Climate Disasters Can Increase the Likelihood of Armed Conflict

Climate disasters increase the chances of armed conflict, particularly in ethnically-divided nations, according to new research published on Monday by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“Devastating climate-related natural disasters have a disruptive potential that seems to play out in ethnically fractionalized societies in a particularly tragic way,” says lead author Carl Schleussner from the Berlin think-tank Climate Analytics and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

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Almost one-quarter of conflicts in ethnically divided countries coincide with climate disasters, the researchers found.

The new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that climate disasters may “enhance the risk of a conflict breaking out” particularly in regions that are susceptible to human-made climate change and ethnic conflicts.

“We think that ethnic divides may serve as a predetermined conflict line when additional stressors like natural disasters kick in, making multi-ethnic countries particularly vulnerable to the effect of such disasters,” co-author Jonathan Donges, co-head of PIK's flagship project on co-evolutionary pathways COPAN.

The study, which analyzed 240 conflicts and 18,000 climate disasters spanning from 1980 through 2010, discovered that in the top 50 most ethnically-divided countries nearly 23 percent of the violent outbreaks occurred in the same month as the climate disasters.

“Climate disasters are not directly triggering conflict outbreak, but may enhance the risk of a conflict breaking out which is rooted in context-specific circumstances," Schleussner noted.

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The authors of the report went on to observe that regions such as North and Central Africa, as well as Central Asia, are particularly vulnerable to ethnic conflict along with climate change related disasters such as heat-waves and droughts.

Similarly, in recent reports the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also observed more direct linkages on how intergroup conflicts are exacerbated by environmental emergencies of food and water shortages, heat waves, flooding, and other natural catastrophes brought on by climate changes.