• woodrow wilson center
  • ecsp

New Security Beat

Subscribe:
  • mail-to
  • Who We Are
  • Topics
    • Population
    • Environment
    • Security
    • Health
    • Development
  • Columns
    • China Environment Forum
    • Choke Point
    • Dot-Mom
    • Navigating the Poles
    • New Security Broadcast
    • Reading Radar
  • Multimedia
    • Water Stories (Podcast Series)
    • Backdraft (Podcast Series)
    • Tracking the Energy Titans (Interactive)
  • Films
    • Water, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Animated Short)
    • Paving the Way (Ethiopia)
    • Broken Landscape (India)
    • Scaling the Mountain (Nepal)
    • Healthy People, Healthy Environment (Tanzania)
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Contact Us

NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Guest Contributor

    On Streetlights and Stereotypes: Selection Bias in the Climate-Conflict Literature

    February 20, 2018 By Adrien Detges & Tobias Ide

    This post is adapted from a similar article on the Resilience Compass.

    Scholarly attention to the links between climate change and conflict has increased. But which places are analyzed most frequently by researchers, and what are the implications of their choices?

    Let’s start with a joke: A policeman sees a drunken man crawling under a streetlight. He asks the man what he is doing there, and the man replies that he is searching for his wallet. The policeman doesn’t see a wallet, so he asks the drunk whether he is sure that he lost his wallet near the streetlight. The man replies: “No, I lost it in the park, but here is where the light is.”

    Academics refer to this streetlight effect: when researchers select cases for reasons of convenience rather than for their scientific or practical relevance. In a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, we—together with colleagues from the University of Melbourne—found this streetlight effect at work in the literature on climate change and conflict.

    We screened 124 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1990 and 2017, analyzing the continents, regions, and countries they covered.

    Countries with high levels of violence appear most frequently in climate-conflict studies

    Former British colonies—where the prevalence of the English language makes field research and data compilation much easier for many Western scholars—are more frequently represented in the literature than non-British colonies. In contrast, studies tend not to focus on those countries most highly exposed or most vulnerable to climate change. Of the 20 countries considered most at risk from climate change in 2015, not a single one was among the top 10 countries in the climate-conflict literature. The at-risk countries include several with large populations (e.g. Vietnam) and political instability (e.g. Yemen).  Research on climate-conflict connections in these countries would be highly relevant, but it is apparently hindered by a language barrier, among other factors.

    Second, countries with high levels of violence appear most frequently in climate-conflict studies. This might not seem surprising: If you are interested in conflict, you go where the violence is. However, if you only focus on violent cases, how can you learn anything about environmental conflict resolution and peaceful adaptation to climate change?

    In addition, the overwhelming majority of these conflict cases are located in African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Asian and African countries are studied, respectively, three and four times as often as other countries. To be fair, large parts of those regions are quite vulnerable to climate change and have hosted (and still suffer from) a number of armed conflicts, but only focusing on those violent episodes tends to downplay important achievements in peace and development. Framing the climate-conflict literature around violence might help channel public attention towards important issues, but it also risks scaring away investors, promoting stereotypes, and spurring measures against potential “climate migrants” from southern countries.

    To avoid these pitfalls, climate-conflict research will need to place a stronger emphasis on both successful adaptation and peaceful transformation in climate-vulnerable countries of the global south. Expanding the scope of research beyond English-speaking countries will certainly also help us understand and address present and future climate challenges.

    Adrien Detges is a researcher and consultant at the Berlin-based think tank adelphi. He is also a researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin.

    Tobias Ide is coordinator of the Peace and Conflict research field at the Georg Eckert Institute and was recently a visiting researcher at the University of Melbourne.

    Sources: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Global Environmental Change, Journal of International Development, Nature Climate Change; Political Geography

    Photo Credit: Al-Mazraq, Yemen Oct. 9, 2009. A boy waits in line for food at the Mazraq refugee camp in Hajjah province. Courtesy of IRIN.

    Topics: climate change, conflict, environment, environmental peacemaking, environmental security, featured, Guest Contributor, research, security
    • dmarc

      While the author’s are right in questioning what has become an accepted line–that climate change is positively and significantly correlated with violent conflict as an outcome–the issue that take with scholarship on the topic is present in their own argument. First, their own sample (N=124) only selects 4.6 articles per year (1990-2017) significantly reducing the variation in geographic regions and findings discussed. Why limit the study to 124? This may be why they overlook articles that do analyze the climate-conflict nexus in the top twenty most climate-vulnerable nations. In fact, there are several articles specifically exploring this relationship in Yemen, in contradiction to the authors statement; what they mean is not that these do not exist but rather that they were not included in their sample. Finally, there are several articles that do away with the nation-state as the unit of analysis and find that there is a robust, positive relationship between environmental perturbations (temperature increase and drought, though stronger for temperature) and violent conflict. These spatially distributed analyses seem to be much more useful than nation-state analyses and might fill the void the authors attempt to point to.

    • T. Ide

      Just to clarify two issues: First, the term sample might be misleading when considered as indicating that we only analyzed a subset of the relevant studies. In fact, the 124 studies are all studies on climate-conflict links that meet our search criteria (which one can of course argue about, but we designed them carefully to include all relevant studies on the issue). Second, we are well aware of the sub-national level studies, but they also focus on certain countries, regions and continents, and were coded accordingly. In other words: There are many fine-grained analyses of Kenya but very few on, say, Haiti, Tanzania and Vietnam.

Join the Conversation

  • RSS
  • subscribe
  • facebook
  • G+
  • twitter
  • iTunes
  • podomatic
  • youtube
Tweets by NewSecurityBeat

Trending Stories

  • unfccclogo1
  • Pop at COP: Population and Family Planning at the UN Climate Negotiations

Featured Media

Backdraft Podcast

play Backdraft
Podcasts

More »

What You're Saying

  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: "Feminism materializes through investment in human capital and caregiving sectors of the economy...
  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: People who refuse to acknowledge patriarchy are often the ones who benefit from it. So please, say...
  • Water desalination pipes A Tale of Two Coastlines: Desalination in China and California
    Dr S Sundaramoorthy: It is all fine as theory. What about the energy cost? Arabian Gulf has the money from its own oil....

Related Stories

No related stories.

  • woodrow
  • ecsp
  • RSS Feed
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Wilson Center
  • Contact Us
  • Print Friendly Page

© Copyright 2007-2023. Environmental Change and Security Program.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. All rights reserved.

Developed by Vico Rock Media

Environmental Change and Security Program

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center

  • One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
  • 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
  • Washington, DC 20004-3027

T 202-691-4000