Climate change, civil wars and security

I just read an extremely interesting article in Nature by three US scholars on the relationship between climate change and civil conflicts. The goal of the study is to determine whether climatic variability (in this case, the El Nino phenomenon) can have an impact on the occurrence of civil wars.

The results are interesting, and for a lot of reasons. The team finds that the annual conflict risk (ACR, see article for definition) for countries whose climate is strongly impacted by El Nino is twice as high as for other countries. Consequently, El Nino may have had a role in 21% of all civil conflicts since 1950.  The authors also find that the link between ACR and El Nino is stronger in low-income countries, which, in fact doesn’t mean much because those countries could be vulnerable because they are poor, or could be poor because their climate is sensitive to El Nino.

Though critical for the understanding of the complex links that exist between climate change and security, these findings do not teach us much about the security consequences of AGW. In all the articles I have read about this paper, it is more or less explicitly implied that the link between El Nino and civil wars can be transposed to anthropogenic global warming. But, according to the authors, it is not true: “We find that the changes in the global climate driven by ENSO are associated with global patterns of conflict, but our results might not generalize to gradual trends in average temperature or particular characteristics of anthropogenic climate change. » In other words, what’s true for abrupt change may not necessarily be true for gradual change in climatic conditions. This does not mean that AGW has or will have no influence on the security and stability of nations.

On a more general level, I think that the security implications of AGW are overlooked, especially in Europe. In a growing number of conflicts around the world, climatic conditions are an important factor. There are a great many number of ways through which climate change can destabilize a country or create tensions between countries: droughts, floods, decline in crop yields, damage to coastal cities or migrations (think of Bangladesh) are a small number of them.

 While the USA seems to be preparing for those changes, European nations have yet to figure out how their security situation will be impacted by a changing climate in both developing countries and at home. Especially acute is the issue of the potentially enormous wave of climate refugees that could end up knocking on Fortress Europe’s door.  As the US Army has noted in various reports, AGW is a “threat multiplier” in many of the already unstable regions of the world.  It will be “interesting” to see how Annex-1 countries try to deal with these threats.