In this series we are looking at the link between climate breakdown and conflict. In Part One we looked at how the two issues are linked, where in the world the problem is most acute and how it is affecting people generally. In Part Two we unpacked some of those issues in more detail, looking at how the concerns of climate breakdown and conflict are often mutually reinforcing. Here in Part Three, we consider what action we can take to respond to this unfolding crisis in our world.

Many of us reading this won’t be living in conflict areas nor be in a position to work directly into those situations with their complex, large-scale problems. But there are still things that we can do to respond:

1. Campaign: on climate action, adaptation finance, independent aid

First and foremost, if we want to see climate-induced conflict reduced we need to see the climate crisis tackled, through slashing global carbon emissions. At the UN climate talks in Paris in 2015, 196 countries agreed to phase out the use of highly polluting fossil fuels to keep global temperature rise to well below 2℃. We need to hold our governments accountable by asking what they are doing to achieve this and what more could be done. In the UK, this means delivering net zero carbon emissions as quickly as possible. Additionally, we must call for alignment of our national contribution to keep us on track for 1.5℃ of heating globally, as well as using our diplomatic influence in the run up to hosting the UN climate talks later this year to press other countries to do the same. We need to demand that all overseas investments are compatible with the aims of the Paris agreement, moving away entirely from fossil fuels, and increasing investment in zero-carbon energy development. One way to join with others in lobbying the government in the UK is through the Climate Coalition, a network of over 100 organisations made up of 19 million individuals, all dedicated to action against global heating.

As well as the crucial preventative work of cutting emissions, we also need to call for measures to adapt and reverse the damage that has already been done. These will include climate adaptation initiatives and financial support from richer countries for poorer nations to help them continue to develop using green energy sources, as outlined in the Paris agreement, with an ambitious plan for international climate finance post-2020. Alongside this, it is vital we keep independent aid a priority in the UK, with its own Department for International Development (DFID) and Secretary of State. A merger with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) would lead to less aid going to the world’s poorest people and to help the situations of conflict and climate breakdown they are facing. So we can also make a difference by lobbying to maintain this crucial government department as a separate entity, where it can be the most effective.

2. Support organisations working on peacemaking

Another way that we can help tackle the issue of conflict which exacerbates the climate crisis around the world is to support those organisations that are working to alleviate it. Peacebuilding is an increasingly important part of good development in many places, and it is an area that Tearfund has invested in heavily in recent years. As an organisation, Tearfund has made working in fragile states affected by conflict one of its three corporate priorities, and has created a team dedicated to peacebuilding work with affected communities to see context-appropriate, locally-owned and sustainable solutions to issues of fragility. Its work encompasses the spectrum of responding to immediate needs, supporting people’s recovery and building their resilience, and the longer term addressing of root causes. By giving to Tearfund, you will support the work we do in this and other areas, and you can help to make a real difference in people’s lives. Please do read more and give here.

3. Pray

Crucial for Christians, alongside calling for change and giving our money to support this work, is prayer. So another way to take action to help alleviate climate and conflict issues is to bring these concerns into our churches in sermons and prayers, helping people understand why involving ourselves is a Christian calling. Let us pray for peace in places around the world that are experiencing violence in the face of climate-induced difficulties, for their governments to know how to respond and to have the resources to do so, and for factions and rebel leaders to find solutions for the issues at the root of conflict and fragility. I strongly believe that change happens when we pray, and particularly when we pray together, and this year, linked with number one above, we need to stand together to pray for climate action. Please join in – we need you!

4. Live low-carbon, peace-filled lives

Finally, if we’re going to see climate-induced conflict addressed, then alongside pushing governments to take action on the climate crisis, supporting organisations that are working to combat conflict and praying to see a change, we must also consider our own lives and lifestyles. This means thinking about our personal carbon emissions and consumer habits, recognising that we hold part of the responsibility for the difficulties we are experiencing. But being part of the problem means that we are also empowered to be part of the solution! There are lots of steps we can take in our ordinary lives to make changes and help resolve these issues. We can change our eating habits to a predominantly vegetable and grain-based diet. We can use less polluting means of travel to get around, such as public transport, car shares or electric cars – and of course flying significantly less, or not flying at all, is one of the most effective things we can do. We can switch our domestic energy supplier to one that uses 100% renewable energy, or even install our own solar panels, as well as planting trees and reducing our energy use when we can (such as by choosing energy efficient appliances and turning things off wherever possible). And let’s work to live peace-filled lives ourselves, caring for others and seeking peace in our relationships.

