Stockholm university

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

Knowledge about how changes in water flows affect conflicts is largely lacking. The goal of this project is to increase understanding of how people and the climate affect water flows and how, in turn, these changes affect cooperation and conflicts over water.

Project overview
Project overview

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.

Project members

Project managers

Elisie Kåresdotter

Doktorand

Department of Physical Geography
Image of Elisie Jonsson

Members

Georgia Destouni

Professor i hydrologi

Department of Physical Geography
Gia Destouni

Elisie Kåresdotter

Doktorand

Department of Physical Geography
Image of Elisie Jonsson

Zahra Kalantari

Forskare

Department of Physical Geography
Zahra Kalantari