Article Published by the Council on Strategic Risk (CSR), October 2024.
The greater the impact of climate change, the greater our awareness of the security challenges it’s leaving in its wake. In recent years, there has been a relative deluge of research in this space. However, while most of that work has been timely and essential and has included significant related studies, such as those on the relationship between heat and interpersonal violence, the full spectrum of climate-related security risks has not yet been adequately explored. Crime, though arguably one of the most widely felt of these fallouts, has received relatively little attention to date in the climate security literature.
This brief paper is an attempt to begin redressing that shortfall. While crime, as a form of insecurity, might seem low stakes in comparison to terrorism and inter-state conflict, its sheer breadth ensures that many more people have likely suffered from it compared with more ‘macro’ forms of climate-related violence. From petty theft to not-so-petty assaults, climate change is leaving its mark on almost every category of crime.
Furthermore, while existing climate impacts aggravate poverty, inequality, and the other forces that at least partly underlie lawbreaking, there is evidence to suggest that there might be much worse climate-related crime in store. After all, the messier, more disorderly world that climate change is stoking may be tremendously beneficial for criminals, especially as climate stresses shrink some states’ capacity and thereby their ability to tackle ne’er doers. At the same time, various types of crime may both undermine climate action and exacerbate climate stresses themselves. We may be overlooking a key plank of the conflict-climate nexus to our considerable collective peril.
A relative dearth of research complicates attempts to articulate the extent and essence of the challenge. As with other forms of climate-related insecurity, the precise nature of climate’s contribution to crime is often hard to pin down, given the messy interplay of climate and other drivers of instability. The full article is an analysis of the limited existing studies, a collation of the researcher’s own extensive fieldwork in this space divided into eight categories of crime: rural petty crime, urban violence, drugs, gender-based violence, hate crimes, trafficking, white collar crime and crime associated with climate action. This is also complemented by three case studies. Ultimately, the hope is that this short and summary briefer might serve as a springboard to—and an entry point for—future work.
These are extracts from an article written by Peter Schwarzstein, October 2024. The full article can be accessed via the link here.