Last month, a major multinational military exercise launched in South and Southeast Asia. The Pacific Partnership is the largest annual multilateral humanitarian assistance and disaster relief preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Asia-Pacific and aims to enhance regional coordination in areas such as medical readiness and preparedness for manmade and natural disasters. At its center is the hospital ship USNS Mercy, with an international team of civilian and military specialists seeking to build response capacity in one of the most disaster-prone regions of the world.

“Climate is unquestionably linked to armed conflict,” said Halvard Buhaug, a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, at a recent Wilson Center event marking the end of the three-year Climate Anomalies and Violent Environments (CAVE) research project. But, he stresses that under a changing climate, exactly how and through what pathways is still a subject of much debate in the academic community.

“Most fundamentally, we turned the ‘resource scarcity drives conflict’ argument on its head and asked, ‘Can environmental interdependence drive cooperation in ways that can be harnessed to build trust and contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding?’” said Geoff Dabelko, Associate Dean at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, about Environmental Peacemaking, which was one of the first books to investigate these questions. In the 15 years since he and Ken Conca, a professor at American University’s School of International Service, published their edited volume, the idea that shared environmental issues could be used to build peace has become a focus of innovative research, policy, and programs.

A recent article in Nature Climate Change has spurred a new chapter in the lively scholarly debate over the potential relationship between climate change and violent conflict. We agree with the article’s authors that there are several forms of sampling bias in this field, including how regions are selected for analysis. But simply addressing this sampling bias will not resolve many of the academic controversies that have raged since the mid-2000s. Our recently published study in International Studies Review examines the mechanisms connecting climate change or its consequences to violent conflict and concludes that to move this research agenda forward, researchers must pay deeper attention to the “nuts and bolts” that shape both climate-related conflicts and our understanding of them.

Environmental stress and climate change can accelerate instability and conflict—but shared environmental problems can also be a source of cooperation and facilitate peacemaking between states. Transnational environmental problems are common threats and often cross national boundaries, requiring international cooperation to address. In turn, this cooperation can provide a good entry point for building trust and cooperation.

“The demand for water will not be linear,” said Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (USN-Ret,), currently vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and security. As people’s quality of life improves, “the demand for water will increase as well. And so the stresses that we already see around the world—the arguments over basin rights for water, the depletion of water in major cities around the world—we think will aggravate problems that already are beginning to manifest themselves,” he said.

Scholarly attention to the links between climate change and conflict has increased. But which places are analyzed most frequently by researchers, and what are the implications of their choices?

“Water security and management represent the cornerstone of global conflict prevention,” said President Danilo Türk, chair of the Global High-Level Panel on Water and Peace and former president of Slovenia, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and peace. “The only alternative to water is water, and therefore, the matter of water is a matter of survival,” said Sundeep Waslekar, president of Strategic Foresight Group.