About half the world’s population lives in an area of active or latent conflict. And few corners of the planet are not feeling the effects of climate change. But in this week’s New Security Broadcast, researcher Clionadh Raleigh cautions against drawing too strong a connection between the two phenomena in an interview with ECSP Director Lauren Risi.

“Conflict is a competition for power,” says Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex and the executive director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Because conflict’s roots cannot be found in “grievance, resource distribution, and population dynamics,” she continues, “there are conflict dynamics that play out irrespective of climate risk, and are not directly associated with environmental issues; hence, it is not useful to frame climate issues as security issues.”

Raleigh says that her research on conflict points to “some indirect connections between conflict dynamics and climate change,” especially when they create “competitions in which some attributes of the environment, especially through patronage and other means of financing turn the entire scenario into a competitive interpretation of how elites are going to operate and contest against each other violently.”  

One key element in Raleigh’s case is research that demonstrates that cooperation—and not conflict—is often found in regional communities with the highest climate risk and lowest potential to mitigate it. This is part of a larger pattern of cooperation in these communities, she adds. 

Raleigh notes that studies indicate that at times, such broader community collaboration smooths the path for cooperation on climate initiatives—and signals the significance of creating and implementing effective adaptation plans. “The areas that have been able to build adaptation, like adaptive cooperation, managed to become resilient to conflict,” she says, “or to break down in that social and political order to resist that kind of violent competition when it stems from other sources.”

One such case can be found in Kenya, observes Raleigh, “where there were peace committees throughout the country that allowed people to discuss and to mediate in situations related to resource distribution, and those mediations—especially when they were funded—were very successful.”  

Nations such as Nigeria, she continues, offer a case study in collaboration failures rooted not in climate conflict but in structural challenges. In that country’s middle belt, Raleigh says, the failure of “local-based cooperative mechanisms” led to “massive conflict that has taken the form of livelihood-based competitions, rather than the climate-related conflicts.”

In this context of research that argues for a broader view of conflict—as well as its causes and patterns—is the framing of climate security still useful? Raleigh says that it must be refined and given greater nuance—especially in the areas of cooperation and resilience—if it is to retain its usefulness. “I find that security framing that has been practiced for years has become outside of the situations, where we are talking about security outcomes,” she says, “it loses this nuance that we bring to it when it’s being practiced.” The result, continues Raleigh, is that the framing can “create negative effects on the people who are supposed to be on the receiving end of better policies or better assistance…In these scenarios, security initiatives themselves cause insecurities among the people.”

Raleigh levels particular criticism at what she sees as a pillar of climate security framing: a seeking out of regional insecurities and refashioning of them as climate-related. She argues that this ignores growing climate collaboration in favor of identifying communities to be presently or potentially “at risk.” The danger in doing so is a tendency to admit the future into evidence while spurning research on communities presently existing in difficult and politically complicated straits.

“The replacement of knowledge about the competition on the political scenarios of these places by the securitization logic,” says Raleigh, “has been an influence in deriving ill-judged solutions about who and what is vulnerable—and what needs to be done.” In its place, she urges that policymakers “derive solutions for conflicts and climate crises from a broader and inclusive environmental lens, like killing two birds with one stone. But we will fail if we try to fix these conflicts without understanding the politics of the root cause.”

Raleigh also notes that reaction in some quarters to the IPCC’s report—which maintained a direct causal link between climate and conflict while noting limitations in a “climate security” framing provides further evidence of the problem she has identified. “I have heard that several civil society organizations and developmental practitioners have sent an open letter to IPCC stating that they are not serious about the climate security,” she continues. “This shows that the idea of ‘climate security’ has become an unstoppable force and demands a reductive conclusion rather than the broader and sophisticated conclusion in the IPCC report.”

In Raleigh’s view, closing off the contributions of broader conflict research in providing nuance is a mistake. “I am worried now that we are returning to a time where all this work and all this interpretation of resilience, the importance of different vulnerabilities, the importance of adaptation and what form it takes, and the importance of cooperation, might be lost,” she says.

What is needed now, concludes Raleigh, is a fundamental change in viewpoint: “The climate security frame must be more focusing and engaging. And it must be more focused on how the conflict itself has complicated people’s adaptation rather than a causal direction.”