Climate change, human security and violent conﬂict
Jon Barnett a,*, W. Neil Adger b
a
School of Social and Environmental Enquiry, University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia
b
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and CSERGE, School of Environmental Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Abstract
Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that
climate change may increase the risk of violent conﬂict. This paper integrates three disparate but wellfounded
bodies of research e on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change,
on livelihoods and violent conﬂict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer
new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conﬂict. It
explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly
do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to
sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities
and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances
these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of
violent conﬂict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide
empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.
Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Climate change; Human security; Violent conﬂict; state functions
Introduction
There is now a signiﬁcant body of research that demonstrates that climate change is and will
increasingly have dramatic impacts on ecological and social systems (summarised in IPCC,
2001, 2007). The risks are such that the aim of the UN Framework Convention on Climate
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ61 3 8344 0819; fax: þ61 3 9349 4218.
E-mail address: jbarn@unimelb.edu.au (J. Barnett).
0962-6298/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.03.003
Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Change is to avoid ‘dangerous’ interference in the climate system, and such impacts have been
deﬁned as a threat to ‘security’ (Barnett, 2003; Barnett & Adger, 2003; Brown, 1989; Edwards,
1999; Swart, 1996). There has been some speculation about the ways that climate change may
increase the risk of violent conﬂict (Brauch, 2002; Gleick, 1992; Homer-Dixon, 1991; van Ireland,
Klaassen, Nierop, & van der Wusten, 1996). There are two broad ways in which conﬂict
might be stimulated by climate change. First, conﬂict could come about through changes in the
political economy of energy resources due to mitigative action to reduce emissions from fossil
fuels (Rifkin, 2002). The second issue is the prospect of conﬂict stimulated by changes in social
systems driven by actual or perceived climate impacts. This paper is concerned with the second
of these possible connections. It offers new insights into the relationships between climate
change, human security, and violent conﬂict by integrating three disparate but well-founded
bodies of research e on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change,
on livelihoods and violent conﬂict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking.
Human security is taken here to mean the condition where people and communities have the
capacity to manage stresses to their needs, rights, and values (after Alkire, 2003).
This paper has four principal sections. First, it explains that climate change may undermine
human security by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to
sustain livelihoods. Second, it suggests that the kinds of human insecurity that climate change
may affect can in turn increase the risk of violent conﬂict. Third, it argues that climate change
may undermine the capacity of states to act in ways that promote human security and peace. In
sum, we suggest that, through direct effects on livelihoods and indirect effects on state functions,
climate change may in certain circumstances increase the risk of violent conﬂict. Yet
these connections between climate change, human security, the state and violent conﬂict are
not empirically proven. Hence, we ﬁnally outline a research agenda to guide empirical investigations
into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.
Climate change and human security
There is now widespread agreement that the changes now underway in the earth’s climate
system have no precedent in the history of human civilization (IPCC, 2007; Stern, 2007). As
a macro-driver of many kinds of environmental changes such as coastal erosion, declining precipitation
and soil moisture, increased storm intensity, and species migration, climate change
poses risks to human security (McCarthy, Canziani, Leary, Dokken, & White, 2001). In most
parts of the world, the impacts of climate change on socialeecological systems will be experienced
through both changes in mean conditions (such as temperature, sea-level, and annual
precipitation) over long-time scales, but also through increases in the intensity and in some
cases frequency of ﬂoods, droughts, storms and cyclones, ﬁres, heatwaves, and epidemics. Outside
of these short- and long-term changes, which are projected to occur with high levels of
certainty, there also exist somewhat more unquantiﬁable risks of high-impact events. These include
melting of glaciers and permafrost which may add several meters to global sea-levels,
collapse of the thermohaline circulation which may cause signiﬁcant regional climate changes
in the northern hemisphere, and large scale shifts in the Asian monsoon and the El Nino Southern
Oscillation phenomenon (Oppenheimer & Alley, 2004; Vellinga & Wood, 2007; Schneider,
Semenov, & Patwardhan, 2007).
There is every reason to worry about the impacts of these changes on human systems given
that the rate of change is unprecedented in the past 10,000 years, and that climatic variations
have triggered large-scale social disruptions in the past. The association between El Nino
640 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
events and famines that killed tens of millions across the tropics in the late 19th century has
been well documented by Davis (2001). Davis (2001) argues that famine was triggered by
drought, but caused by the way political and economic colonisation deprived people of their
entitlements to natural resources. Most analyses of famines now identify poverty, inequality,
market failures, and policy failures as the deeper causes of what ostensibly seem to be ‘natural’
disasters (see Sen, 1981; de Waal, 1997; Webb & von Braun, 1994). Davis’s arguments about
the ways climatic variations have combined with stressed socialeecological systems to result in
dramatic social change is reinforced by Diamond (2005), who examines many cases of catastrophic
social change and ﬁnds that environmental change was a common factor in all of
them, and climate change in particular was a cause of many.
