(MINERVA) CLIMATE CHANGE, RESOURCE REALLOCATION, AND GREAT POWER COMPETITION
Abstract
From a practical perspective, climate change raises important questions and challenges for U.S. national security policy. To what extent are great power competitors going to use their military capabilities to capture resources that are increasingly on the move (e.g., fisheries) or that become available and economically viable as climate change advances (e.g., Arctic petroleum reserves if climate policy doesn’t leave them as distressed assets)? Underlying these questions is a basic research problem- how does climate change influence the costs and benefits of production and trade for resources versus predation, backed with military force? Unfortunately, scholarship has failed to catch up to the rapid changes in great power relations. Political science, for example, still lacks a comprehensive theory of resource-driven conflict, despite a long-standing interest in economic statecraft (Baldwin, 1985; Norris, 2016). In particular, researchers have failed to model a contest function which combines the costs and benefits of (peaceful) exchange vs. (violent) predation. For their part, climate modelers have largely failed to incorporate politics, and international politics in particular, into their models. That is, most studies of climate change have focused on the environmental impacts on a given region, without further consideration of its political impact. One reason the existing academic literature is lacking in terms of unpacking the effects of climate change on world politics is that resource competition does not fit neatly into any of the existing paradigms in security studies. So-called realist scholars of international relations tend to use aggregate measures of power, like GDP and the number of nuclear weapons, that are only marginally shaped by changes in resource prices. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the effects of repeated cooperative exchange on international politics, without modeling in any explicit way the possible trade-offs between production and exchange on the one hand and predation and conflict on the other. The climate literature is also incomplete or unsatisfactory in this regard. While climate modeling has provided baseline assessments of regional impacts at least since the late 1990s (Watson et al., 1998), the socio-economic component of such work rarely goes beyond some estimates of economic costs and losses of habitat and wildlife. Indeed, even the World Bank’s recent report on the effects of climate change on the Middle East and North Africa (World Bank, 2017) , which predicts sharp falls in GDP, did not venture into the potential ramifications for politics and conflict in that region. Existing scholarship thus has yet to provide the kind of comprehensive analysis of resource competition that would lead to a robust theory. Nor has it systematically merged climate models with those that grow out of political-economic traditions in security studies, such as contest functions. To address these gaps, our project will develop new theoretical and empirical approaches, and thereby generate academic public goods. In sum, this proposal addresses three major gaps in existing scholarship and policy thinking by (1) developing a clear theory of resource competition which accounts for research in the relevant environmental economics, climate science, and strategic great power politics; (2) robustly calibrating that theory to observed political and economic data and (3) testing the sharp predictions of the model using carefully chosen case studies.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502210252
Entities
People
- Kristopher Ramsay
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- Trustees of Princeton University