1. Lauren Kiser
Week 8 – 10/29/2014
Climate Change and Conflict
The IPCC Report, Climate Change-Induced Migration and Violent Conflict and An
Abrupt Climate Change Scenario seek to incorporate future climatic events in the conflict
literature. Expanding on earlier works that reveal a weak relationship on climate shocks and
violent conflicts, these articles do not provide enough evidence to support the causal mechanism
between climatic events and violent conflict. However, the articles begin to reveal how
environmental pressures can influence actor’s decisions. Due to the limitations of climate models
and their predictive capability, using conflict as a likely scenario of climate change to pursue
policy would be inefficient. However, incorporating climatic stresses into the overall climate-
change policy rhetoric is appropriate and could positively expand the understanding of the full
spectrum of climate-change induced events.
“Rather than predicting how climate change will happen, our intent is to dramatize the
impact climate change could have on society if we are unprepared for it.” (Schwartz and Randall,
7) Immediately, it is clear the limitations on the scope of this article and its applicability to policy
recommendations. Even though scientists believe that an extreme scenario such as the one
proposed here is plausible, the scope, magnitude and duration proposed in this article over-stated.
Nevertheless, Schwartz and Randall point out the international communities lack of preparedness
to deal with climatic events. This notion can be similarly found in Reuveny’s discussion on
environmental migration and the potentiality for conflict, albeit in a different manifestation and
with regional disparities of preparedness. Governments may be unprepared for an immediate
influx of mass quantities of migrants and their societies unlikely to absorb them into the

2. economy. Similarly, in the IPCC report suggests that climate change induced events may lead to
macro-level instability and an inability for the state to provide “a range of ecological, economic,
social and political services that fundamentally contribute to human security”. (Adams, et. al, 20)
“Recently several observers revived the Malthusian paradigm, arguing that
environmental problems cause conflict, particularly in LDC’s.” (Reuveny, 660) Although,
climate change induced events do not always have to lead to conflict. Furthermore, the empirical
evidence proposed is inconclusive as half of the cases sampled (drawn on the dependent
variable) exhibits conflict, half did not, further only three of the sampled cases involved
interstate conflict. “Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural
resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or
national honor.” (Schwartz and Randall, 14) While their security implications are only
hypothetical, they point to a shift in the mechanisms leading to war and conflict similarly
proposed by Revueny. On the contrary, Adams et. al are critical of this causal mechanism.
Studies on the effect of drought and short-term warming reveal a weak relationship to conflict.
This premise is stated in earlier findings as well; that the war would occur at a prohibitive cost
and would be unlikely to effectively redistribute resources.
However limited the predictive capability of weather models on future climatic events
are, the assertion that governments, developed and less developed alike, will be unable to
respond in a manner that protects the political, economic and social integrity of their territories
should not be taken lightly. Each article suggests that there is a discrepancy between
environmental disasters’ effects and the mobilization and adaptation capability of states. While
scientists cannot predict when climate change-induced events will occur and their exact
magnitude, they do agree that climate change will impact, and has impacted, the occurrence and

3. severity of environmental disasters. In the past decade and a half there have been plenty of
environmental disasters in the United States and abroad to analyze in order to improve upon this
aspect of the literature. Further research should be conducted on the mobilization and adaptive
capacity of the state and the international community at large to provide more useful policy
directives in order to mitigate the potential disastrous effects of environmental disasters as well
as future climate change induced events. Pre-emptive measures in this regard could help mitigate
the consequences of environmental disasters in disrupting markets and the mobility of goods, and
response mechanisms to future effected areas. These policies directives can be informed on the
experiences of recent environmental disasters and could be potentially pushed through with
relative ease.
The limitations of the Reuveny and Schwartz and Randall articles are not unique to
environmental causes of conflict, but speak rather to the conflict literature as a whole because of
the complexity of the decisions leading to war and conflict. While large-scale military campaigns
are unlikely, societal distress seems a likely outcome from environmental pressures. The IPCC
Report focuses largely on human insecurity arising from climate change stemming from a
compromise of “human rights to life, health, shelter and food”. (Adams, et. al, 4) Further
research should be conducted in the human insecurity paradigm to improve the understanding of
how climate change compromises individual’s rights to life, health, shelter and food and the
disruption of state institutions to protect these rights. At this time, the causal mechanisms should
be refined to translate more clearly into policy directives. So too, should states begin to explore
the effectiveness of their adaptive responses, understand the impacts climatic events place on
vulnerable populations and improve predictive capabilities of climate models to be better
prepared for future disasters. (Schwartz and Randall, 21)