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. 2025 May;54(5):774-792.
doi: 10.1007/s13280-024-02109-1. Epub 2025 Feb 4.

Climate, peace, and conflict-past and present: Bridging insights from historical sciences and contemporary research

Sam White  1   2 , Dominik Collet  3   4 , Agustí Alcoberro  5 , Mariano Barriendos  6 , Rudolf Brázdil  7   8 , Pau Castell  5 , Siyu Chen  9 , Cedric de Coning  10 , Dagomar Degroot  11 , Lukáš Dolák  8 , Stefan Döring  12 , Santiago Gorostiza  13 , Katrin Kleemann  14 , Florian Krampe  15 , Kuan-Hui Lin  16 , Nicolas Maughan  17 , Natália Melo  18 , Barry Molloy  19 , Astrid E J Ogilvie  4   20   21 , Piling Pai  22 , Qing Pei  23 , Christian Pfister  9 , Silviya Serafimova  24 , Diyang Zhang  25
Affiliations

Climate, peace, and conflict-past and present: Bridging insights from historical sciences and contemporary research

Sam White et al. Ambio. 2025 May.

Abstract

Concern has risen that current global warming and more frequent extreme events such as droughts and floods will increase conflict around the world. This concern has spurred both social science research on contemporary climate, peace, and conflict as well as research in the historical sciences on past climate, weather, warfare, and violence. This perspectives article compares these two fields of scholarship and examines how each may benefit the other. It finds significant convergences in methods and insights across contemporary and historical research as well as persistent patterns in causal pathways between climate and conflict. Contemporary climate, peace, and conflict (CPC) research may sharpen methods and causal models for historical researchers. Historical studies, particularly those informed by contemporary research, may elucidate deep origins and long-term effects of climate-related conflicts. For policymakers and the public, history offers comprehensible ways to make sense of complex and contingent linkages and to construct cogent narratives of the past as well as storylines for the future.

Keywords: Archaeology; Climate change; Conflict; History; Peace; Science communication.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Schema of direct and indirect effects of climatic change and extreme events on the incidence and severity of conflicts
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Schema of complex causal pathways between climate change and conflict, based on SIPRI’s Climate and Risk Programme model. Source: de Coning et al.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Time series of climate and society variables in China 1776–1851. The upper panel shows socioeconomic variables extracted from the SIER database, including warfare (blue bar), epidemics (red curve), national grain stock (light red), and famine (purple). Note that national grain stock (hectoliter) is calibrated to 0–300 (original value * 0.000006 (= 6.E−06)). The lower panel shows climate variables from the REACHES database: reconstructed temperature index (dashed green), precipitation index (dashed blue), as well as droughts, floods, locust swarms, and snowstorms
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Spatial analysis of natural hazards and societal variables from the REACHES and SIER databases. The upper maps display the associations between epidemics and drought (top left) and epidemics and famine (top right) during 1776–1851. The lower maps display the associations in the same period between warfare and population density (bottom left) and warfare and population growth rates (bottom right). The latter indicates migration from eastern regions with high population density and epidemic disease rates into southwestern China, where conflict erupted
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Major flood events and structural damage in Catalonia, November 1617. Source: D. Pino et al. “Major flood events reconstruction from a multi-proxy approach. The case study of November 1617 flood event in the Mediterranean Basins of Iberian Peninsula”, Geophysical Research Abstracts, 20, EGU2018-10386, ISSN 1029–7006
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Cases of witchcraft accusations in Catalonia. Source: Castell (2022) and Atles de la cacera de bruixes (2021)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abel, G.J., M. Brottrager, J.C. Cuaresma, and R. Muttarak. 2019. Climate, Conflict and Forced Migration. Global Environmental Change 54: 239–249. 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.12.003.
    1. Adams, C., T. Ide, J. Barnett, and A. Detges. 2018. Sampling Bias in Climate-Conflict Research. Nature Climate Change 8: 200–203. 10.1038/s41558-018-0068-2.
    1. Alcoberro, A. 2014. The Catalan Church and the Witch Hunt: The Royal Survey of 1621. eHUmanista: Journal of Iberian Studies 26: 153–169.
    1. Alcoberro, A. 2024. Witch Hunts and the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Catalonia: The Crime of Triggering Natural Disasters and Its Repression (1614–1629). In Rethinking Violence in Valencia and Catalonia: Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century, ed. A. Llinares and G. López. Peter Lang.
    1. Atles de La Cacera de Bruixes. Sàpiens, 2021. https://www.sapiens.cat/cacera-bruixes.html.

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