The vulnerability (potential for loss) of people to climate change depends on the extent to
which they are dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services, the extent to which
the resources and services they rely on are sensitive to climate change, and their capacity to
adapt to changes in these resources and services. In other words, the more people are dependent
on climate sensitive forms of natural capital, and the less they rely on economic or social forms
of capital, the more at risk they are from climate change.
Yet environmental change does not undermine human security in isolation from a broader
range of social factors. These include, among other things, poverty, the degree of support (or
conversely discrimination) communities receive from the state, their access to economic opportunities,
the effectiveness of decision making processes, and the extent of social cohesion
within and surrounding vulnerable groups. These factors determine people and communities’
entitlements to economic and social capital that in turn determine their capacity to adapt to climate
change so that the things that they value are not adversely affected.
The way climate change can and does undermine human security varies across the world
because entitlements to natural resources and services vary across space, and the social determinants
of adaptive capacity are similarly varied. For example, in contrast to many industrialised
countries where agriculture represents 1e2% of the workforce, in East Timor some 85% of
the population are dependent on agriculture as their sole or main source of income, and the majority
of the population are engaged in subsistence farming so that 46% of rural people live below
the poverty line of US$0.55 per day (UNDP, 2002). There is no state-directed system of
income support, but there may be customary and Church-lead processes whereby food (and
in some places labour) is shared. There is a modest public education system and a very basic
public health system. Therefore, most rural Timorese have little or no alternative sources of
food beyond their own production. Maize is the most important source of food supply, but nowhere
is it an irrigated crop. Therefore, in times of low rainfall maize production can be reduced
by up to one-third, resulting in widespread hunger and child malnutrition (Barnett,
Dessai, & Jones, 2007). If climate change results in less rainfall in the dry season, then this
may negatively affect a number of resources that rural Timorese value, such as sufﬁcient
food and good health. In Timor, as in most instances of famine risk, climate is an exogenous
trigger, but underlying social problems are the deeper cause of food crises. This example of
East Timor, as well as the aforementioned analyses of famine, strongly suggests that the risks
of climate change to social systems is as much about the characteristics of those systems as it is
about changes in environmental systems.
While the focus of human security is the individual, the processes that undermine or
strengthen human security are often external to the locality of communities where individuals
reside. In terms of environmental change, for example, upstream users of water, distant atmospheric
polluters, multinational logging and mining companies, regional-scale climatic
641J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
processes, and a host of other distant actors and larger scale processes inﬂuence the security of
individuals’ entitlements to natural resources and services. Similarly, in terms of the social
determinants of vulnerability, warfare, corruption, trade dependency, macroeconomic policies,
and a host of other larger scale processes associated with ‘globalisation’ shape the social and
economic entitlements that are necessary to reduce an individual’s vulnerability (or increase
their ability to adapt) to environmental changes. Adger and Kelly (1999) refer to these larger
scale processes as comprising the ‘architecture of entitlements’. Furthermore, the determinants
of human security are as temporally as they are spatially complex: past processes such as colonisation
and war shape present insecurities, and ongoing processes such as climate change and
trade liberalisation shape future insecurities.
These larger scale processes that shape people’s entitlements to natural, economic and social
capital may themselves be vulnerable to climate change. Production sectors may be at risk; for
example, it is not just farmers whose livelihoods are at risk from climate change, but also those
whose livelihoods depend on agricultural production such as suppliers of inputs, people who
work in transporting and processing agricultural commodities, people who work as extension
ofﬁcers, and people who work in agricultural lending services. The knock-on effects of the
decline of certain sectors and the responses of those who depend on them for their livelihoods
may in turn impact on other places; for example, rural decline can cause migration to urban
areas, placing increasing demand on urban services and increasing political pressure on the
state, which in itself is an important provider of various entitlements such as education, health
care, law and order, credit, and protective security (see below).
The extent to which system-wide impacts transpire will be determined in part by the degree
to which any given national economy is dependent on climate sensitive natural resources, and
the robustness and resilience of social institutions to manage change. In both these less direct
ways, but also through direct processes such as territorial losses through rising sea levels, climate
change may be a national security issue (Barnett, 2003). The risk to national security may
be both a cause and a consequence of human insecurity.
So, human security is a function of multiple processes operating across space, over time,
and at multiple scales. This makes researching the ways in which climate change may affect
human security a daunting task, which is not helped by the difﬁculty of ascertaining whether
there are indeed any existing environmental changes that can be attributed to climate change
(see Allen & Lord, 2004). Nevertheless, there have been some investigations of the relationship
between climate change and human security. These have focussed on the local dynamics
that limit individuals’ and group’s access to environmental, ﬁnancial, and social resources
necessary to respond to climate variability and change (e.g., Adger, 1999; Bohle, Downing,
& Watts, 1994; Liechenko & O’Brien, 2002). As well as these climate speciﬁc applications,
a similar social vulnerability approach has been applied in anthropology (e.g., Minnegal &
Dwyer, 2000), development (e.g., Chambers, 1989) and disasters research (e.g., Blaikie, Cannon,
Davies, & Wisner, 1994). In the ﬁeld of environmental security many case studies, for
example from Northern Pakistan (Matthew, 2001), South Asia (Najam, 2003), the Niger Delta
(Mochizuki, 2004), the Paciﬁc Islands (Cocklin & Keen, 2000) and Ethiopia (Haile, 2004)
show that environmental change can be a signiﬁcant factor that undermines human security.
