Does Climate Change Cause Conflict?

The Oxford Climate Society is a University of Oxford society dedicated to developing informed climate leaders.Our membership extends from students to professionals and the general public, welcoming all levels of interest and experience.

Oxford Climate Society

This event will address the effect of climate change on political stability, international peace and conflict.

In the past decades, there has been a growing awareness of the security implications of climate change, not only relating to human, water and food security but also in matters of political instability, intra-state conflict, mass displacements of peoples, and so forth. Studies have emphasised among other cases the link between the Arab spring movements, rising global food prices and droughts in major grain-producing nations; the role of climate change in fuelling intercommunal conflicts in Western Africa, the Sahel and Somalia; and ISIS’s capitalisation on extreme weather events in rural Iraqi communities in their recruitment strategy. Beyond the events we already witness, on-going climate-related phenomena raise security concerns. Two examples are the predicted internal displacement by 2050 of over 143 million people in the Global South which will apply further pressure on already fragile water and food resources and dynamics of increasing military and economic activity over the Arctic which are laying the groundwork for future tensions between great powers. On the one hand, a growing number of institutes and research programmes have emerged to study the implications of these trends and climate dimensions have started to be integrated in UN Peacekeeping Operations. On the other, strong causal relations between climate change and conflict have been difficult to evidence and questions remain. Does climate change actually cause conflict? What mechanisms contribute to the escalation from competition over scare resources, social tensions or protests to the use of military violence? How can we avoid such an outcome? How are climate dimensions presently integrated into states’ security policies?To discuss these, we will be joined by Professor Halvard Buhaug and Dr Marcus King. Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Associate Editor of Journal of Peace Research. He leads and has directed a number of research projects on security dimensions of climate change and geographic aspects of armed conflict, funded by the European Union, the World Bank, the US Department of Defense, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the Research Council of Norway. Marcus D. King is a Senior Fellow and member of the Advisory Board at the Center for Climate and Security. He is also a John O Rankin Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Arts in International Affairs Program (MAIA) at George Washington University, USA. He has extensive experience with climate change and energy issues in academia, policy-research organizations and the U.S. government. Notably, in the 1990s, he held Presidential appointments in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where he represented the United States for negotiation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Office of the Secretary of Energy where he directly supported the Deputy Secretary and participated in negotiations on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy with the Russian Federation.This event will be live-streamed to our YouTube channel here:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOoksFYBCHqZWwVBU9qewZg" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOoksFYBCHqZWwVBU9qewZg</a>We will post the exact link when the event starts at 7pm.You can find more about our speakers at the following links:<a href="https://elliott.gwu.edu/marcus-king" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://elliott.gwu.edu/marcus-king </a><a href="https://www.prio.org/People/Person/?x=3497" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">https://www.prio.org/People/Person/?x=3497</a>

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Does Climate Change Cause Conflict?

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