Conflict-Sensitive Climate Change Adaptation: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors examined 35 peer-reviewed research about conflict sensitive climate change adaptation and gave an overview of how climate change affects lives and livelihoods across the globe and inflicts concerns on potential conflict. In general, the paper is well-written and the results were stated clearly. But I still have some questions about methodology, and some errors in spelling and citation format should be corrected.

1.      In methodology, you listed the key words and the proxy words you used for literature search. But it is unclear how did you select proxy words? Were all the important proxy words included? For example, I think some words, such as ‘global warming‘ and ‘permafrost melt’, can also be proxy words of climate change, but you didn’t mention them in your study. Will that lead you to ignore some important studies?

2.      In methodology, you said “Some pieces were eliminated for having the focus on disaster adaptation instead of climate change adaptation.” I think some kinds of disasters are caused by climate change, such as extreme drought or flood. Therefore, I think if the disasters in the literatures are largely caused by climate change, the literature should be included in your research. At least, it would be better to clarify what kind of disaster studies can be included and what should be removed.

3.      Chapter 4.1, first paragraph, “Such water scarcity results in the declining agricultural harvest in large parts of Africa…. due to diminishing accumulation of snow.”

Rewrite the sentence, it is too long and the statement is not clear enough.

4.      Chapter 4.2, second paragraph, the example of Bangladesh should add citations.

5.      Chapter 4.3, last paragraph, add citations.

6.      In many sentences, the format of citations is wrong, for example, in Chapter 4.1 “Such water scarcity results in the declining agricultural harvest in large parts of Africa[18] and South Asia [23,24),…..”,  “[23,24)” should be corrected to “[23,24]”.

Please check the whole manuscript and correct all the format errors like this. 

7.      Chapter 5, first paragraph, “We emphasise possible threads of adaptation actions that could trigger conflict.”  Revise “threads” to “threats”.

Author Response

Reviewer's Comments:

The authors examined 35 peer-reviewed research about conflict sensitive climate change adaptation and gave an overview of how climate change affects lives and livelihoods across the globe and inflicts concerns on potential conflict. In general, the paper is well-written and the results were stated clearly. But I still have some questions about methodology, and some errors in spelling and citation format should be corrected.

Response: Thanks very much for your kind remarks. We will try to respond to your questions and comments with our best efforts.

Comment 1:

1. In methodology, you listed the key words and the proxy words you used for literature search. But it is unclear how did you select proxy words? Were all the important proxy words included? For example, I think some words, such as ‘global warming‘ and ‘permafrost melt’, can also be proxy words of climate change, but you didn’t mention them in your study. Will that lead you to ignore some important studies?

Response: Yes, you are right. Permafrost melt and global warming are proxy words for climate change. When we selected the proxy words we did some random searches using proxy words like, global warming and permafrost melting and we had two major conclusions from those searches: 1) papers having keywords like global warming and permafrost melting are mostly natural science research and do not have a focus on the climate, adaptation, conflict and security nexus; and 2) papers with those key words also mention climate change in the text and thus appear in our search using the word ‘climate change’. However, after seeing your comment, we gave two runs in the combination of the words replacing ‘climate change’ with ‘global warming' and ‘permafrost melting’ and we could not find any papers to add besides what we already have.

Comment 2:

2. In methodology, you said “Some pieces were eliminated for having the focus on disaster adaptation instead of climate change adaptation.” I think some kinds of disasters are caused by climate change, such as extreme drought or flood. Therefore, I think if the disasters in the literatures are largely caused by climate change, the literature should be included in your research. At least, it would be better to clarify what kind of disaster studies can be included and what should be removed.

Response: We agree on the point that climate change is a stress multiplier and would make future extreme events even worse. We have seen many predictions in the first five IPCC assessment reports to support the point of future climatic scenarios. In the 6^th Assessment report, it says that climate change impacts have started happening. Now, reflecting on your suggestion, there are two important points to consider. Firstly, while global scientists using the IPCC platform were giving warnings about the future adversities, many academics were switching from disaster scholars to climate change scholars and were lacking critical perspectives to understand the problem. Leading global scholars like Ian Burton, Ben Wisner, Anthony Oliver Smith and so on who brought in the debate of ‘vulnerability’ in the 1960s have expressed their concerns on how the climate change debate has been politicised. In the paper, we gave an example of an eminent climate change scientist who led the adaptation chapter in the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th IPCC assessment reports, has claimed salinity as an impact of climate change in 2001 and has revised his perspective in other articles in 2018 and 2019 where he sees the problem as more complex and finds it as a failure of environmental governance, which could further degrade due to sea level rise. So, we truly acknowledge that climate change could make extreme events worse, but we tried to put it through a critical lens all through this review process. Secondly, there is a fundamental difference between disaster adaptation and climate change adaptation. For example, building a storm surge defence would be ‘adaptation’ from a climate change angle, but would be ‘mitigation’ from a disaster studies angle. There were some papers which slipped through the peer review process without maintaining such conceptual integrity. We eliminated those papers which lack such conceptual clarity. However, all the papers we considered, discuss extreme events like drought, flood, crop failure, heavy pouring, biodiversity loss, scarcity of resources and so on. In the last paragraph of the Methodology section, we elaborated on data extraction and clarified that identifying climate relevance was one of the important elements.   