This research demonstrates that marginalised people are vulnerable to environmental change,
and it all helps substantiate the argument that climate change poses signiﬁcant risks to human
security in many parts of the world. What is less clear, however, are the ways in which human
insecurity lead to violent conﬂict. This is important to consider since violent conﬂict is itself a
powerful cause of human insecurity and vulnerability to climate change (Barnett, 2006).
642 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
Human insecurity and violent conﬂict
Beyond considering the impact of violent conﬂict on people, for the most part the issues of
human security and violent conﬂict are treated as separate entities in research. Instead, most
research into the cause of violent conﬂicts, including that from almost all participants in the
so-called ‘greed versus grievance’ debate (see Berdal & Malone, 2000), focus on the structural
conditions that increase the risk of violent conﬂict rather than the decisions of actors to engage
in violent acts. Yet violence happens for a number of reasons including, because leaders are
more able to mobilise some groups of people under certain conditions such as the presence
of a weak state (Eckstein & Gurr, 1975); because of the ‘lootability’ of natural resources
(Collier, 2000); and because to varying degrees individuals choose to engage in both violence
(excluding those who are forcibly conscripted into armed groups) and peace (Cramer, 2002;
Gilgan, 2001; Moran & Pitcher, 2004).
The role of individuals in initiating, sustaining, resisting or solving violent conﬂicts is a major
lacunae in both the development and violent conﬂict literature, and the environmental
change and violent conﬂict literatures (in the latter more so than the former). There are few
studies (Gough, 2002; Mochizuki, 2004; Ohlsson, 2000) that explain in any detail the ways
in which human insecurity increases the risk of violent conﬂict. This section explores in detail
the connections between human insecurity and the risk of violent conﬂict.
Table 1 summarises some our key hypothesised mechanisms by which climate change may
undermine human security and may, in conjunction with an array of non-climate speciﬁc
Table 1
The relationship between determinants of human insecurity, violent conﬂict and climate change
Factors affecting violent
conﬂict
Processes which climate change could affect/exacerbate
Vulnerable livelihoods Climate change is likely to cause widespread impacts on water availability, coastal regions,
agriculture, extreme events and diseases. The impacts on livelihoods will be more
signiﬁcant in sectors of the population with high resource-dependency, and in more
environmentally and socially marginalised areas. Some of these climate driven outcomes
are long term and chronic (such as declining productivity of agricultural land), while
others are episodic (such as ﬂoods). These impacts on livelihoods will be widespread both
in developing and developed countries.
Poverty (relative/chronic/
transitory)
Poverty (and particularly relative deprivation) is affected by the spatial differentiation of
climate impacts and the sensitivity of places to them. Climate change may directly increase
absolute, relative, and transient poverty by undermining access to natural capital. It may
indirectly increase poverty through its effects on resource sectors and the ability of
governments to provide social safety nets. Stresses from climate change will differentially
affect those made vulnerable by political-economic processes such as liberalisation of
markets for agricultural commodities.
Weak states The impacts of climate change are likely to increase the costs of providing public
infrastructure such as water resources, and services such as education, and may decrease
government revenues. So climate change may decrease the ability of states to create
opportunities and provide important freedoms for citizens as well as decrease the capacity of
government agencies to adapt and respond to climate change itself.
Migration Migration may be one response of people whose livelihoods are undermined by climate
change. However, climate is unlikely to be the sole, or even the most important ‘push’
factor in migration decisions. Yet large-scale movements of people may increase the risk
of conﬂict in host communities.
643J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
factors, increase the risk of violent conﬂict. It is important to stress that climate change will not
undermine human security or increase the risk of violent conﬂict in isolation from other important
social factors. So, while Table 1 summarises our arguments, it should not be read as a simple
statement of the ways climate change can be a security problem, nor as a blueprint for
reductionist research. We also stress that the set of climate change factors does not cause violent
conﬂict, but rather merely affect the parameters that are sometimes important in generating
violent conﬂict. We examine each of these areas in turn.
A common factor in many internal wars is that armed groups are comprised of young men
whose expectations for a better life have been frustrated due to contractions in their livelihoods
(Ohlsson, 2000). This makes joining an armed group a relatively more rational option to
achieve some status in society, particularly when leaders are able to ascribe their poverty to
the actions of Other (ethnic, political, geographic, class) groups (Goodhand, 2003; Reno,
1997). Ohlsson (2000: 8) juxtaposes the situation of declining livelihoods with a more stable
state of affairs, arguing that ‘‘young men do not (at least not in signiﬁcant numbers) regularly
seek immediate rewards in illegal activities and looting, as long as the society they live in can
provide livelihoods and a social position’’. Indeed, poor men may have a ‘comparative advantage’
in violence because the opportunity costs of joining armed groups are low (Goodhand,
2003). The opportunity costs for women, in contrast, are relatively higher; their reproductive
and domestic obligations arguably mean they are less likely to engage in acts of organised violence
because this would mean forsaking those who may be dependent on them (Ohlsson,
2000). The gendered division of labour in most countries also makes women the ﬁrst to suffer
from the direct and indirect depredations wrought by violent conﬂict (Brittain, 2003). Perhaps
for these reasons, women are often the most important actors in peace-building endeavours
(Mochizuki, 2004; Moran & Pitcher, 2004).
