In case you didn’t get the memo that climate change is probably the most important, and almost certainly the largest human rights issue facing us today. If you want to promote peace and justice, you need to work to reduce and mitigate climate change.
Warmer climate strongly affects human conflict and violence worldwide, says study.
“What was lacking was a clear picture of what this body of research as a whole was telling us,” said Solomon Hsiang, the study’s lead author, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at Princeton during the research project and is now an assistant professor of public policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. “We collected 60 existing studies containing 45 different data sets and we re-analyzed their data and findings using a common statistical framework. The results were striking.”
They examined various aspects of climate such as rainfall, drought or temperature, and their associations with various forms of violence within three broad categories of conflict:
- Personal violence and crime such as murder, assault, rape, and domestic violence;
- Intergroup violence and political instability, like civil wars, riots, ethnic violence, and land invasions;
- Institutional breakdowns, such as abrupt and major changes in governing institutions or the collapse of entire civilizations.
The results proved all three types of conflict exhibit systematic and large responses to changes in climate, with the effect on intergroup conflict being the most pronounced. Conflict responded most consistently to temperature, with all 27 out of 27 studies of modern societies finding a positive relationship between high temperatures and greater violence.
… The findings of the study suggest that a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by over 50 percent in many parts of the world.
Ponderings of a Perplexed Primate 