In the past few years, rising food prices and the global financial downturn have increased the ranks of the world's food insecure to over a billion, reversing decades of slow but steady progress in reducing hunger. Not only have the human costs been considerable but this reportedly also had dramatic political repercussions. According to one World Bank-commissioned study, the 2007–08 food crisis sparked demonstrations and riots in at least 48 countries. The notion that food insecurity drives violent conflict is just one of many dimensions of the contemporary climate security debate. However, in distinct contrast to the near universal agreement among political leaders and NGOs that climate change constitutes a significant threat to peace and security, the scientific community is yet to reach consensus on specific links between climate and political violence.
CLIMSEC seeks to remedy shortcomings in the empirical literature, such as the scientific community's inability to reach a consensus on specific links between climate and political violence and the apparent disconnect between theories and analyses of climate-conflict connections, by providing a more rigorous scientific foundation for efficient policy advice and implementation. The project will be guided by the following overarching research question: How does climate variability affect dynamics of political violence?
Reflecting the general nature of this research question, the primary scientific tool will be rigorous quantitative analysis at various levels of spatial and temporal aggregation. The project will rely on a multitude of data sources, among them the PRIO-GRID dataset, Munch Re's NatCat database and the NAVCO dataset. In addition, as a specific deliverable of the project, the Urban Social Disorder (USD) dataset will be expanded. The quantitative empirical approach will be complemented by a set of qualitative case studies of carefully chosen areas and events as a means to investigate suggested processes, validate key statistical findings, explain unexpected patterns, and facilitate further theory building.
The five-year research project (September 2015 – August 2020) is funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (CG) as part of EU's new program for research and innovation, Horizon 2020 (H2020). The project brings together researchers across institutions and countries, with
Halvard Buhaug at PRIO as project leader;
Ole Magnus Theisen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology;
Jonas Nordkvelle from PRIO; PhD-candidate
Elisabeth Lio Rosvold from PRIO and
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, as well as three nine-month visiting researchers yet to be announced.
The project will be organized into four work packages (WPs):
Objective: Investigate how food security impacts of climate variability affect political violence
WP 1 identifies two primary pathways through which climate-induced food insecurity affects peace and stability. First, drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events have the potential to exert significant impacts on food prices. In the recent global food crises, failing harvest among some of the world's major food exporters contributed to a dramatic increase in the international price of many food commodities. Second, subsistence households and societies dependent on local food production may experience dramatic food shortages and loss of livestock when the rain fails.
Neither of these proposed pathways has been subject to rigorous comparative testing. By placing prime focus on the multi-scale process from food price volatility to social responses, WP 1 takes a consumer perspective. Two types of insecurity outcomes are considered particularly relevant in this context: urban demonstrations and riots, and rural land use disputes.
Objective: Investigate how economic impacts of climate variability affect political violence
WP 2 will investigate how economic impacts of climate anomalies and extremes affect social cohesion and political stability. A novel contribution in this regard is the decoupling of general economic performance from agricultural performance and the explicit consideration of alternative economic transmission mechanisms of an indirect climate-conflict relationship besides food production. Unique to this project, we will draw on Munich Re's NatCat database, which contains unsurpassed information on natural disasters, including coordinates of their spatial extent and best estimates of economic and human losses incurred. Combined with other relevant high-resolution data, it will be possible for the first time to evaluate whether economic damages of natural disasters affect the local risk or dynamics of political violence, including the possibility that disasters may create a ripe moment for negotiations and conflict settlement.
Objective: Conduct short-term forecasts of political violence in response to food and economic shocks
WP 3 aims to develop a short-term prediction tool that will provide forecasts of urban disorder and civil conflict within a temporal range from several months to two years. The specification of the forecasting model will be based on results from empirical models in the other WPs – with recurring recalibration against actual outcomes as the project moves on.
The forecasting model will be analogous to an early warning tool, with frequent updating of real-time input data and constant evaluation of performance. International and domestic food price statistics will constitute a core component in the tool, supplemented by country-specific, time-varying information on economic performance and unemployment, foreign direct investments, regime approval rates, national political elections and irregular leader transition, as well as various contextual variables.
