Although acceptance of climate change’s role as a ‘threat multiplier’ is, by now, widespread, the specific causal mechanisms linking climate change to (violent) conflict onset remain under researched. Formal descriptions of the causal mechanisms remain few and far between. This is not problematic only for scientific reasons. The obscurity surrounding climate change’s links to violent conflict also hinders the development of targeted policy interventions at a time when the impact of such conflict is on the uptick.

This study presents seven climate-related conflict pathologies. For each pathology, the study identifies the relevant factors, describes how they interact with one another, and elucidates the pathways through which they lead to violent conflict. A climate-related conflict pathology is defined as the specific pathway through which interaction between climate change and social, economic, and political factors leads to violent conflict.

The study also highlights regions that are particularly prone to each pathology and evaluates the available evidence and the degree of scientific consensus surrounding each of them.

Land degradation has been identified as a factor that significantly increases the risk of civil conflict, though this finding should treated with caution because land degradation is operationalized differently across studies.
Evidence focused on the effect of water and land scarcity and local inter-communal conflict, especially in the context of low levels of development and high degrees of political and economic marginalization, is more robust.

Deviations in rainfall, temperature rise, and prolonged and more intense droughts can aggravate water and land scarcity, particularly when they affect vulnerable groups

When droughts occur during crop cultivation in agriculturally dependent countries – and in areas with low levels of economic development – they can increase the risk of violence.

Demographic growth further exacerbates land, water, and resource scarcity and intensifies competition. Against the background of unequal power and resource sharing arrangements, minorities’ access to water and land can be obstructed. The risk of conflict erupting further increases in localities where water and road infrastructures are absent.

Groups struggling to sustain their livelihood can turn to violence as a means of securing resources, especially when there are no alternate coping mechanisms (such as market transfers or state accommodation) available to them.

In this sense, conflicts over natural resources are distributional in nature. Climatic change’s adverse effects have a disproportionately high negative impact on indigenous or ethnic groups,meaning that these groups are also the most likely to experience localized forms of violence.