The Climate–Conflicts Nexus and the Role of Geographical Spillovers

The chapter reviews the literature on the pathways through which climate change leads to armed conflict. These are pressures on agriculture, resource scarcity, factors that result in the resource curse, and migration. There is evidence, especially from Africa, that climate change has worked through all of these to varying degrees to increase armed conflict. The questions being addressed are as follows: what scale is appropriate for the analysis and over what time period do variations in climate make an impact? On the first, most studies focus on region- or country-specific case studies. Recent research has been shifting toward a much more geographically disaggregated level of analysis that captures local factors shaping conflict dynamics. This also allows an assessment to be made of the spillover effect of conflict in one locality on other localities nearby. Such spillovers are found to be important. On the time period over which climate change impacts are relevant, while most studies focus on yearly variations in temperatures and precipitation, some consider deviations from long-term averages and others take into account aspects like extreme temperature. Studies find links to conflict using all of these and as yet there is no conclusive view on what the right measure is.