WG1 Climate & Peace
In many research and policy areas the interest for the climate has been increasing, rightly so. The climate crisis has an impact on state as well as human security. Security and climate are inherently interlinked and intertwined. This has important consequences when we look at policies surrounding peace and conflict. The purpose of this Working Group will be to identify the links between conflict, peace and climate in order to advance the growing field of research on the topic as well as feed into policy. The Working Group will take a critical look at some security implications of climate change, including forced migration and mutually reinforcing connections between climate impacts and conflict risk.
Co-leadership:
Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Associate Editor of the Journal of Peace Research. His main research concerns security implications of climate change, including the relationship between extreme weather events, armed conflict, and human displacement, as well as societal drivers of vulnerability to climate change. He is principal investigator for a European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant project on improving political scenarios for climate impact research. Recent publications have appeared in, inter alia, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Politics, Nature, PNAS, and World Development.
Nina von Uexkull is Professor of International Politics at University of Konstanz, Germany, and an Associate Researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her main research interests are the impacts of climate change and climate change policies on armed conflict and human security, combining advanced statistical methods with surveys and field interviews. Her work has been published in journals such as Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Environmental Research Letters, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Nature, PNAS and Political Geography and received the 2022 Oscar Prize awarded by Uppsala University. She currently leads the project ‘Petroleum, prices and protests: The impact of climate change mitigation on social unrest’, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
