Abstract

Violent conflicts, freshwater related risks, mass migration, food and human insecurity, in vulnerable developing countries are among the key global threats posed by climate change, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014 report. The admonitions concur with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2007) and Ban Ki Moon (2007) assertions that the conflict in Darfur was as a result of resource scarcity and climate change. This essay reviews the evidence in academic literature, newspaper, articles, journals, blogs, books which links climate change and violent conflicts and then proceeds to use evidence from Kenya, Nigeria and Rwanda to argue that current evidence linking climate change and violent conflict is counterfactual and filled with numerous disagreements. This signals the need for current policy debates to be informed by measured views of vulnerability to conflict, causes of specific conflicts and local responses to climate change rather than on simplistic, unsubstantiated gloomy assertions that prove no statistically significant link between climate change and violent conflict.

Keywords: Climate change; Violent conflict; Adaptation strategies; Climate change policies; Anthropocentric