This climate change impact demonstration is a product of the Center for Defense Information's new project on Global Warming and International Security. It permits users to generate randomized scenarios of global conflict in future worlds of climate change. The demonstration's creation was motivated by several desires.
First, although a number of published studies and reports analyze the general causal links between climate change and conflict, insufficient research has publicly described resulting conflict scenarios on a large scale. Focused case studies are important, but, in order to translate the overall topic into strategic planning, we need to develop a mass of basic scenarios for all parts of the world. There is a limited set of dyads for interstate conflict, and it should be possible to describe the most likely potentials for internal conflict. Moving beyond generalizations about the risks in different regions, we desire to write brief scenarios for conflict and assess their basic relative probability (unlikely, likely, highly likely, etc.). Unusual and improbable scenarios should also be considered, albeit with appropriate experimental probability assigned.
Second, a visual presentation communicates the most important aspect of the climate change-security nexus: that negative impacts will occur simultaneously in multiple countries, in different regions of the world. Visualizing the multiplicity of challenges on a map can help policymakers and citizens imagine the security implications of a warming world. Enabling repeated runs of the demo, with randomized results based on the intensity of the effects, illustrates the uncertain and dynamic nature of potential security threats. In the future, this basic model could be useful for planning the wargaming of climate change.
Third, we feel that it is important to encourage the public and overall policy and area studies communities to be involved in developing conflict scenarios for climate change. Although policy analysts can study the potential climate change impacts established by scientific studies, including the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II's report, one must have a fair understanding of the political, social, and economic features of a country or region to develop a reasonable and specific future scenario for conflict. An interactive visual presentation will hopefully encourage informed individuals to write brief conflict scenarios that can be included. It remains a work in progress. If you can write a brief scenario for a country for which you have some understanding of the social and political dynamics, please send an email to Todd Fine (tfine@cdi.org) and we will try to integrate your production into the script, giving you credit. If you have any comments or proposed edits for existing scenarios, please email them as well. You can also add your ideas to a wiki located at cdi.on-wiki.net or see all of the scenarios so far constructed on the static list.
No. There are no neat formulas that can translate environmental damages from warming into probabilities for conflict within complex social and political systems. We cannot say, for example, that a drought would cause X percent risk of civil war in a particular country. Combined with uncertainty about the potential impacts and overall science of warming, definitive claims would be highly suspect. While there exist highly contested regression studies looking at the general link between environmental damage and conflict, the complex causal links and other factors involved make establishing precise probabilities difficult.
This demonstration is essentially a thought experiment, and, although the relative probabilities of conflict are based on inferences from IPCC conclusions combined with informed estimation, the absolute probabilities are essentially arbitrary. We establish basic relative probabilities for conflict events based on an informed assessment of their risk. In the future, the Center for Defense Information hopes to do experimental surveys of area studies experts to assign more precise probabilities for different events, assuming that environmental damages occur.
The different intensity levels represent simple mathematical transformations of the base probabilities of events. While the scenarios do not map degrees precisely, we did use the IPCC impact degree thresholds to map the probabilities of different events. In that sense, "low" represents one degree Celsius of warming, "medium" two, "high" three, and "extreme" four. Certain events do not occur unless the intensity level is sufficiently severe. Still, the scenarios overall should be seen as more related to the hypothetical degree of conflict and instability than linked to any concrete amount of warming.
Each time the demonstration is run, the manifestation of events is recalculated based on each event's assigned probability, mathematically transformed according to the assigned overall "intensity." In order to view some, especially improbable, events again, it may be necessary to run the demonstration repeatedly. A static list of events can also be viewed at cdi.projectkhalid.org/static.html. It will be updated periodically.
Since each scenario is dynamically created, events which occur at low intensity levels of the demonstration may not always occur under higher intensity runs of the demonstration--even though their probability of occurence will increase. This mimics reality. If a medium-level drought contributes to a conflict in a country, that does not guarantee that, in a different world, a more severe drought would have automatically caused a conflict. Relying, instead, on a handful of escalating static scenarios might encourage policy planners to focus on a limited set of potential conflicts; the model used in this demonstration pushes planners to embrace uncertainty and consider the dynamic range of challenges.
This demonstration remains a work in progress. If you have a suggestion for a potential conflict scenario, please email it to tfine@cdi.org.
We decided not to try to map impacts onto particular years. Instead, this demonstration displays a range of hypothetical challenges that would occur in a 20-30 year timespan. We could have made a time-based discrete event simulation that would have assessed risks over time and printed a year or date, but this would have complicated the project and made visual representation much more difficult. We do recognize that the evolution of social and political systems challenges the plausibility of these scenarios.
Some of these scenarios may seem somewhat fantastic given current circumstances, and it is very possible that our experimental probabilities for some events are unreasonably high. However, it is important to note that climate change may dramatically change existing political dynamics if the theorized effects on agriculture and water are as severe as predicted under high-risk scenarios. If you find a scenario exceedingly improbable, please email us with your recommendations for an altered scenario or suggestions to shift the probability.
Many of the conflicts explored in this demonstration are greatly contingent on other political and economic factors. However, in some cases, global warming could generate circumstances that would worsen these conditions. For example, even if a peace agreement has blunted internal conflict in a country, resource scarcity might generate tensions that could counteract those political circumstances. Environmental changes might affect poverty rates and thereby affect the probability of conflict according to other models that concentrate on poverty and related factors.
This is indeed the case, and we are considering ways to incorporate this feature into an advanced version.
Because of the choice not to use time-based analysis, this would be difficult to integrate into the demo.
This project does not advocate any particular action to address climate change, and the purpose of this demonstration is not to create fear. It exists to study the potential impacts of climate change and to motivate thinking about possible scenarios for conflict. If anything, our research highlights the uncertainty of the impact assessment. We do not firmly link these scenarios to specific degrees of warming. However, as a policy research organization, we can explore these risks analytically without requiring high mathematical certainty. We will try to be as open as possible about the probability functions that generate the map results.
The purpose of the demonstration is to examine scenarios that have negative implications on international security: internal and regional instability, conflict, and refugee flows. Positive effects, like improved agricultural yields in some places, might also have negative security implications if they generate internal or international competition over newly viable land and resources.