Let the climate wars begin

Climate change is making floods, droughts and other natural disasters more frequent, and poor countries suffer the most. If a society is already politically tense when disaster strikes, the risk of civil strife and war between countries goes up sharply.

Daniel Mittermeier of the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich and his colleagues layered global climate-risk data over war-risk data to build a new database: the Climate-Conflict-Vulnerability Index.

1. Three colours on the map

Red zones: conflict risk above 90%, but low climate risk. Examples include the India–China border, northern Mexico (cartel country), and coastal Brazil.

Yellow zones: high climate risk, low conflict risk — West Africa, northern China, most of Indonesia and Malaysia.

2. The blue zones are the worst

Blue zones: both risks above 90% — mostly sub-Saharan Africa, much of the Middle East (Syria, Jordan, Israel, Iraq) and Pakistan.

3. Correlated, but one-way

The two risks are generally correlated, but the direction is one-way: high conflict risk tends to sit in high climate risk areas, not the other way round. In other words, climate change raises the risk of war, not vice versa. Wars are increasingly climate wars.