As climate change unfolds, one of its effects is a heightened risk of violent conflict. This risk is at its sharpest in poor, badly governed countries, many of which have a recent history of armed conflict. This both adds to the burdens faced by deprived and vulnerable communities and makes it harder to reduce their vulnerability by adapting to climate change.
Policy discussions about the consequences of climate change are beginning to acknowledge the conflict and security implications. These concerns, however, are not being properly taken on within the complex negotiations for a new international agreement on reducing global warming and responding to climate change. In the negotiating context, the discussion focuses on how much money should be available for it and how that money will be controlled. This discussion pays scant attention to the complexities of adaptation, the need to harmonise it with development, or the dangers of it going astray in fragile and conflict-affected states and thereby failing to reduce vulnerability to climate change.
In order to shape adaptation policies, it is necessary to go beyond the most immediate natural and social effects of climate change and look to the context in which its impact will be felt, because it is the interaction between the natural consequences and the social and political realities in which people live that will determine whether they can adapt successfully to climate change. Doing this means addressing the realities of the system of power in fragile and conflict-affected societies, a structure of power that often systematically excludes the voices of all but a privileged few. Policies for adapting to the effects of climate change have to respond to these realities or they will not work. At the same time, the field of development itself will have to adapt in order to face the challenge of climate change. Neither development, adaptation or peacebuilding can be regarded as a bolt-on to either one of the other two. The problems are interlinked and the policy responses must be integrated.
This paper outlines the climate-conflict interlinkages and the challenges involved in responding to their combined challenge. Establishing the overall goal of international policy on adaptation as helping people in developing countries adapt successfully to climate change even where there is state fragility or conflict risk, the paper makes and explains eight specific policy recommendations:
1. Adaptation to climate change needs to be conflict sensitive – responding to the needs of the people, involving them in consultation, taking account of power distribution and social order, and avoiding pitting groups against each other.
2. Peacebuilding needs to be climate-proof, ensuring that its progress is not disrupted by the effects of climate change that could and should be anticipated.
3. Shifts towards a low-carbon economy must be supportive of development and peace – unlike what happened with the rapid move to biofuels.
4. Steps must be taken to strengthen poor countries’ social capacity to understand and manage climate and conflict risks.
5. Greater efforts are needed to plan for and cope peacefully with climate-related migration.
6. Institutions responsible for climate change adaptation need to be structured and staffed in a way that reflects the specific challenges of the climate-conflict interlinkages. For this to be possible, institutions must restructure in such a way as to maximise the participation of ordinary people and build accountable and transparent public institutions.
7. Development policy-making and strategic planning henceforth, at both international and national levels, need to integrate with peaceful climate adaptation planning. Compartmentalisation between these areas is no longer viable.
8. A large-scale systematic study of the likely costs of adaptation is required, including the social and political dimensions along with economic sectors that have thus far been left out of most estimates.
