Overview

Climate change disproportionately affects lower-income households and threatens to reverse decades of progress in global poverty alleviation. The World Bank estimates that it could push as many as another 132 million people into poverty by 2030 (Jafino et al. 2020). 

While the technology needed to address climate change is rapidly advancing, political commitment to enact and implement vital climate change policies lags behind. At the heart of the issue lies a core political economy challenge—climate change policies often create both winners and losers, pitting promises of fossil-fuel-led growth against commitments to emissions reductions.

Moreover, the effects of climate change transcend country borders. Many of the places and populations disproportionately affected by climate change are not the largest emitters. Chancel, Bothe, and Voituriez (2023) describe this phenomenon as the “triple climate inequality crisis,” whereby the bottom 50 percent of wealth holders are responsible for just 12 percent of global emissions but experience roughly 75 percent of the relative income losses triggered by climate change. This includes many fragile and conflict-affected contexts, where government capacity is often already weak, intergroup tensions are high, socioeconomic progress is slow, and stability is tenuous. In these contexts, climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier” to conflict (United Nations 2021).

In this brief, we provide a high-level overview of the theoretical frameworks and (quasi-) experimental literature on the intersections between climate, governance, and conflict, pulling out key recommendations and open questions for continued exploration.​​ We present key recommendations for policy and research before dividing the brief into two distinct sections: the first examining the links between climate and governance, where the experimental evidence base is better established and growing, and the second on the links between climate and conflict, where evidence from randomized evaluations remains limited but is beginning to emerge. 
 
 

The brief was prepared by Aprille Knox (Policy Lead), Anna Mysliwiec (Senior Policy Manager), and Aimee Barnes (Policy Manager) in affiliation with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and in collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) for the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). It is not an exhaustive review of all rigorous evidence on this topic but is limited in scope to emerging insights from impact evaluation studies that employ experimental or quasi-experimental designs and should be considered alongside other sources of evidence.