CHRISTOPHER CARLETON

The surprising impact of climate change on conflict in Europe during the 2nd Millennium and its implications for our understanding of long-term climate-conflict dynamics

Zoom link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/93860682773

Abstract 

Climate change may inflame political and economic tensions, giving rise to violent conflict. This ominous portent has inspired globally significant policy organizations like the IPCC, US Department of Defense, and EU Commission to warn that climate change poses a major national and international security risk. Recently, UN chief Antonio Guterres joined the frightening chorus, adding that climate change is a “code red for humanity” because it will multiply conflict risk. The assumption fueling this concern is that climate changes can create resource shortages, which leads to conflict over access to increasingly scarce necessaries---essentially, a “scarcity mechanism” will provoke violence. Research on the role of climate in conflict incidence, however, has so far produced mixed results, with some studies finding that climate change stokes violent conflict, others finding that it dampens conflict, and still others finding no correlation between the two. So, while the scarcity mechanism has intuitive appeal, solid evidence for it has remained elusive. Some scholars have turned to studying long-term patterns in conflict and climate change in order to determine whether a long-term effect may be more visible. One such case study involves a historical conflict record for central and western Europe spanning the second millennium. This is an important case study because the period included two major, widely recognized swings in climate conditions---the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age---and violence within and between political entities smoldered incessantly with regular flare-ups. With significant variability in both climate and conflict records, any strong covariation should be readily visible. The two quantitative studies published so far, though, have failed to find a robust correlation between climate change and conflict incidence. And a third study, currently under review, focused on the impact of extreme climate conditions on conflict incidence also found no effect. Surprisingly, it is starting to look as if major climate changes over a thousand year period had no significant impact on long-term conflict levels in Europe, despite the entirely rational expectation that it would have. This finding contrasts starkly with the predictions of major international policy organizations and raises important questions about the nature of the conflict process over the long-term.
    

Bio

Chris (W. Christopher Carleton in publication) is an archaeologist and data scientist with an interest in uncertainty and long-term human--environment interaction. He has BA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Saskatchewan, an MA in Anthropology from Trent University in Ontario, and a PhD in Archaeology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia—all in Canada. He joined the independent Extreme Events Research Group with the Max Planck Society in August 2019 after finishing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University. Chris’s research focuses on quantifying the nature of the interaction between human societies and the environment over the long-term. In particular, he is interested in studying the complexities of analyzing data from the palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records (together, “palaeo-data”), both of which are highly idiosyncratic from a data science perspective. In his research, he has found that these palaeo-data idiosyncrasies lead to uncertainties and biases that have so far gone underappreciated and understudied by archaeologists and other scholars interested in the past. As a result, there has been little attention paid to evaluating the impact of palaeo-data idiosyncrasies on our understanding of the past and little in the way of methodological development aimed at handling the data properly. Consequently, Chris spends a lot of time thinking about and analyzing the impact of palaeo-data idiosyncrasies on established statistical methods and developing new statistical tools for testing hypotheses about human--environment interaction. In the long-run his objective is to develop a body of palaeo-data science literature and help establish palaeo-data science as a formal sub-discipline that reaches across several traditional disciplinary boundaries.