Women collecting water in plastic containers from a volcanic spring, Turkana region, Kenya (Credit: Martin Harvey via GettyImages)
Does climate change cause conflict: What can research tell us?
As climate change intensifies resource scarcity and social pressures, there is an increasingly urgent need to understand when and why violence breaks out. While studies have shown that worsening climate conditions can raise conflict risk, the results vary widely across contexts. Better evidence is needed to design policies that support fragile states in a warming world.
In 1788, a devastating drought struck France. Crops failed, grain prices soared, and a state already crippled by debt could not support its people. By the summer of 1789, unrest spilled into the streets, fueling the French Revolution.
Searching for a link between climate shocks and conflict
Climate shocks have been invoked as explanations for unrest – from medieval pogroms to nomadic raids in ancient China – for centuries. Today, as climate change reshapes economies and intensifies extreme events, policymakers fear a new wave of instability, especially in fragile states. This instability can take many forms: clashes over scarce resources, anti-government protests, or even civil war.
Given the stakes, policies to prevent conflict must be grounded in solid evidence. In many other sectors, bad decisions waste resources; in conflict, they can backfire and cost lives.
Yet despite a surge in economic studies on conflict, we still know too little about why individuals choose to fight, or which policies are most effective at reducing violence. With conflict rising globally and climate change adding new pressures, closing the evidence gap is more urgent than ever.
Why is the climate-conflict link so hard to pin down?
At first glance, the logic seems straightforward: when droughts, floods, or heatwaves hit, people lose crops and livelihoods, tensions rise, and violence follows. However, reality is far more complicated.
Theory suggests that outcomes are highly dependent on context. Conflict depends not just on one group’s strength but also on the relative strength of its opponents. A shock might embolden one side and weaken the other, thereby escalating conflict, or push both to negotiate.
Outcomes also hinge on timing, institutions, and the ability of communities to organise themselves. Sometimes climate shocks catalyse grievances, as in the French Revolution; other times, they force people to focus on survival, limiting large-scale mobilisation. In short, it is very difficult to predict whether climate shocks will spark conflict.
Empirically, the challenges are just as complex. Climate change is global and unfolds over decades, making it hard to disentangle its impact on conflict from other forces. Researchers often rely on short-term weather shocks (like unusually hot years) as stand-ins for longer-run changes.
This allows for cleaner causal analysis, but it assumes that short-run reactions mirror long-run dynamics – a big leap to make, given that adaptation and compounded shocks may both heighten and reduce conflict at different stages.
Moreover, shocks do not always immediately lead to increased violence – recruitment, organisation, and resource mobilisation take time, and the violence might occur far from the original climate shock, making the link harder to trace.
Why context matters when thinking about climate and conflict
Over the past 15 years, studies on climate and conflict have boomed. Using satellite data and event records, researchers have tried to quantify the impact of weather shocks on violence.
A meta-analysis by Burke, Ferguson, Hsiang, and Miguel (2024) finds that a moderate worsening of climate conditions – such as higher temperatures or reduced rainfall – increases intergroup violence by about 2.5%. With many regions expected to face two to four times that level of warming in the coming decades, this could mean that the risk of conflict increases by 5-10%.
These headline figures conceal a great deal of variation. Most studies pool together very different types of shocks and conflicts, spread over large geographical areas and long periods of time, which masks important distinctions. Results also shift dramatically depending on methodological choices, whether the variables being considered are rainfall or temperature, protests or civil war.
Since conflict is highly context-specific, broad averages reveal little about where and why violence breaks out. If context is expected to shape outcomes, then research designs should explicitly examine how and why that context matters.
How should new research think about conflict?
While the current literature has advanced our understanding of the possible links between climate change and conflict, it leaves policymakers with limited guidance on what to do next. New waves of research should make five key shifts:
- From top-down to bottom-up: Broad, data-driven studies should give way to more focused research on specific conflicts in specific contexts, guided by local knowledge and clear testable theories.
- From averages to mechanisms: Instead of lumping all shocks and conflicts together, studies should investigate pathways: how exactly does a drought affect livelihoods, recruitment, or bargaining power?
- From partial to general equilibrium: Research on climate and conflict should follow the broader conflict literature and incorporate general equilibrium effects of climate shocks. This means accounting for spatial spillovers – such as how violence or resource stress spreads across regions – and for transmission through markets and prices.
- From local to systemic: Climate shocks and conflicts are capable of spilling across borders, markets, and networks. Research should capture these ripple effects, not just local dynamics.
- From conflict to cohesion: Violence is an extreme outcome, but climate stress can also erode trust in governments, weaken institutions, and strain social cohesion long before fighting starts. Understanding these subtler dynamics is crucial.
- From “climate conflict” to conflict: So far, the causes and dynamics of climate-related conflicts do not appear fundamentally different from those of other conflicts. To really understand why people fight and how to prevent it, researchers should study conflict more broadly, including its social and psychological drivers, rather than focusing narrowly on climate.
Rethinking the debate to reflect the realities of fragile contexts
Climate change will reshape entire economies and societies. We already have a wealth of evidence showing its effects on growth, health, and wellbeing, yet policies are still moving too slowly. Adding conflict to the long list of quantified climate impacts is unlikely to change that.
What we need instead is better research on why people fight or choose not to. Too often, economic studies of conflict rely on overly simplistic frameworks, stripped of context and offering little policy guidance.
As climate change triggers profound social and economic disruption, the best preparation is not to measure its every consequence, but to deepen our understanding of conflict itself: why it emerges, how it escalates, and what can prevent it.
Ultimately, the question is not whether climate causes conflict, but how, why, and under what conditions. Answering it requires shifting from broad narratives to targeted, mechanism-driven analysis that reflects the realities of fragile contexts. Doing so will help donors, researchers, and policymakers design more grounded interventions, strengthen institutions, and support peaceful adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
Read more on our latest synthesis paper
As COP30 unfolds, the IGC will be sharing more insights on how developing countries can think about climate change and drive sustainable growth. Explore our full collection of blogs on climate priorities in developing countries.