Adaptation and Peace: Extending the Agenda for Capacity‐Building in Climate and Conflict‐Affected Communities

Climate change impacts on the social–ecological conditions that communities depend on may increase the vulnerabilities to new conflicts. Yet, the communities that will be most impacted by climate change, as noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are already conflict‐affected communities. Here, we present the results of a systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies (n = 212) in Spanish and English on the climate–conflict relationship. We found that most studies are focused on a direct relationship between climate change and violent conflict, and there has been less attention on a contextual or indirect relationship in already conflict‐affected communities. Studies on this contextual or indirect relationship suggest a climate change–conflict cycle that is negatively reinforcing, whereby violent conflict increases climate change vulnerability and feedback from climate change increases violent conflict vulnerability. While limited in number, such studies provide important insights enabling further conceptual development and empirical examination of how climate impacts interact with violent conflict, and how governance efforts can simultaneously support peacebuilding and climate change adaptation. Drawing this work together with the latest frameworks in conflict studies and adaptation, we sketch out a promising synthetic agenda, focusing on how to design policies and projects that build synergistic capacities and address cumulative and interactive impacts of climate change and violent conflict. Without such insight, efforts to treat climate and conflict in parallel may be ineffective or even counterproductive, worsening violent conflict and, in turn, further reducing the capacities of communities to build peace and resilience.