Research project NG| The missing link: how does the climate affect human conflicts and collaborations through water?

During recent years, our understanding of how climate affects society has advanced greatly. In particular, a vigorous scientific debate on the role of climate in conflict has taken place.
Despite advances in finding appropriate ways to study this link, research has so far overlooked a key pathway for societal effects of climate: water on land.

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Surface waters directly influence human society in many ways that could affect both conflict and cooperation, including resource availability, energy production, and infrastructure risk. This project will use a water model to separate human modifications of water flows from the remaining background climate signal in water variations. In this way, we will be able to understand how naturalized climate-dependent water flows govern societal responses. We intend to first investigate this pathway for the world’s transboundary river basins, and then in finer detail study the effects over a suite of other political and physical entities. In the end, this project will pioneer a new research approach to estimate the societal effects of climate through water, eventually enabling a better-informed foundation for policy decisions on adaptation to climate change.