Climate Change Mitigation, Peace and Conflict

Mitigating climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Without timely and ambitious climate action, global temperature rise could exceed 3°C by the end of the century, with dramatic implications for eco­systems and human societies.

However, climate change mitigation can also have adverse effects that trigger or shape conflicts. Transition minerals like lithium or cobalt are crucial for re­newable energy technologies. But their extraction can also trigger resistance by local communities, provide revenues to armed groups, and result in human right violations. Like­wise, affected communities often resist large-scale land use changes related to solar- or hydro-energy projects. Finally, climate change mitigation requires drastic de­carbonization efforts, including a quick phase-out of oil and gas. This threatens the political stability of already fragile states that are highly dependent on exporting fossil fuels.

The project analyses conflicts in the context of climate change mitigation and investigates pathways towards their peaceful resolution. I will result in a special issue on the topic as well as a study on why transition mineral conflicts escalate into violence. The resulting insights are crucial to design climate change mitigation measures in a peace­ful, just, and effective way.