Although acceptance of climate change’s role as a ‘threat multiplier’ is, by now, widespread, the specific causal mechanisms linking climate change to (violent) conflict onset remain under researched. Formal descriptions of the causal mechanisms remain few and far between. This is not problematic only for scientific reasons. The obscurity surrounding climate change’s links to violent conflict also hinders the development of targeted policy interventions at a time when the impact of such conflict is on the uptick.

Although climate-related conflicts are complex, extant conflict research suggests that structural patterns can be discerned across cases. This study presents seven climate-related conflict pathologies (see Table 1 below). A climate-related conflict pathology is defined as the specific pathway through which interaction between climate change and social, economic, and political factors leads to violent conflict. For each pathology, the study identifies the relevant factors, describes how they interact with one another, and elucidates the pathways through which they lead to violent conflict. The study also highlights regions that are particularly prone to each pathology and evaluates the available evidence and the degree of scientific consensus surrounding each of them.