Climate Change Will Increase Risk of Violent Conflict, Researchers Warn

Stanford convened top experts in climate and conflict with a wide range of views to see where they agree about climate change’s impact on global security.

Worsening climate change will increase the risk of future violent conflict within countries, a group of top researchers representing an array of viewpoints said Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

The study, "Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict," tries to address some longstanding disagreements among climate scientists, political scientists, historians, and other experts about what role, if any, climate change has played in internal conflicts over the last 100 years.  Stanford researchers took the unusual step of convening 11 of the most experienced and cited experts on the topic to resolve their assessments of climate change's impact on global security.

Working together, the experts concluded that climate change so far has not played a large role in stoking conflict, overshadowed instead by other factors such as poor governance and weak economic development.  But they agreed that climate change will play a far greater role in destabilizing countries as the planet warms.

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