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Societal impacts from extreme climate and weather events depend not only on hazard magnitude but also on the vulnerability of the affected population. Existing research suggests that adverse socioeconomic conditions are associated with higher baseline vulnerability to many types of risk, but comparatively little attention has been paid to political drivers of vulnerability. Focusing on floods, the most frequent climate-related hazard, this article evaluates the impact of political development on flood mortality. Findings from a Bayesian predictive analysis of global flood impacts from 2000 to 2018 suggest that democracy, institutional quality, and peace reduce the predicted human cost of flooding. The effect of a breakdown of peace on predicted flood mortality is especially pronounced. These results indicate that promoting peace, justice, and strong institutions (Sustainable Development Goal 16) can help to mitigate disaster risks and support effective climate change adaptation.

Concerns about adverse security implications of climate change have fostered a booming research agenda and have also gained increasing traction in international political fora, such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). To what extent do policy discourses and decisions reflect the scientific understanding of the problem? Here, we assess evidence on uptake of scientific research on climate change and violent conflict in high-level UNSC debates, 2007-2022. We show that UNSC member states increasingly acknowledge climate-conflict risks as real but context-dependent, consistent with recent academic literature on the topic. Even so, views remain divided among prominent Council members, blocking progress on this matter. Explicit engagement with science on climate change and conflict, which might have helped resolve disagreements, remains rare and partly selective. We highlight challenges and opportunities for the scientific community to improve the perceived relevance and accessibility of research to stakeholders and strengthen science-policy interaction.

Violent conflict is a major barrier to sustainability. Does this mean that peace operations promote sustainable development? Do sustainability interventions foster peace? Surprisingly, scientific evidence in support of these assumptions remains limited. There is an urgent need for more research on synergies and trade-offs between peacebuilding and sustainability interventions, evaluated over longer time horizons and supported by high-quality data.

The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This article takes a first step in addressing this gap by reviewing the literature on conflict impacts through the lens of an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework. We review the literature on the consequences of conflicts across 9 dimensions of human development: health, schooling, livelihood and income, growth and investments, political institutions, migration and displacement, socio-psychological wellbeing and capital, water access, and food security. The study focuses on both direct and indirect impacts of violence, reviews the existing evidence on how impacts on different dimensions of societal wellbeing and development may intertwine, and suggests plausible mechanisms to explain how these connections materialize. This exercise leads to the identification of critical research gaps and reveals that systematic empirical testing of how the impacts of war spread across sectors is severely lacking. By streamlining the literature on the impacts of war across multiple domains, this review represents a first step to build a common language that can overcome disciplinary silos and achieve a deeper understanding of how the effects of war reverberate across society. This multidisciplinary understanding of conflict impacts may eventually help to reconcile divergent estimates and enable forward-looking policies that minimize the costs of war.

A now extensive literature examines effects of international peacekeeping on conflict-affected countries’ war-to-peace transitions. Still, we know little about how impactful peacekeeping is in stemming a wider set of hardships affecting host communities, such as hunger. Addressing this gap, we theorize and empirically examine the relationship between local UN peacekeeping deployment and food security in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, and Liberia. The results suggest an overall positive but substantively modest association between peacekeeping presence and more food secure communities—proxied by stunting rates in children—and point to context-specific variation. We conclude by discussing implications for future research.

Mitigating global warming requires a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels which form the foundation of modern economies. Fossil fuel reduction is crucial for minimizing future loss and damage associated with a changing climate, but a challenging task. In diverse contexts, climate-friendly policies that increased fuel prices have sparked massive, at times violent, protests, ultimately leading to a reversal of those policies. However, to what extent and under what conditions fuel prices and policies affect protest more generally is poorly understood. Addressing this gap, we study how fuel prices affect the likelihood of protest onset. We theorize that increases in fuel prices may create economic grievances through their impacts on the cost of living and income. We also suggest that the likelihood of protest following such price increases would be particularly high where attribution of blame to government policies is feasible, such as in fuel subsidizing states, as well as when governments are seen as being able to provide a remedy such as in petroleum producing states. We evaluate our theoretical framework using global country-level monthly statistics 2003–2015, combining protest data with data on the price of gasoline, fuel policies, and country characteristics, and subject our results to placebo and sensitivity tests. Our study finds that gasoline price hikes increase the likelihood of protest onset across the global sample. In line with our theoretical framework, we also find evidence for a clustering of such relationships in the presence of subsidies and oil production, where the attribution of fuel prices to government (in)action tends to be higher. These results highlight the need for policymakers to anticipate public responses to price increases. This study lays the groundwork for more detailed investigations into climate-friendly subsidy and tax reforms.

Drawing on collective experience from ten collaborative research projects focused on the Global South, we identify three major challenges that impede the translation of research on sustainability and resilience into better-informed choices by individuals and policy-makers that in turn can support transformation to a sustainable future. The three challenges comprise: (i) converting knowledge produced during research projects into successful knowledge application; (ii) scaling up knowledge in time when research projects are short-term and potential impacts are long-term; and (iii) scaling up knowledge across space, from local research sites to larger-scale or even global impact. Some potential pathways for funding agencies to overcome these challenges include providing targeted prolonged funding for dissemination and outreach, and facilitating collaboration and coordination across different sites, research teams, and partner organizations. By systematically documenting these challenges, we hope to pave the way for further innovations in the research cycle.

Connections between climate and conflict have been the centre of critical debate and discussion. In this Viewpoint, five researchers provide their thoughts and opinions on the topic, outlining the types of conflict that can be linked to climate variability, and how these relationships might evolve with ongoing climate change.

Concerns about the security implications of climate change are increasing. The growing academic literature on the topic suggests that linkages between climate change and armed conflict are shaped by structural risk factors, but micro-level variation and mechanisms remain poorly understood and flood responses are hardly studied. In this paper, we strive to contribute to a better understanding of such micro-level patterns and investigate how flood exposure affects the support for violence in the Karamoja region of Uganda, which is characterized by many structural vulnerabilities to climate change and armed conflict. We use unique household-level survey panel data and investigate changes in survey responses following a destructive flood. Our study finds that flood exposure was associated with greater support for the use of violence. However, while we identify some adverse impacts of flood exposure on the perceived and actual socio-economic conditions of households and a decrease in perceptions of government support, these do not seem to mediate the estimated flood impact on support for violence against expectations. Our findings point to the limited explanatory power of natural hazards' economic impacts alone for conflict risk. Further investigation of causal mechanisms between climate hazards and conflict remains an important priority for future research. 

Interest in the intersections of environmental issues, peace and conflict has surged in recent years. Research on the topic has developed along separate research streams, which broadened the knowledge base considerably, but hardly interact across disciplinary, methodological, epistemological and ontological silos. Our forum addresses this gap by bringing into conversation six research streams on the environment, peace and conflict: environmental change and human security, climate change and armed conflict, environmental peacebuilding, political ecology, securitisation of the environment, and decolonizing environmental security. For each research stream, we outline core findings, potentials for mutual enrichment with other streams, and prospects for future research.