Disasters, including disaster-related activities, have been shown to precipitate, intensify, and lengthen violent conflicts, yet disasters have also demonstrated the potential to reduce violent conflict, encourage cooperation, and build peace. Disaster-conflict and disaster-peace literature has sought to establish causal and linear relationships, but research has not explored with the same rigour the causal mechanisms linking these phenomena in long-term processes of social–political change and how they are influenced by human actions and inactions. This research fills this gap by drawing on in-depth interviews with disaster risk reduction (DRR) professionals in 25 disaster- and conflict-affected countries in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to analyse the pathways leading from disasters and disaster-related activities to violent conflict and peace. The findings highlight how these pathways can be deliberately swayed towards peace potential through DRR.
As climate change increasingly affects the world, much is said about the rising amounts of aid required to support emergency response, long-term development to adapt, and peacebuilding to ensure that conflict does not undermine these efforts. Bringing these ideas together, some advocate for the addition of a separate climate change stream into the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus (or triple nexus). Based on a critical literature review and synthesis, this article articulates and conceptualizes how climate change perspectives and actions should be integrated into the existing streams of the humanitarian, development, and peace/peacebuilding nexus, rather than being added as a separate stream. The analysis shows the risks of adding climate change as a stand-alone stream and advocates for developing long-term strategies that integrate climate change actions into humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts to better serve all three.
In the third climate change, conflict and security scan, covering the period from December 2018 to March 2019, we show that this quadrimester has witnessed the release of an astonishing array of new publications – reviewed through our summary of academic articles and grey literature, debates and announcements, and also conveyed through our summary of the blogosphere, and opinions found on Twitter. Many new authors appear in our bibliography, publishing on different aspects of the intersection of climate change, conflict and security. There is also a completely new list of top five individuals tweeting, which reveals that the breath of individuals and agencies engaging in the topic continues to expand. Prominent institutions continue to feature widely in the policy discourse, publication of grey literature and the blogosphere, with reporting from the World Economic Forum (WEF), United Nations (UN) Security Council debates on the security implications of disasters, and the fourth Planetary Security Conference. However, these high-profile forums are increasingly being complemented by evidence on the local experiences of the intersection of climate change, conflict and security. For example, through articles exploring the 'double vulnerability' of climate and conflict risk, with implications for humanitarian, development, peacebuilding and climate communities. Across the blogosphere, debate rages about the place of climate change in US national security priorities, and there is continued academic analysis of the political discourse of climate change found in policy documents and statements. This complements analysis on international and transboundary dimensions of the climate security nexus, with literature pointing to potential ways forward for such challenges in the context of: territory allocation in the Arcticregional cooperation around shared natural resources in Africa and Asiaunderstanding and responding to changing patterns of human mobility across borders. Themes less prominent in previous scans that appear here include urban landscapes, human mobility, and rights and justice. This complements new evidence on the intersection of disasters with conflict and violence, this time drawing on themes of poverty, inequality and marginalisation. As with the previous two scans, we aim to provide time-poor policy-makers, practitioners and academics with a summary of the new knowledge and evidence that has emerged over a four-month period. As described in the methodology for each section, the scan is not exhaustive but in featuring 25 top blog posts, 39 publications from grey literature and 66 articles from the academic articles, we believe this provides a good starting point for anyone wanting to better understand the nexus.
