CANADA: Researchers agree that climate change can exacerbate human conflict, there are many that caution against using it to explain the root causes of war.
Humans have fought over resources for millennia, so recent studies indicating a link between severe drought and the civil war in Syria shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. That said, some researchers warn we might be jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly.
Any attempt by scholars over the past several years to link climate change with conflict has been hotly contested, and not just by climate deniers. Many respected conflict researchers believe that climate change is happening, that humans are contributing to it, and that it’s a big problem, but that focusing on it as a cause of war may be wrongheaded.
The problem is both scientific and social. “If you want to show that climate change has contributed to an increase in civil violence, then you need to control for other factors,” explains Andrew Solow, senior scientist at the Wood Hollow Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. “This is a fundamental scientific principle. But it is difficult to do.”
Half a dozen or so researchers have attempted to do this, and a few have come close. In 2013, Stanford researchers Sol Hsiang and Marshall Burke, for example, conducted a meta-analysis of 50 studies on conflict and climate change and found that higher temperatures and extreme precipitation tend to correlate with greater incidence of conflict.
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