Comment 3:

3. Chapter 4.1, first paragraph, “Such water scarcity results in the declining agricultural harvest in large parts of Africa…. due to diminishing accumulation of snow.”

Rewrite the sentence, it is too long and the statement is not clear enough.

Response: We have rephrased the section as “Such water scarcity results in the declining agricultural harvest in large parts of Africa [18] and South Asia [23,24] and creates a food crisis for livestock in pastoral societies [16, 17]. Among different livelihood groups around the world [12,25-28], mounting water scarcity accelerates competition for access to and control over resources. In the Alps [29], declining water in cross-border channels is impacting environmental integrity in their watersheds. Besides, parts of Italian Alps [30] are losing income from ski-loving tourists due to the diminishing accumulation of snow in the region. Thus, we see climate change-induced water scarcity is inflicting a wide spectrum of mounting challenges across the globe.”

Comment 4:

4. Chapter 4.2, second paragraph, the example of Bangladesh should add citations.

Response: We cited the below two references as [5,6] in the original text.

Paprocki, K.; Huq, S. Shrimp and coastal adaptation: on the politics of climate justice. Climate and Development 2018, 10 (1), 1-3. DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2017.1301871

Mostafa, M.; Nasir, N.; Rahman, M.F.; Huq, S. A Delta in Peril. American Scientist 2019, 107 (5), 288-295. DOI: 10.1511/2019.107.5.288

Comment 5:

5. Chapter 4.3, last paragraph, add citations.

Response: Instead of adding another citation, we mentioned the reference to the official act, which is a public document, available online.

Comment 6:

6. In many sentences, the format of citations is wrong, for example, in Chapter 4.1 “Such water scarcity results in the declining agricultural harvest in large parts of Africa[18] and South Asia [23,24),…..”,  “[23,24)” should be corrected to “[23,24]”.

Please check the whole manuscript and correct all the format errors like this. 

Response: Apologies for such silly typos. We have amended them.

Comment 7:

7. Chapter 5, first paragraph, “We emphasise possible threads of adaptation actions that could trigger conflict.”  Revise “threads” to “threats”.

Response: In the original text, “threads of adaptation actions” means a web of actions, knock-on effects, successive consequences and so on. In our reading of adaptation literature, we do not see adaptation as a single action, rather a harmonized effort of a set of actions orchestrated by a set of actors. Thus, we are trying to critique the whole design of adaptation actions, which is better represented by thread, web and similar words. But, you are rightly pointing out that these threads of actions manifest threats and potentially could trigger conflicts of multiple magnitudes.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript is well written and enjoyable to read.

My only suggestion is for the "Results and Discussions". In the current version, there is a lack of quantitative evidences and comparisons to support the statements/viewpoints. For example, in Section 4.1 (Page 5), "two significant climate attributions of change echoed in most papers area extreme heat and reduced rainfall rate". What percentage is "most papers"? What are the percentages about "extreme heat" and "reduced rainfall rate", respectively? In addition, some discussions can be and should be expanded with more details. For example, also in Section 4.1 (Page 5), "water scarcity and abundance are not only associated with potential conflicts among individuals and groups but may also bring relevant institutions together to the bargaining table...." -- can examples or explanations be given?

Author Response

Reviewer's Comment

My only suggestion is for the "Results and Discussions". In the current version, there is a lack of quantitative evidences and comparisons to support the statements/viewpoints. For example, in Section 4.1 (Page 5), "two significant climate attributions of change echoed in most papers area extreme heat and reduced rainfall rate". What percentage is "most papers"? What are the percentages about "extreme heat" and "reduced rainfall rate", respectively?

Response: Thanks very much for this comment. We discussed this point while writing the paper and eventually decided not to drive the discussion in that direction. Therefore we wrote in the methodology section:  “The primary focus of this research is to explore evidence from peer-reviewed works to understand how conflict-sensitive adaptation to climate change has been conceptualised in diverse contexts.” Thus, the primary focus of this paper is to understand the contrasted meaning of conflict-sensitive adaptation in academic discourse. Here the focus is on understanding the design of adaptation actions and critiquing the underlying politics. So, instead of identifying the proportion of papers focusing on different climate change onsets, we focused on the attribution of ‘science’ in making the connection between climate change and extreme events (i.e. drought, rainfall variability, extreme heat, and so on).

Reviewer's Comment: In addition, some discussions can be and should be expanded with more details. For example, also in Section 4.1 (Page 5), "water scarcity and abundance are not only associated with potential conflicts among individuals and groups but may also bring relevant institutions together to the bargaining table...." -- can examples or explanations be given?

Response: Thanks very much for the comment. We discussed the details in different sections across the paper. We also have the supplementary table which gives a glance picture of the review. We hope, the updated version has accommodated your point.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

All the questions are clearly answered and the manuscript was revised according to the comments.