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Climate Change and Conflict

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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History

Abstract

Scholars in a range of academic disciplines have used distinct methods and sources to connect past climate variability and change to the causes of conflict within, and between, diverse societies. Qualitative approaches spearheaded by historians have concentrated on connections between climat harvest failures, societal instability, and violence during the roughly six centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA). Quantitative approaches pioneered by geographers, by contrast, have found correlations between temperature or precipitation trends, harvest failures, and wars not only in the LIA but also in the modern era of anthropogenic global warming. Recently, some scholars have found relationships between climate change and the conduct of conflict, particularly in pre-modern centuries distinguished by long, open-ended wars; a few have even hypothesized links between conflict and the origins of climate change. Above all, the burgeoning scholarship that connects climate change to conflict has strongly suggested that violence within and between societies both increases societal vulnerability to climate change and exacerbates the human impacts of climate change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Field et al., 2014, 20; Adger et al., 2014, 772.

  2. 2.

    Glete, 2000, 17; Lamb, 1995, 260; Bernstein et al., 2007, 30; Carey and Garone, 2014, 292; Culver, 2014, 312; M.L. Parry et al., 2007.

  3. 3.

    Kelley et al., 2015, 3245; Zakieldeen, n.d., 14; Borger, 2007; Maystadt et al., 2015, 649.

  4. 4.

    Gleditsch, 2012, 3.

  5. 5.

    Lamb, 1995, 287.

  6. 6.

    Fagan, 2000, 166; White, 2014, 350.

  7. 7.

    Diamond, 2005, 175; Turner and Sabloff, 2012, 13,913; Media-Elizalde and Rohling, 2012, 958.

  8. 8.

    Brooke, 2014, 272, 297.

  9. 9.

    Brooke, 2014, 370.

  10. 10.

    Parker, 2013, 45.

  11. 11.

    Parker, 2013, 267.

  12. 12.

    White, 2011, 76, 294.

  13. 13.

    Endfield and O’Hara, 1997, 255; Endfield and O’Hara, 1999, 413; McNeill, 2003, 35; White, 2011, 76.

  14. 14.

    Zhang et al., 2005, 137; 2006, 464; 2007a, 404; 2010, 3746; Zhang and Lee, 2010, 64.

  15. 15.

    Zhang and Lee, 2010, 65; Zhang et al., 2005, 138; 2006, 462; 2010, 3745; 2007a, 407.

  16. 16.

    Tol and Wagner, 2010, 69; Lee et al., 2015, 10; Büntgen et al., 2011, 581.

  17. 17.

    Burke et al., 2009, 20,670; Hendrix and Salehyan, 2012, 35; Fjelde and von Uexkullm, 2015, 444; Maystadt et al., 2015, 657.

  18. 18.

    Buhaug, 2010, 16,478; Burke et al., 2010a, 2; 2010b, E185; 2010c, E103; Couttenier and Soubeyran, 2013, 219; O’Loughlin et al., 2012, 18,344; Sutton et al., 2010, E102.

  19. 19.

    Zhang et al., 2007b, 19,214.

  20. 20.

    Buhaug, 2010, 16,478.

  21. 21.

    Tol and Wagner, 2010, 67; Zhang et al., 2010, 3746; O’Loughlin et al., 2014, 2054; Degroot, 2015, 471.

  22. 22.

    Zhang and Lee, 2010, 63; Zhang et al., 2007b, 19,214.

  23. 23.

    Zhang et al., 2011, 17,298.

  24. 24.

    Bai and Kung, 2010, 972.

  25. 25.

    Zhang et al., 2010, 3746; Bai and Kung, 2010, 971.

  26. 26.

    Büntgen et al., 2011; Sutton et al., 2010; Theisen et al., 2011; Theisen, 2012.

  27. 27.

    Hsiang and Burke, 2014.

  28. 28.

    Gartzke, 2012, 177; Slettebak, 2012a, 163, 2012b.

  29. 29.

    McNeill, 2008, 38; Bernauer and Siegfried, 2012, 227; Bernauer et al., 2012, 1.

  30. 30.

    McNeill, 2008, 40.

  31. 31.

    United States Department of Defense, 2014, 47.

  32. 32.

    Fagan, 2000, 92; Lamb, 1995, 218; Parker, 2013, 322.

  33. 33.

    Brown, 2001, 296; Neumann, 1978, 1432.

  34. 34.

    Winters et al., 2001, 74.

  35. 35.

    Webb, 1995, 87.

  36. 36.

    McNeill, 2010, 4, 59.

  37. 37.

    Degroot, 2014, 242, 272; see also Degroot, 2018.

  38. 38.

    Gates, 1965, 29; Steinberg, 2002, 95.

  39. 39.

    Noe, 2015, 25.

  40. 40.

    Lewis and Maslin, 2015.

  41. 41.

    Ruddiman, 2003, 284, 2007, 137; Hynes, 2011; Zabarenko, 2008; Goodell, 2015; Branagan, 2013.

  42. 42.

    Gleditsch, 2012, 5.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Dagomar Degroot

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  1. Dagomar Degroot
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Sam White

  2. Institute of History, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change, Bern, Switzerland

    Christian Pfister

  3. Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Franz Mauelshagen

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Degroot, D. (2018). Climate Change and Conflict. In: White, S., Pfister, C., Mauelshagen, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_29

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