Policy Briefs on Climate Change and Conflict

Climate change induced human mobility comes with considerable risks and responsibilities. This insight was the starting point for a recently held workshop on climate-change induced migration and community relocation in the Pacific Island country of Fiji. Climate change induced relocation is a highly complex ‘wicked problem.’ This Policy Brief identifies the key challenges and focuses on the most relevant findings and insights from the workshop—i.e., the need for a holistic and integrated multi-stakeholder and multi-scalar approach with the cooperation of state, civil society and community actors, and the need for an inclusive dialogue and communication between a plurality of narratives and voices to build trust. It concludes with lessons learned and policy recommendations. (The workshop ‘Comparative Learning: Climate Change, Relocation and Peacebuilding in Fiji’ was organised by Toda Peace Institute, Conciliation Resources and Transcend Oceania on 5-6 October 2020.)

While there is no empirical evidence yet to prove that climate change can cause conflict among and within states, there is an increasing agreement among scholars that it can aggravate existing security challenges. India’s future security in a changed climate scenario is uncertain. Tangible alteration in its climatic variables relating to temperature, sea level, and extreme weather phenomena will have far-reaching security implications. The paper seeks to analyse a range of challenges and investigate the state’s efforts to mainstream and factor in climate change within India’s larger security narrative. The paper concludes with key policy considerations to help make India better prepared to deal with the onslaught of climate change impacts before it is too late.

This paper draws from the experiences of a multi-stakeholder planned relocation measure in Narikoso village, Fiji, to enhance understandings around the nature and scope of challenges in relocation processes for adaptation. Key learnings are drawn from the Narikoso case study with implications for policy and practice. This brief makes strategic and operational recommendations in areas of: promoting participatory processes; building on existing capacities and improving coordination; strengthening the inclusion of socio-cultural dynamics; improving monitoring, evaluation and learning; and securing and managing finance.

This policy brief draws on an analysis of the interlinkages of climate change and conflict in Lake Chad to make recommendations for the implementation of responses to this crisis and in other climate-affected fragile contexts beyond the Lake Chad region. The assessment of Lake Chad shows that the impacts of increasing variability and decreasing predictability in rainfall are decreasing social cohesion, leaving communities less able to cope with conflict and this, in turn, is eroding people’s resilience to climate change. Responses to such crises, where climate change and security interlink, need to take the interactions of climate change and conflict into account and be climate- and conflict-sensitive. Climate and conflict informed programming and interventions are vital to ensure responses remain effective and sustainable, and do no harm in the face of a changing climate.

Decision makers and practitioners have expressed a strong interest in the security implications of climate change since the mid-2000s. In response to this, researchers have produced an impressive literature on climate change and violent conflict. This literature and the resulting discourse are strongly shaped by quantitative research, that is, by statistical studies of a large number of cases. This policy brief identifies eight limitations of quantitative climate-conflict research, outlines the resulting knowledge gaps, and suggests ways to address them.