A number of authors (Goodhand, 2003; Nafziger & Auvinen, 2002; Ohlsson, 2000) hypothesise
that it is not so much chronic poverty per se, but rather the risk or realisation of sudden
poverty that increases people’s propensity to join armed groups. Stewart and Fitzgerald
(2000) point to uncertainty about the future as being a critical factor here, and in this sense
it is not just potential or actual insecurity that increases the risk of violent conﬂict, but also
the perception of future insecurity (uncertainty). In this respect, the provision of aid, and
importantly some certainty that aid will arrive, can help reduce the need for people to use violence
to provide for their needs (Gough, 2002; Keen, 2000). In many developed countries, established
and effective welfare systems perform this function, which in part helps explain why
they experience relatively less frequent and intense violent conﬂicts than developing countries.
The causes of livelihood contraction are often but not exclusively due to declining access to
natural capital caused by, for example, deforestation, land degradation, natural disasters such as
drought and ﬂood, and population displacement for agricultural expansion, industrial development,
or the building of roads and dams. Declining access to land, or rather to the returns from
human uses of land, is seen as a key process that causes livelihood contraction and hence increases
the risk that people will join armed groups (de Soysa, Gleditsch, Gibson, & Sollenberg, 1999).
Other non-ecological factors such as the rolling back of state services and declining terms of trade
also matter, and often interact with natural resource use and people’s access to them in complex
ways (Reed, 1996). For example, in his analysis of land invasions in a district of Chiapas, BobrowStrain
(2001) shows that declining agricultural production due to economic and political forces
(rather than environmental scarcity) was an important factor in land conﬂicts. Population growth
may be a contributing factor in declining livelihoods, but it is rarely the most signiﬁcant (Hartmann,
1998). War itself is a signiﬁcant cause of livelihood contraction: violence tends to escalate
644 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
in part because it generates new causes of grievance and increased impoverishment (Bax, 2002).
These factors rarely operate in isolation (O’Lear, 2005). As argued earlier, there are good grounds
to suggest that climate change will result in contracted livelihoods for many people, including losses
of land and declining returns from human uses of land.
There is no consensus on whether income inequality causes violent internal conﬂict. Collier
(2000) ﬁnds no strong association between income inequality and civil wars. However, many
others argue that either vertical (class-based), horizontal (spatially-based), or age-based
inequalities are a cause of grievance which leads to either direct action to redress inequality
and/or to take revenge, or at least makes it possible for leaders to mobilise the poor under
the common cause of grievance (Archibald & Richards, 2002; Cramer, 2003; Goodhand,
2003; Hage, 2003; Keen, 2000; Reno, 1997; Stewart, 2000). It is relative rather more than
absolute poverty that seems to matter. Because contractions in the livelihoods of some sections
of society most often imply increasing inequality (since others are not affected, or may indeed
prosper), then this can create conditions more conducive to the outbreak of violence.
It is not just relative, absolute, and transient poverty that can increase the risk of violent conﬂict,
but also a lack of opportunities for individuals and groups to act to improve their lives. Of
particular importance here is access to education since it is critical for self-empowerment and
increasing the prospects of employment, higher wages, and social mobility. Education offers
the opportunity for people to improve their lives. Poverty of opportunities has been seen to
be a major factor in the decisions of people e particularly young men e to join militias in Sierra
Leone (Archibald & Richards, 2002; Keen, 2000) and Palestine (Hage, 2003), and street
gangs in Managua (Maclure & Sotelo, 2004).
This focus on agents’ decisions reinforces the arguments of Collier (2000), Dufﬁeld (2001),
Keen (2000) and Reno (1997) that wars are not irrational, but rather are the product of a set of
rational decisions that lead to (a violent) reordering of economic and political systems and social
relations. However, there are serious limitations to understanding agents only as rational
economic actors (Cramer, 2002). Joining armed gangs can serve a host of psycho-social needs
as well. It can deliver an often badly needed sense of power and status (Goodhand, 2003; Keen,
2000), the prospects of some social mobility (Stewart & Fitzgerald, 2000), excitement (Keen,
2000), and belonging and social recognition (Hage, 2003; Maclure & Sotelo, 2004). It may also
be motivated by a genuine sense of grievance, frustration, and desire for revenge (Archibald &
Richards, 2002; Scheper-Hughes, 2004), by identiﬁcation with a common cause (Weinstein,
2004), and by a need for protection from violence and denial of economic freedoms (Keen,
2000; Mwanasali, 2000; Weinstein, 2004). ‘Generation gaps’ between youth and elders can
also be a source of frustration and alienation, pointing to the need for inclusive decision-making
and conﬂict resolution processes (Archibald & Richards, 2002; Reno, 1997). Once in a violent
group, the doing of violence may be in part because of obedience to authority (Milgram, 2004),
fear of exclusion from the group, a variety of ‘cultural’ factors (Hinton, 2004), and in large part
due to training within armed groups and discursive processes that construct and dehumanise
Others (Spillmann & Spillmann, 1991; Weinstein, 2004).
