ABSTRACT
The road to hell is famously paved with good intentions. The battle to confront the climate challenge will be no exception – and yet, researchers and scholars have generally neglected to investigate how our efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change might directly and immediately contribute to conflict. To avoid doing harm by doing good, researchers and policymakers must identify the risks involved in climate programs and policies. This overlooked field of research – which falls under the umbrella of ‘backdraft’ and now ‘boomerang’ – requires paying attention to the ways in which our responses to climate change will produce winners and losers. Otherwise, our good intentions may lead us down a dangerous path.
Fortunately, there are some concrete ways to begin that build off of existing initiatives: (i) require conflict-sensitivity screens for all climate programs throughout the project lifecycle as some bilateral aid agencies are doing; (ii) create more flexible pools of funding that support multiple inflection points to meeting the climate challenge that emphasize local and affected community participation; (iii) expand the universe of ‘appropriate’ climate responses and ‘appropriate’ climate actors to bring the social, political, economic and equity concerns into decision-making from the outset; and (iv) establish more applied research and practitioner forums for shared learned on cross-sectoral approaches to complex climate-security challenges. Granted, this is no easy task, but these actions are modest first steps to making an essential transition to how we frame and address climate change challenges.
