ABSTRACT
Over the last half dozen years or so, there has been a sustained and systematic effort to use quantitative methods to assess the conflict potential of global climate change. Bringing together assorted geographers, economists and political scientists, this new research programme deploys large-N methods to examine evidence of links between environmental and conflict variables, and on the basis of this to offer tentative predictions about the security implications of greenhouse-induced climatic change. The central ambition of this research programme is clear. Most early climate-conflict research, including that summarised in the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was highly speculative, was not peer-reviewed, and was also unremitting in its neo-Malthusianism.1