The meaning of violence also matters, as do perceptions of threat and danger (Goodhand,
2003). Not unlike the security dilemma whereby countries arm themselves because they perceive
dangers from other countries, sometimes leading to iterative cycles of threat perception
and armament (arms races), within countries groups may respond to perceptions of threat
from others, leading to similar build up of threat perception and capability thereby increasing
the risk of violent conﬂagrations. The role of leaders in generating or mitigating these cycles of
antipathy is critical (David, 1997).
645J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
So, on the basis of the arguments and evidence we have just reviewed, it seems that human
insecurity increases the risk of violent conﬂict. There is no single explanation for why individuals
and groups who are e or who may or do become e insecure are more likely to join armed
groups and engage in violent acts. This should not be surprising, for if violence were monocausal,
solutions would be more readily identiﬁable. However, while the connection between
human insecurity and an increased risk of violent conﬂict seems reasonably strong, this is
not by any means to suggest that: (a) the presence of widespread human insecurity, even
when coupled with every other possible risk factor, means violence is more likely than not;
(b) over history the majority of directly violent acts that have caused trauma and death have
been committed by the poor; (c) the forms of structural violence (see Galtung, 1969) that
are the major cause of morbidity and mortality emanate from the decisions and actions of
the poor; and (d) violent conﬂicts in developing countries are entirely local and caused exclusively
by endogenous factors. It does suggest, however, that under certain circumstances, at the
same time as it negatively affects human security, climate change may also increase the risk of
violent conﬂict. Livelihood security seems to be an important factor in security from violence,
or, in Gough’s (2002: 154) words: ‘‘human security depends on a system where each rational
individual calculates that it is more proﬁtable not to rebel’’. We now turn to discuss some of the
larger structural circumstances e in particular, the operation of states e that both shape the degree
of human security as well as affect the risk of violent conﬂict, and the ways some of these
may be affected by climate change.
The state and human security
Human security cannot be separated from the operation of states. States are critical to providing
opportunities for people, creating and providing a stable environment so that livelihoods
can be pursued with conﬁdence, and providing measures to protect people when livelihoods
contract. They can actively promote or repress rights to personal security, social services,
and economic opportunities. They can exercise their sovereign rights to mediate between global
ﬂows in ways that enhance or undermine all or certain groups’ livelihoods. So the state is a critical
institution for livelihoods. Yet given that few, if any violent conﬂicts are entirely local, and
that most often there are important regional and global forces at work (such as arms trading, the
presence of private security forces, cross-border movements of people and goods, foreign investors,
and degrees of third party intervention), many states may be involved in the causes of and
solutions to violent conﬂict (Kahl, 2006; Reno, 2000).
States play critical roles in creating the conditions whereby people can act in ways to pursue
the lives they value (Sen, 1999). They can provide protective guarantees to assist people when
their livelihoods suddenly contract, for example through income support, food aid, or shortterm
local employment programs. They can provide economic freedoms that are important
for people to seek employment and to interact to seek mutually advantageous outcomes in
terms of consumption and production. The state can provide political freedoms such as the freedom
of speech, freedom of the media, civil liberties, and the freedom to vote for parties, leaders
and policies. Provision of social opportunities such as education and health care is another important
state role. States can provide transparency guarantees to ensure openness and accountability
in transactions to mitigate against corruption and to maintain faith in market processes.
These state functions are interconnected, they ‘‘supplement’’ and ‘‘reinforce’’ each other (Sen,
1999: 40), and their instrumentality is maximised when all are in place. When all these functions
are extensive and effective states are legitimate, people have opportunities to develop and
646 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
have less anxiety about the future, conﬂict resolution mechanisms tend to be effective, and
economies tend to grow and poverty levels tend to fall (Sen, 1999). These are characteristics
of ‘strong states’ that have effective administrative hierarchies, control the legitimate use of
force, can mediate impending conﬂicts before they turn violent, and are more capable of managing
environmental degradation and change (Eckstein & Gurr, 1975; Esty et al., 1999; Hauge
& Ellingsen, 2001; Kahl, 2006). In strong liberal-democratic states, both the structural conditions
and livelihood factors that increase the risk of violent conﬂict are reduced.
