Climate change and armed civil conflict are both linked to socioeconomic development, although conditions that facilitate peace may not necessarily facilitate mitigation and adaptation to climate change. While economic growth lowers the risk of conflict, it is generally associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions and costs of climate mitigation policies. This study investigates the links between growth, climate change, and conflict by simulating future civil conflict using new scenario data for five alternative socioeconomic pathways with different mitigation and adaptation assumptions, known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). We develop a statistical model of the historical effect of key socioeconomic variables on country-specific conflict incidence, 1960–2013. We then forecast the annual incidence of conflict, 2014–2100, along the five SSPs. We find that SSPs with high investments in broad societal development are associated with the largest reduction in conflict risk. This is most pronounced for the least developed countries—poverty alleviation and human capital investments in poor countries are much more effective instruments to attain global peace and stability than further improvements to wealthier economies. Moreover, the SSP that describes a sustainability pathway, which poses the lowest climate change challenges, is as conducive to global peace as the conventional development pathway.
Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, PO Box 541, SE-75 105 Uppsala, Sweden;Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), PO Box 9229 Grønland, NO-0134 Oslo, Norway;Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), PO Box 9229 Grønland, NO-0134 Oslo, Norway;Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway;Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Joint Global Change Research Institute, College Park, MD-20742, USA;Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), PO Box 9229 Grønland, NO-0134 Oslo, Norway;Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, PO Box 1072 Blindern, NO-0316 Oslo, Norway;Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Joint Global Change Research Institute, College Park, MD-20742, USA;School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD-20742, USA
Recommended Citation:
Håvard Hegre,Halvard Buhaug,Katherine V Calvin,et al. Forecasting civil conflict along the shared socioeconomic pathways[J]. Environmental Research Letters,2016-01-01,11(5)