, rather than, as it primarily was, a consequence of internal marginalisation, repression and militarisation.

But his drought-conflict reasoning was subsequently embraced by Khartoum, with former President Omar Al-Bashir claiming that what happened in Darfur was a ‘traditional conflict’ rooted in ‘frictions between the shepherds and the farmers’ that ‘increased because of climate change and the dry weather’, and the Sudanese government claiming at the UN Security Council that ‘the main cause of the conflict in Darfur was desertification and drought’. Rather than XXX.

Ban Ki-Moon asserted that the Darfur war ‘began as an ecological crisis’ in an attempt to mollify Sudan at a time when he needed its cooperation over the establishment of a peacekeeping mission.

Pakistan

Haiti

Ethiopia

Somalia

Afghanistan

Syria

Bangladesh

Philippines

Iraq

Yemen

We have identified the following ten countries as scoring the highest for composite climate and political risk: 

The risk of political elites pursuing extraordinary climate mitigation policies to the detriment of vulnerable groups is most pressing in countries where levels of both climatic risk and political risk are high. While these countries face the most pressing need to implement climate mitigation policies, it is also in these countries, where such policies are most likely to adversely affect certain groups within society. 

Compared to the amount of talk on climate change as a cause of conflict, there is much less talk of the potential harms of climate action to human security. And this is crucial, seeing as authoritarian regimes love the climate-conflict link and use it to deflect blame and responsibility, and implement extraordinary measures to mitigate the effects of climate change which themselves may, in fact, lead to conflict.

Of course, we need to act, adapt and combat climate change. But the way in which climate change mitigation and adaptation policies affect societies, and in particular vulnerable groups within them, needs to be considered. This is especially important when climate change is drawn upon as a cause of conflict to legitimise extraordinary policies. 

The idea that climate change causes conflict is used to further emphasise the need for climate action. The Paris Agreement enshrined the desirability of limiting warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with a goal of a 1.5°C end-of-century mean temperature target.

Evaluated in the subsequent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5°C (SR15), the more stringent 1.5°C end-of-century mean temperature target has a meaningful and beneficial impact for the climate system. Presently, it is understood that this target requires net zero emissions by mid-century. Achieving this target will require substantial interventions that exceed what has already been committed. To the extent that some of these climate actions may interact with and adversely affect various aspects of human security and well-being. Compared to the amount of talk on climate change as a cause of conflict, there is much less talk of the potential harms of climate action to human security. 

Just as climate change might lead to conflict along many different pathways, there are many different ways in which climate change mitigation measures might drive insecurity and conflict. For example, a rapid decarbonisation of energy systems will affect demand and rents of high market value resources, such as oil and gas, which are known to affect conflict risks. This could challenge the stability of resource-dependent states that are poorly prepared for such transformation in the medium term.

But let us here consider the following three mitigation strategies: major infrastructure projects (any, but especially hydraulic development), green-grabbing, and economic measures.