When states cannot provide all these functions, the risk of violent conﬂict increases. Thus
internal wars are more likely in countries where the revenue raising opportunities for the state
are constrained (which is itself a function of the poverty of the population) (Nafziger & Auvinen,
2002). In a recent analysis, Kahl (2006) has argued that in addition to civil disputes arising
when political leaders seek to exploit environmental and social pressures for personal gain,
environmental change can be a factor in state failures through its impacts on revenue, legitimacy
and social cohesion. A number of studies suggest that state functions that seem to be
of particular importance to mitigate against the generation of violent conﬂicts include the provision
of health care and education, the protection of human rights, establishment and maintenance
of a strong and independent judiciary, accountable and transparent police services and
armed forces, and the protection of democratic processes (Goodhand, 2003; Gough, 2002;
Kahl, 2006; Keen, 2000). Democracy, for example, gives people power to act to affect
change e it creates opportunities that reduce the need for violent action to cause change,
and it tends to ensure a minimal level of welfare such that people are less likely to die
from, for example, famine (Sen, 1999). For these reasons, groups that fall outside of e or
who live beyond the protection of e the state, for reasons of geographic but also social distance,
are often more likely to experience violent conﬂict (Keen, 2000). Goodhand (2003) points to
the emergence of many violent conﬂicts in ecologically and/or economically marginal regions
as evidence that relative poverty and poverty of opportunities due to inadequate access to the
state may be a key cause of violence. Bax’s (2002) detailed description of the emergence of
violent conﬂict in a Bosnian village shows that contraction of the state and the economy heightened
perceptions of inequality within the village, which lead to a progressive reduction of a previously
pluralistic community into two groups who respectively dehumanised, and ultimately
began killing each other.
Of course, where states actively deny entitlements, or deliberately repress and abuse people,
violence becomes a more likely tool of resistance (Nafziger & Auvinen, 2002). There can be
distinct environmental factors in this process, for example dispossession of land for mining
with subsequent environmental impacts and inadequate returns to landholders was a key factor
in the formation of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (Bo¨ge, 1999); and inadequate distribution
of the returns from resource extraction activities has been a factor in violence in West
Kalimantan (Peluso & Harwell, 2001) and the Niger Delta (Mochizuki, 2004; Watts, 2001).
There are good grounds to think that when states contract e for example as a consequence of
Structural Adjustment and Good Governance Programmes e so that the freedoms and opportunities
they provide subsequently contract, violent conﬂict is more likely (Bax, 2002; Bobrow-Strain,
2001; Gough, 2002; Gourevitch, 1998; Kahl, 2006; Keen, 2000; Reno, 1997). So, understanding
the way climate change may increase the risk of violent conﬂict therefore also requires understanding
the way it may weaken (or strengthen) the capacity of states to provide or deny opportunities
for people, and manage globalisation.
Other factors that increase the risk of violent conﬂict include the availability of weapons
(Boutwell & Klare, 1999); a history of violent conﬂict (Collier, 2000); resource dependence
647J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
(de Soysa, 2000); a ‘youth bulge’ among the working population (Cincotta, 2004); and in-migration.
In terms of migration, the inﬂux of migrants into new areas has been a signiﬁcant factor
in many ‘environmental conﬂicts’ (see Baechler, 1999; Klo¨tzli, 1994; Peluso & Harwell, 2001;
Swain, 1993). Large migrations have at times lead to violent conﬂict, and large migrations may
be a consequence of climate change (van Ireland et al., 1996). However, it is the political and
institutional responses to new migrants e rather than the existence of migrants per se e that
seems to be most important in cases where migration is a factor in violent conﬂict
(Goldstone, 2001), and these social dynamics of host communities are important areas for
study. Further, people rarely migrate for environmental reasons alone, so understanding the
way climate change may induce more migration also requires understanding the way it will interact
with other factors (Meze-Hausken, 2000). It also requires understanding the strategies
people use to adapt to environmental changes, of which temporary, and ultimately permanent
migration is but one (Davies, 1996; Meze-Hausken, 2000).
Despite the evidence that contraction in livelihoods, poverty (chronic, transitory, and relative),
weak states, and immigration are all risk factors in violent conﬂict, and despite research
that suggests that climate change may have direct and indirect negative effects on these risk
factors, there is still much uncertainty about the ways in which climate change may increase
human insecurity and the risk of violent conﬂict. Given this uncertainty, there are dangers in
speaking prematurely and vociferously about climate change in the language of security (see
Barnett, 2003). Much more research is required, and so we now turn to outline a potential research
programme to gain a greater understanding of the ways climate change may increase
insecurity.
Towards an improved understanding
The discussion in the sections above raises many questions that, to date, have not been
effectively addressed by either theoretical or empirical research. We suggest that research on
climate change and its potential effects on human security has many parallels with research
on the risks and causes of violent conﬂict. Bearing this in mind, and informed by the discussion
thus far, we now propose three key areas of research on climate insecurity, some of the important
issues associated with each aim, and suggest some places where such research might profitably
focus.
