Root Causes and the Future of Conflict Resolution

Researchers, including at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and various UN bodies, describe climate change as a "threat multiplier" that can exacerbate existing drivers of conflict — such as competition over increasingly scarce water, arable land, and grazing resources — rather than typically being a sole, direct cause of war on its own. The Sahel region illustrates this dynamic: declining and increasingly erratic rainfall, desertification, and competition between pastoralist and farming communities over land and water have been cited by researchers as contributing factors, alongside weak governance and jihadist insurgency, to intercommunal violence in countries such as Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. Similarly, a severe multi-year drought in Syria preceding the 2011 uprising has been cited by some researchers as one contributing pressure among many — alongside government mismanagement, rapid rural-to-urban migration, and political repression — that fed into the grievances underlying the protests that triggered the civil war, though the precise causal weight of climate factors relative to political and economic ones remains debated among specialists and is not treated by mainstream research as a primary or sufficient cause on its own.