With thousands of scientists representing 195 countries working for more than a quarter of a century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the world’s leading authority on of assessing climate change and its potential socio-economic impacts. However, Marc Levy, an IPCC lead author and deputy director of Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, says he’d have gone further in connecting climate change to conflict in their latest report if it were up to him.

The final text of the human security chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report, which Levy contributed to, states “Climate change is an important factor threatening human security through (1) undermining livelihoods; (2) compromising culture and identity; (3) increasing migration that people would rather have avoided; and (4) challenging the ability of states to provide the conditions necessary for human security.”

“That’s kind of a bland message,” says Levy in a lecture for Simon Fraser University, “you’re probably not instantly tweeting that or posting it on Facebook to anybody.” Instead, he says if he were the sole author, “I would have…just come straight out and say that climate change makes the world more violent.”

Levy gave his presentation, titled “Welcome to the Pressure Cooker: How Climate Change is Making Our World More Violent and Less Secure,” as part of public lecture series at Simon Fraser. At this point, most scientists agree that climate change can lead to human insecurity by exacerbating existing problems, as expressed by the IPCC. However, there are some, like Levy, that theorize a more direct, causal link between climate change and violence.

Pushing Hard

Climate change makes it harder to “regulate violence,” according to Levy. Research by University of California Berkley Professor Solomon Hsiang and colleagues has shown links between temperature increases and aggressive behavior of all kinds and found a correlation between civil conflicts in the tropics and spikes in temperature during El Niño years.

Based on these findings, Levy argues that fragile democracies face higher risks of elections-related violence under hotter conditions. “The more severe the climate shock,” he says, “the greater the likelihood that you would have an election problem.”

“When societies are hit with these kinds of problems, they often undertake measures that shift the risk onto someone else and that can not only not solve the problem but it can make it worse because it can lead to a potential for escalation,” says Levy. He pointed, for example, at the food price increases in developing countries and displacement that occurred after developed countries increased biofuel production several years ago. The idea was to mitigate fossil fuel use, but the way it was implemented had dire consequences for communities who could not afford to pay rising food prices and whose land was taken over for biofuel production.

The Arab Spring, meanwhile, illustrates how cascading systemic failures can spread, from drought to food price shocks to riots, says Levy. “When we worry about stressing one system and having that put in motion a chain reaction, it’s very hard to predict what that chain reaction is going to be.”

Over the Edge?

This line of thinking about such a direct relationship between climate change and increased violence has been challenged, however.

Hsiang et al.’s work was questioned by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo’s Halvard Buhaug and others for being overly broad and not providing enough insight into how exactly climate change contributes to violence. Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina called Hsiang et al.’s El Niño study “horrifically flawed,” and University of Texas Austin Professor Josh Busby compared their work to the democratic peace finding, calling it “a finding in need of a theory” on this blog.

Levy argues that these disagreements are rooted in professional biases from peace studies scholars, a fear of reviving widely discredited theories of environmental determinism, and an unwillingness to accept a deterioration of a historical trend towards peace. “There’s more to it than climate, but that doesn’t lessen the severity of climate, it actually makes it more severe,” says Levy. “We have to take it more seriously. It’s not an academic debate; it’s a real life and blood issue.”

The IPCC process is a one of consensus building and historically been about summarizing the latest research available. The text written by the various contributing scientists has to be agreed on by the chapter authors and then ultimately approved by the member governments as well, making grand statements unlikely. This approach has been criticized of late, however, by some that contend telling stories about human impact is a better way to prompt action.

While Levy said via a phone interview that he didn’t think the IPCC said anything wrong, per se, he wishes they could say it differently.

“The IPCC tends to devolve to statements that are safe,” he says at Simon Fraser. “They’re politically safe, they’re scientifically safe, and sometimes they’re not the statements that people need.”