A key aim of research to enhance understanding of climate insecurity should be to assess the
vulnerability of people’s livelihoods to climate change. Studies of this kind are not new, but
given that there are many low-income and resource dependent communities in the developing
world such studies need to be far more numerous, both for reasons of enhanced understanding
of the relative signiﬁcance of factors that structure vulnerability, and to inform policies to
reduce vulnerability to climate change. The Assessment of Impacts and Adaptations to Climate
Change (AIACC) project is an initial attempt at the kind of comparative vulnerability assessment
process that is required to enhance understanding and improve policies to address climate
insecurity. The AIACC project is revealing that the most potentially devastating impacts of climate
change arise from a combination of multiple stresses acting in concert e of which climate
stresses are but one, and which also include ecosystem degradation, failed governance systems,
and economic decline (Leary et al., 2006) The emerging lessons from this and other vulnerability
research are, for example, that elderly and young people are particularly at risk everywhere
in the world e in the developing world from impacts on agriculture and nutrition, and
everywhere from the physiological impacts of heatwaves and extreme weather. Some places
648 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
are more exposed to new risk than others. But a starting point for security-oriented vulnerability
research could be places where exposure is high and climate change seems to be having the
greatest effect e notably the semi-arid tropics and the high arctic e and in places where the
magnitude of impacts seems likely to be greatest, for example small island developing states
and densely populated coastal areas such as the GangeseBrahmaputra delta.
Present research on vulnerability to climate change investigates the diverse array of social
and environmental factors operating over time, and across an array of spatial scales, that structure
vulnerability (e.g., O’Brien et al., 2004). These factors include the sensitivity of resources
such as freshwater, soils, reefs and ﬁsheries to sudden and incremental changes in climate, the
degree to which households and communities rely on these resources to meet their needs and
values, and the capacity of social systems to adapt to changes in the temporal distribution and
abundance of these resources so that households’ and communities’ needs and values can continue
to be satisﬁed. This adaptive capacity depends on, inter alia, the ability to access commodity
markets and labour markets and the prices paid on these markets, the ability of
communities to pool resources to collectively respond to change, access to information, population
health, and the existence and effectiveness of national and international policies and measures
to sustain resources and livelihoods in vulnerable places.
Understanding the determinants of vulnerability in this way requires insights from a range of
disciplines across the natural and social sciences. It also requires analysis of how policy
agendas are shaped through scienceepolicy interactions that can, at times, reproduce Malthusian
associations of resource scarcity with the risk of violent conﬂict (Sarewitz, Pielke, &
Keykhah, 2003). If the economically and politically powerful developed countries that also
emit large amounts of greenhouse gases primarily understand vulnerability to climate change
in developing countries as a risk to their national security through migration or violent conﬂict,
then their responses may be more weighted towards increased border protection and defence
spending, rather than towards the reduction of emissions and efforts to foster adaptation
(Barnett, 2003). Hence, the framing of climate change risks by the scientiﬁc community, and
the way those framings inform policy, is a key area for research (e.g., Weber, 2006).
A second key aim of the research to enhance understanding of climate insecurity should be
to examine the consequences of livelihood insecurity, since this is a likely outcome of climate
change, and seems to be a factor that increases the risk of violent conﬂict. Satisfying this aim in
part requires answering a question at the heart of most conﬂict research, which is ‘why do
individuals choose violence?’ e the answer to which is most likely to come through psychological
rather more than geographic research. However, there are structural risk factors that
can also be identiﬁed, and identiﬁcation of these, the way they interact, and their inﬂuence
on conﬂict is an important research task. Key risk factors include the opportunities to gain income
elsewhere (which is most often a function of labour markets, and may involve migration),
a past history of violence, ineffective justice systems, the availability of weapons, ineffective or
non-existent public and private welfare systems, and poor access to opportunity-enhancing services
such as education and health care.
A systematic and comparative research project on the consequences of livelihood change
and the risk of violent outcomes would perhaps proﬁtably focus on countries where the risk
factors are high. The kinds of places where climate induced changes in livelihoods is a risk factor
for violent conﬂict include those where the state is weak e as might be indicated by the
Failed States Index (see Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace, 2006); where access to education
and health care and income is poor e as might be indicated by the Human Development
Index (see UNDP, 2006); and where much of the population is dependent on primary resources
649J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
for their livelihoods e as might be indicated by sectoral distribution of employment data provided
by the ILO (2005). Using these criteria as a course screen, the kinds of countries where
climate change seems most likely to induce widespread human insecurity and conﬂict are those
which score poorly on each of these indicators, and these include Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, The
Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Yemen. Within these countries,
local level studies of low-income resource dependent communities, as well as low-income urban
communities, could deliver insights into the ways people construct their livelihoods, the
choices they have made when faced with change in the past, and the choices people are likely
to make in the face of livelihood decline. They could also examine local peace movements and
their successes and constraints.
In the two research priorities above, vulnerability analysis and causes of conﬂict analysis
primarily focus on speciﬁc individual and community-level social processes, but with an eye
on larger scale forces that shape the opportunities and constraints to local livelihoods and
alternatives to them. But we argue that there is a third locus of analysis that is important for
understanding climate security, and which is equally under-researched. The role of institutions,
which is critical for successful adaptation to climate change (Smit & Pilifosova, 2001), as well
as the management of security problems, including conﬂict (Keohane, 1989), is not well understood.