Rather than losing hope in the face of these vast issues of climate and conflict, we can choose to act, to contribute to the solution and be part of reversing the terrible trends we are seeing in our world. It has becoming increasingly clear that the fate of the planet cannot be separated from its effects on people – and this fact will perhaps see both the climate crisis and human conflict addressed with the urgency they require at all levels of society, starting with us.

I gave a lecture at Chichester Cathedral recently for World Peace Day, examining the relationship between climate breakdown and conflict. In Part 1 of this mini-series, we looked generally at whether there is a link between them, where in the world we are seeing it, and how it’s affecting people, both at an individual, local level and a national one. In Part 2 I will look more closely at the key issues and some of the links between the two problems.

Given we can see that the two issues are linked, how do they affect each other? Let’s take a look at some of the key areas that mean climate and conflict are often mutually reinforcing…

1. Agriculture and food security
Changing rainfall patterns affect the fertility of the land and force people whose ancestors may have lived in an area for many centuries to relocate because they are unable to produce enough food to eat and make a living. A 2016 study showed that a 1℃ temperature rise in countries that are dependant on agriculture was correlated with a 5% increase in migration to other countries. Migration due to food shortages can also take place within the same country, e.g. from rural to urban areas. This problem of climate-induced food insecurity is not limited to land-based food sources: ocean acidification is also forcing communities reliant on dying fish stocks to migrate to find new sources of food. As we will see, migration can have significant effects for stability and levels of violence.

2. Climate adaptation capacity
In the case of slow-onset disasters, people will usually try to adapt to changes in climate (like those mentioned above) as a first response over migration. But this can actually serve to increase tensions, by highlighting or exacerbating societal inequalities more than sudden shock events, that affect everyone in the same way in the short term. Relative deprivation and perceived injustice can create conditions that make conflict more likely. Conflict in turn significantly affects an individual’s ability to adapt, making it much more difficult to deal with the challenges arising from environmental degradation.

3. Weak governance
Adaptive capacity is not only significant at an individual level, but at a societal one too, meaning the role of governments is pivotal. In fact, vulnerability is caused by society – hazard, exposure to hazard and capacity to cope are determined by people’s social, political and economic situation. In turn, climate-induced scarcity has been recognised to increase areas of ‘ungovernable spaces’ by contributing to economic hardship and fuelling social tensions that allow for increased recruitment into terrorist organisations with the potential to destabilise a region. In countries that are on the verge of conflict, sudden climate-related disasters can be exploited by those seeking to achieve a particular political aim, because the ensuing chaos stretches military and police capacity and allows their activities to go unnoticed and unchallenged. This then facilitates further environmental degradation because, although measures such as the SDGs and the Paris Agreement make provisions to help the most vulnerable countries, support hardly reaches the most fragile contexts where this vulnerability is most acute and climate finance is most needed.

4. Displacement and migration
Where individuals and governments are unable to adapt to situations of climate shocks and conflict, people often have no choice but to leave their homes, either for another part of their own country or a new country altogether. Global displacement is currently at an all-time high, and one person is displaced every second by natural disasters, whether climatic shock events, chronic droughts or cyclonic flooding. One place we see this is in coastal cities whose inhabitants are suffering the effects of sea-level rises. Sometimes it works in reverse with people displaced by conflict exposed to unpredictable climates in their new environments. For example, in Colombia, many people moved to the Mocoa area to seek refuge from armed groups, not knowing that it was a hotspot for flash floods and landslides. The landslide there in 2017 claimed 300 lives, and left many more people missing. This issue is set to become more problematic. By 2050, the World Bank estimates that given high greenhouse gas emissions combined with unequal development, more than 143 million people could become internally displaced, with potential knock-on effects for political stability, as the resources of host regions become increasingly stretched.

5. Resource competition
Competition over natural resources, often exacerbated by climate change, can lead to conflict and movement of people. For example, low-level disputes over water or land can escalate into armed conflict during a drought. Migration can in turn increase the pressure on resources in host communities, leading to tension and violence. One example of this is the way that climate change is moving the borders between agriculturalists and pastoralists in the Sahel region in north Africa, as desertification is decreasing the land available for cattle grazing, meaning pastoralists are increasingly encroaching on farmers’ land, which is directly linked to the upsurge in violence in these areas. Resources are also sometimes deliberately restricted as a means of manipulation for political ends. One example of this is water weaponisation, involving tactics such as cutting off the flow of freshwater, the policing of narrow seaways or the re-routing of shipping (e.g. in the Panama canal or Palestine).

