The pace of changes in the planet's climate has no precedent in the history of civilization. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council recognize that climate change is a threat to human security. Potential links between natural hazards or scarcities and conflict have been publicly acknowledged by political officials and made their way into international forums such as the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the European Security Strategy, and the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. The Mediterranean, Middle East and the Sahel are among the regions in the world most exposed and vulnerable to floods and droughts.

While the scientific literature does not seem to support the thesis that water scarcities are a cause of inter-state wars, there are valid concerns about the possibility of low intensity and violent intra-state conflict prompted by extreme hydrological events such as droughts or floods. Hydrologically-triggered disasters, such as drought-inflicted famines, flash-floods and land-slides or river floods threaten human security and can be a source of suffering and involuntary migration. Existing studies show that climate extremes do not automatically cause disasters, conflicts or migration. Social factors often matter more than environmental. Conflict is unlikely in areas with good institutions, preparation plans in place and cohesive functional societies with social support. And conflict is not always bad or cooperation good. Conflict can prompt institutions to address problems and to reduce vulnerabilities, while cooperation can mask domination and continued vulnerabilities and sufferings.

These complex and context-specific inter-dependencies between environmental, social and political-economic factors call for inter-disciplinary, cross-comparative research covering a variety of geographical and historical contexts. This is what CLICO is all about.

The CLICO project mobilizes 14 research teams and brings together for the first time some of the world's leading researchers in water resource, vulnerability, and peace and security studies. Eleven cases of areas where droughts or floods pose threats to human security are studied ranging from Niger, Sudan, the Jordan and Nile basins to Cyprus, Italy and the Sinai desert. A large dataset – the first of its kind – of domestic hydro-conflicts in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Sahel will be regressed against climatic, hydrological and socio-economic variables. The resilience of international treaties in the region to deal with climatic variability will be addressed and national and international policies will be evaluated, the aim being the development of a suitable international institutional framework for dealing with the human security implications of hydro-climatic hazards.

We welcome you to the CLICO website and we hope you will find this research endeavor as exciting as we do. In this website you can find more information about our institutes, our research and our case-studies and experiments, download our latest publications, policy briefs and press releases, see videos with important talks from our public events, and participate in the discussions of our researchers from the field-work sites and their "labs". If you know something of relevance to our case-study sites or our research methods, become part of the CLICO community and share it with us via our CLICO blog.

 

Giorgos Kallis (Project Coordinator) and Christos Zografos (Research Coordinator)