What is it about?
Modes of climate variability such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole are major drivers of global and regional climate variability, with wide-ranging impacts on human societies. Using an updated armed conflict dataset, we show that these two climate modes shape the risk of armed conflict onset around the world, offering insight into how large-scale climate variability may affect political stability in a warming world.
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Why is it important?
The high-level takeaway from this paper and the broader literature on climate and society is that we are poorly adapted to the climate we already have let alone the one anthropogenic warming is producing. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a useful test bed for that claim: its impacts (droughts, floods, heatwaves, wildfires) resemble those from warming, and the fact that those impacts remain so consequential despite ENSO recurring every three to seven years suggests adaptation isn’t keeping pace.
Perspectives
With both American and European meteorological agencies predicting the emergence of El Niño by the end of this year (2026), and even some forecasts anticipating a super El Niño, our findings are especially timely.
Tyler Bagwell
Rice University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Global and regional climate modes modulate armed conflict risk, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2532935123.
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