The Climate & Conflict blog will publish updates from relevant PRIO-based research projects on security dimensions of climate and environmental change.
PRIO presently hosts three research projects that jointly have an overarching goal of addressing the relationship between climate and conflict: CAVE, CLIMSEC, and CROP. Some of the questions these projects ask are:
- What is the relationship between climate variability, food insecurity, and political violence?
- How does agricultural productivity relate to conflict risk?
- Under what circumstances does extreme weather events affect political stability?
Despite wide agreement among policy and NGO communities that climate change constitutes a significant threat to human security, the research community to date has failed to demonstrate a robust and general historical effect of environmental change on armed conflict and generally warn against tendencies to draw sweeping and sensationalist claims about climate-conflict connections.
Just like the nature and extent of environmental change vary across regions, so do societies’ sensitivity to these changes. Our research is dedicated to disentangling such conditional and indirect causal processes because we believe that rigorous, nuanced, and evidence-based knowledge is necessary to device effective policies for minimizing adverse social impacts of climate change.
On this blog, you will find updated information on publications, events, and activities of the members of environmental security-related research projects at PRIO. We encourage you to join the discussion and leave a comment in the comments field.
