Climate Change, Conflict and Security Scan: Analysis of Current Thinking
Publisher: Overseas Development Institute
Author(s): Katie Peters and Leigh Mayhew
Date: 2019
Topics: Climate Change, Disasters, Governance, Land, Livelihoods, Peace and Security Operations
Countries: Australia, China, Norway, Sweden, United States
As the climate change–conflict–security nexus has gained attention in policy circles – particularly those associated with the international security apparatus, such as the UN Security Council – media coverage of this intersection of risk has ballooned, as have discussions on practical implications for policy-makers and operational agencies alike. The research community has to date both helped and hindered understanding of the links between the issues, with new insights confined to peer-reviewed journals – to which many policy-makers and practitioners do not have access – and arguably an overconcentration on conceptualising the links and on methodological questions around attribution.
Things are starting to change. UN agencies and non-governmental organisations that have been operationalising ‘resilience’ for some years are now increasingly getting to grips with what resilience-building to intersecting climate, conflict and disaster risks looks like. Policy dialogues at the regional and international level are becoming more action-oriented, exemplified by the hashtag #doable at the 2019 Planetary Security Conference in The Hague. And robust research is increasingly being conducted, with a critical eye on the practical implications of the evidence being generated, using new methods to understand the climate change–conflict–security nexus.
The Scan aims to help policy-makers, practitioners and academics who are short on time get to grips with the range of literature, discourse and social media coverage of the intersection of resilience, climate change, conflict and security. It has assessed over 350 pieces of literature and summarises 146. It intentionally emphasises academic journals, because these remain inaccessible to many, including those who take critical policy and funding decisions on how to prevent and respond to new manifestations of complex risk.
The Scan is not intended to be read from start to finish, but provides signposts to allow readers to head straight to the sections of relevance for them. We do not claim to be exhaustive, but the material we present covers as much as we feel is needed for anyone wanting to understand the new insights emerging from the academic literature, the grey literature, the blogosphere and social media coverage.
This Scan is the first of three, which will together provide a snapshot of everything written over the period of a year, between 2018 and 2019. Each installment will cover a four-month period. This first Scan covers April 2018–July 2018. The authors described the methodology for each section below, but essentially follow an adapted version of the process that led to the highly successful Rockefeller-funded ODI Resilience Scans, which summarised emerging insights from the resilience field.
Over the coming year, this topic will remain firmly on the international agenda: the UN Security Council is set to hold further discussions on the security implications of climate change; the new Climate Security Mechanism within the UN system will come into effect; and many countries will continue to see discussions on the impacts of climate-related disaster risks, with consequences for conflict dynamics and security. We are also likely to see a new shift. A nascent body of work focused on risk-informed development is emerging that takes a more holistic approach to the intersection of shocks, stressors, threats and hazards. A broadened approach, together with a greater diversity of voices on the nexus – which we aim to showcase here – seeks to bring new insight and fresh perspective into what has arguably become an echo chamber on ‘climate security’. It is for this reason that we include topics that to many may seem new: psychosocial support, disaster risk governance, etc.
The impetus behind this work is to help guide policy-makers, practitioners and researchers to pursue pro-poor ways to address the intersection of climate change, conflict and security risks. Understanding what we already know is a first step towards this goal.