The term ‘institutions’ is contested, but is understood here to be ‘‘a persistent, reasonably
predictable arrangement, law, process, custom or organisation structuring aspects of the political,
social, cultural or economic transactions and relationships in a society’’ (Dovers, 2001: 5).
They are the ritualised practices that maintain social cohesion and collective and peaceful responses
to changes. They include, but are more than, organizations and regimes, and they occur
at various scales ranging from marriage to the United Nations.
There is no single agreed theory of institutional adaptation, nor are there clear criteria for
what constitutes an ‘effective’ or a ‘successful’ institution (Adger, 2000). There is an emerging
consensus, however, that a number of factors matter, including an institution’s legitimacy
(moral and legal), its responsiveness to its constituents, its core values and its commitment
to them, its ability to learn and experiment, the amount of resources available to it, its independence
from short-term political pressures, the quality of its management, and the transparency
of its decision making (Dovers, 2001; Goodin, 1996). There are multiple and overlapping
institutions operating at various scales that are and will be directly and indirectly involved in
exacerbating or alleviating the adverse effects of climate change. These include local, national,
regional and global governance institutions that make decisions and implement policies that
directly (e.g., the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), and indirectly
(e.g., development agencies) affect capacity to adapt to climate change. An important task
for research on climate change and security is therefore to identify the capacity of these institutions
to manage the adverse effects of climate change so that they do not become security
problems. Not all of these are amenable to empirical research, but the operation of the most
important larger scale institution e the state e can be studied, and should be in the context
of research to satisfy the ﬁrst two and the following key aim for further research on climate
insecurity.
Because the role of the state is often critical in reducing both vulnerability to climate change
and the risk of violent conﬂict, and because the capacity of states is itself at risk from climate
change, a third key aim of the research to enhance understanding of climate insecurity should
be to examine the challenges climate change pose to states, including the capacity of the states
to protect livelihoods and sustain peace, recognising of course that these may not be goals of
some states. Key issues here are the dependence of states on revenues gained directly (as rents
650 J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
or as state companies) or indirectly (through climate sensitive resources such as agriculture,
ﬁsheries, or forestry), and their responses to past situations where revenues have declined,
which may include encouraging more intensive resource extraction, and declining expenditure
on livelihood protection and peace building activities. Various state institutions are involved in
managing the security risks of climate change. These include climate-speciﬁc groups such as
national climate change teams and environment and resource management agencies. However,
institutions engaged in management of problems that may arise from climate change such as
increased ruraleurban migration (land tenure institutions and urban planning agencies);
increased morbidity (health service providers); increased climatic hazards (disaster management
arrangements); increased demand for development assistance (diplomatic and development
agencies); and increased violent disputes and crime (the judiciary and the police) are
also important.
Because many of the determinants of vulnerability are either locally or state-derived, it
makes sense to study state processes in the same countries that local-scale ﬁeldwork is being
conducted. That many important global processes such as development programs, trade and ﬁnancial
ﬂows, and multilateral negotiations (on climate change, but also human rights, security,
trade, and so on) ﬂow through states add to the value of studying the state to understand climate
change and security.
Conclusions
This paper has argued that climate change undermines human security in the present day,
and will increasingly do so in the future. It does this by reducing people’s access to natural
resources that are important to sustain their livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine
the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain
their livelihoods, and which help to maintain and build peace. In certain circumstances, these
direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security and the state may in turn
increase the risk of violent conﬂict.
It seems evident that climate change poses risk to human insecurity principally through its
potentially negative effects on people’s well-being. This is the a priori reason why climate
change is of great concern to many people. Yet there is need for considerably more research
on the ways it may undermine human security, not least because the level of understanding
of people’s vulnerability is still sufﬁciently uncertain for the purposes of designing effective
adaptation strategies. Yet, because the actual or perceived insecurity of people due to a wide
range of processes e including livelihood contraction e is a factor in many violent conﬂicts,
human insecurity caused in part by climate change may in turn lead to more conventional
security problems.
Based on these observations, we suggest that there is a need for systematic, comparative and
cross-scale research to enhance understanding of the connections between climate change,
human security and violence. This includes understanding the ways in which it may affect environmental
changes in localities, the extent to which people are susceptible to damage from those
changes, and their capacities to avoid or adapt to them so that their livelihoods can be sustained and
their needs and values can continue to be satisﬁed. It also requires understanding theways in which
people may respond if climate change undermines livelihoods, as one outcome might be an increased
propensity for people to engage in violence as an alternative livelihood strategy. Finally,
enhanced understanding of climate insecurity also involves understanding the ways in which climate
change challenges states, including their capacity to protect livelihoods and maintain peace,
651J. Barnett, W.N. Adger / Political Geography 26 (2007) 639e655
if it exists. Such research on climate insecurity can reduce uncertainty about the human dimensions
of climate impacts, and enhance knowledge of potential adaptation strategies to avoid human
insecurity as well as an increased risk of violent conﬂict.
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