These brief thoughts from my lecture give just an overview of some of the main ways that climate change and conflict interact, but this is an area that is just gaining traction amongst researchers and future study will shed more light on these important interrelations. In Part 3, we’ll look at what needs to be done to help address these issues.

We know that climate change is an ever-present and increasingly serious threat, and it seems there is always more news of wars, conflicts and violence – but is there any link between the two?

I was recently invited to give a lecture for World Peace Day at Chichester Cathedral, looking at the relationship between climate breakdown and conflict. As I prepared for the lecture, I was reminded of the moving day I spent with Daniel a few years ago, on his shamba, on the floor of the Rift Valley in Tanzania. One of the things that became apparent on that day was how the climate crisis was leading to conflict between him and the herders around him, as they looked for land on which to graze their goats. With good grazing ground becoming increasingly scarce, the goats kept breaking through his thornbush fences. He would have to throw stones at them to scare them away, and you can imagine he was none-too-happy with the herders themselves.

We have been aware of the reality of climate breakdown for decades, and wars and conflict have gone on since the beginning of human society, but there is a particular interest growing in looking at these two topics together. It has become increasingly recognised that – alongside poor governance – conflict and climate change pose the biggest threats to international development, and their effects could see millions of people pushed back into poverty, reversing the progress that has been made in the last thirty years. In fact, Tearfund has seen these two issues as so central to combating global poverty that it has made them two of its three corporate priorities.

So how might climate change and conflict relate to each other? Although a strong causal relationship between the two has not yet been proved by research (this is a new area where further study is needed), there is evidence to show that they are linked. Some researchers have suggested that climate change ‘loads the dice’, increasing the likelihood of the outbreak of violence. But not only that, for both agriculture and warfare, the way we use the earth’s resources has undergone a radical transformation – more intensive methods of production have gone hand-in-hand with greater exploitation of the natural world. Tearfund has found as it has developed its work in these two areas that the root causes of fragility and the challenges for environmental stability are very similar.

There certainly seems to be a correlation between climate issues and fragility: 26 of the 39 states with the highest fragility have chronic, high exposure to multiple climate hazards, facing some combination of floods, wildfires, chronic aridity, rainfall anomalies, cyclones, and coastal inundation. And, of the 10 countries in the world with the largest number of multilateral peacekeepers, 8 of these countries are also highly exposed to climate change.

This correlation means that there are climate and conflict ‘hotspots’: the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), the Lake Chad region in west-central Africa, the Sahel region in north Africa, parts of west, central and east Africa, parts of Latin America (particularly tropical Latin America), and parts of Asia. For example, in the Lake Chad region armed conflict and climate change are compounding each other and affecting water governance, leading to displacement and poverty. There were 11 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance there in 2018. To take an example from a different area, Iraq is both one of the countries in the Middle East that has been hit hardest by climate breakdown and one that has seen much conflict and instability. And in Latin America, which is more than 85% urbanised, the rapid movement of people from the countryside to cities driven by climate breakdown (particularly in tropical Latin America), has fuelled deadly violence given a context of poor government services, lacklustre policing, plethora of firearms, inequality, youth bulge, and dislocated families. These are countries and regions nearer the equator that are less developed, meaning their governments are less able to cope with the effects of climate change, and there are pre-existing higher levels of poverty and instability, increasing the risk of conflict.

Nigeria is a notable example of a country where climate change and conflict are perpetuating and reinforcing each other. Drought and desertification have seen a significant reduction in crop yields for farmers as well as pasture for herders to graze their cattle, leading to competition for the limited fertile land and water resources available, which in turn has led to violent clashes between the two groups. The country is now the poverty capital of the world, with the number of absolute poor rising there and in DRC, meaning that by 2030 these two countries will account for more than 40% of Africans in extreme poverty. The Global Terrorism Index also named it the third most terrorised country three years in a row, whilst the Fragile States Index ranked it 14th in its listings for 2018. Between 2010 and 2015, Nigeria lost 6500 citizens and $14.7 billion, with 62,000 others displaced in a record 850 perennial clashes between herdsmen and farmers in the middle belt region of the country. The crisis is now a full-blown national security threat.

So climate change and conflict are increasingly appearing together, worsening the crisis that fragile communities find themselves in. In Part 2, we’ll look at some of the key issues that tie these two problems together before looking, in Part 3, at how we might work to bring about change.