As researchers investigate the connection between climate change and conflict, the relative power of communities and individuals attempting to cope with climate change has become a recurring theme. While climate change may not directly cause conflict, it may be inextricably woven into pre-existing conflicts of power, ethnicity, and economic interest.

February’s special edition of Peace Science Digest offers a compilation of articles on climate change, security, and conflict. Two of the five articles tackled the intersection of climate with these more traditional sources of conflict.

In “Exploring the Relationships Between Climate Change, Migration, and Violent Conflict,” Michael Brzoska, Associate Senior Researcher with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and Christiane Fröhlich, Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, found that communities that receive migrants and have strong “exclusionary identities” see migrants of a different culture as eroding their traditions and social cohesion, which may set the stage for violence. The danger is particularly acute when migrants shift the balance of community identity in an already existing identity conflict. Peace Sciences Digest applies this analysis to the current wave of migration at the U.S. southern border. Some in the United States are concerned migration will lead to crime, but this analysis suggests that how migrants are perceived has a larger role to play than the number or identity of migrants.

For their article, “From Water Scarcity to Conflict or Cooperation,” P. Michael Link, Researcher at the University of Hamburg, Jürgen Scheffran, Professor at the University of Hamburg, and Tobias Ide, Coordinator of the Peace and Conflict research field at the Georg Eckert Institute in Brunswick, Germany, developed a framework for analyzing conflict in internationally shared water basins. They focused on how humans interpret water stress, including the fundamental choice of framing water as a security issue in the first place. In looking at the Syr Darya/Amu Darya River Basin, shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the authors found that water availability challenges were framed as threats to security in contexts where there were “persistent national rivalries and frequent attacks against ethnic minorities.”

Rebecca Froese, Research Fellow at the University of Koblenz-Landau, and Janpeter Schilling, Professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau, see evidence of similar cleavages between the powerful and powerless when it comes to climate adaptation and mitigation in their article, “The Nexus of Climate Change, Land Use, and Conflicts.” Climate change isn’t alone in affecting land use patterns. Even climate adaptation and mitigation measures themselves heavily alter land use and may promote conflict.

REDD+ initiatives, which seek to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks in developing countries, and large-scale wind power projects can actually diminish livelihoods and erode human security. The authors found that REDD+ projects rarely increased local and indigenous communities’ land tenure security and often weakened it.

When the government or international investors acquire former communal land to install large wind parks or concentrated solar power plants, primary land users, such as farmers, pastoralists, or indigenous people, may lose access to resources that sustain livelihoods and cultural identities. For poorer communities in developing countries, weaker land rights and the absence of environmental regulations tend to favor developers over local communities.

Conflicts usually arise after the construction has already taken place and relate to financial and employment promises that failed to materialize. In these contexts, the authors write that “the existence of trusted and neutral bodies providing unbiased information on the project, transparent communication, and the possibility for local communities to participate and influence the project tend to reduce local opposition and the risk of conflict.”

Read More:

• Armed conflicts tend to cluster in places with warmer climates.
• When local people do not benefit, forest conservation efforts are not sustainable.
• Violence does not necessarily occur in the location most heavily affected by climate change, but rather in places that have relatively good supplies of natural resources, such as water sources or grazing areas. 
• Calling people who move for climate-related reasons “climate refugees” is tempting, but politically problematic.