Objectives: Develop a comprehensive, testable theoretical model of security implications of climate variability; validate key empirical findings from other work packages
The final work package is explicitly cross-cutting by bringing together and evaluating the output from WPs 1–3 and developing a common theoretical framework that will guide the specification of empirical and forecasting models. The first and most essential part of WP 4 concerns theory development, with particular focus on establishing the causal mechanisms and conditions under which various conflict types emerge as plausible outcomes of climate-induced food or economic shocks. An important aspect of this work will be to make further progress on understanding the temporal dimension of climate-conflict linkages.
Research Professor Halvard Buhaug has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for the project "POLIMPACT: Enabling Politically Sensitive Climate Change Impact Assessments for the 21st Century".
In a new study published in Nature Communications, PRIO researchers use a machine-learning analysis framework to identify leading predictors of contemporary asylum migration to the European Union. The study finds little evidence that climatic shocks or deteriorating economic conditions predict near-future arrivals of asylum seekers in Europe, contrasting commonly held notions of economy- and climate-driven asylum migrants. Instead, indicators capturing levels of political violence and violations of physical integrity rights in countries of origin are important predictors of asylum migration flows, suggesting that migrants are continuing to use the asylum system as intended – i.e., to seek international protection from a well-founded fear of persecution – despite the fact that most applicants ultimately are rejected refugee status. The article is a product of the ERC-funded CLIMSEC project and is published as open access.
Schutte, Sebastian; Jonas Vestby, Jørgen Carling &
Halvard Buhaug (2021) Climatic
conditions are weak predictors of asylum migration, Nature Communications 12:
2067.
An article presenting a new global dataset of geocoded disaster locations has just been published in the Nature journal Scientific Data. The dataset, containing spatial geometry of nearly 40,000 unique locations of natural hazard-related disasters worldwide between 1960 and 2018, are posted in NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center's (SEDAC) data repository in collaboration with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University. These data allow users of the EM-DAT disater database for the first time to map and analyse disasters at subnational levels. The data collection was a central part of Elisabeth Lio Rosvold's now-concluded doctoral project and is a product of the CLIMSEC project.
Read the article (open access) here.
The Journal of Peace
Research has just published a new special issue on ‘Security implications
of climate change’ (January 2021), guest edited by Nina von Uexkull and Halvard
Buhaug. The special issue contains 12 original research articles and viewpoint
essays, supplemented by an introductory
article by the guest editors that presents a review the state of the art.
This is the second time JPR dedicates a special issue to climate change
and conflict; the first
time was in 2012, edited by Nils Petter Gleditsch. The new issue represents
the most up-to-date collection of studies on the subject. Several articles,
including the introduction, are available as open access.
Read the special issue here.
We congratulate Elisabeth Lio Rosvold on the successful defense of her PhD thesis today, 08 November 2019! Dr Rosvold’s thesis entitled ‘Coping with Calamity: Natural Disasters, Armed Conflict and Development Aid’ was defended at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Sociology and Political Science.
A new study published in the journal Nature today assesses the role of climate in affecting the risk of armed conflict. Unlike conventional empirical analyses, this study is based on expert elicitation, where the data material is derived from in-depth interviews and structured group discussions among an interdisciplinary selection of scholars on climate-conflict relations. These experts agree that climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries over the past century. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development, intergroup inequalities, and low state capabilities, are judged to be substantially more influential, and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages remain a key uncertainty. PRIO researchers Halvard Buhaug and Nina von Uexkull took part in the elicitation and co-authored the study, which was facilitated by scholars at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
On 27-28 September
2018, the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University and PRIO
co-hosted a joint Workshop on Climate Change and Security in Uppsala. The
workshop brought together an international group of twenty scholars and experts
to discuss ongoing and emergent research on a variety of topics related to
climate change and security. The discussions highlighted a variety of topics
including the consequences of resource scarcity, extreme weather events, food
price shocks, land use competition, demographic pressure, and environmental
migration. The program included presentations on 14 projects as well as a public
keynote lecture by Professor W. Neil Adger on sustainable urbanization.
The
workshop was co-organized by Nina von Uexkull and Halvard Buhaug and sponsored
by the PRIO-based research project Climate Variability and
Security Threats (CLIMSEC), funded by the European Research
Council, and the Uppsala-based project on Climate
Change, Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict, funded by the
Swedish Research Council, SIDA, and FORMAS.
Three PRIO researchers are among the 721 experts invited to participate as lead authors and editors in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).
Jonas Vestby has defended his thesis today, 9 March 2018: 'Climate, development, and conflict: Learning from the past and mapping uncertainties of the future' at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Oslo.
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