ABSTRACT
Does climate change cause conflicts? The public debate around ‘climate wars’ suggests a causal link between changes in climate and conflict. Examples from history show that climate and the natural environment had an impact on many aspects of human development such as types of food and settlements. This raises the question of how current, accelerated climate change and the resulting environmental changes will influence human societies. Due to the many influences of climate change, this question covers a variety of aspects such as the impact of extreme weather effects (e.g. floods or typhoons), of rising sea levels or of changes in temperature and precipitation. In this book, I focus on one link between climate change and conflict: scarcity of livelihood resources such as arable land and water. While there are strong theoretical arguments linking resource scarcity and conflict, the empirical evidence on this link is mixed: some case studies support the link but most quantitative studies find no or only weak correlations. I assume that whether conflicts break out in resource-scarce countries depends on the specific combinations of social, political and economic conditions in these countries. To establish under which conditions armed conflict occurs in countries experiencing resource scarcity, I systematically compare 30 cases, employing qualitative comparative analysis. The conditions included in this analysis are based on an adaptive capacities framework and include economic resources, political institutions, adaptive skills and equality. This introduction also contains a discussion of the concept of resource scarcity and the notion of resource scarcity on which the selection of cases included is based. Many of the aspects included in the analysis (such as the quality of political institutions, the level of education and access to technology) are dependent on and constitutive of the level of development. This makes the role development plays for peace and conflict in resource-scarce countries a central theme in this book.
