Climate-related disasters are among the most societally disruptive impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Their potential impact on the risk of armed conflict is heavily debated in the context of the security implications of climate change. Yet, evidence for such climate-conflict-disaster links remains limited and contested. One reason for this is that existing studies do not triangulate insights from different methods and pay little attention to relevant context factors and especially causal pathways. By combining statistical approaches with systematic evidence from QCA and qualitative case studies in an innovative multi-method research design, we show that climate-related disasters increase the risk of armed conflict onset. This link is highly context-dependent and we find that countries with large populations, political exclusion of ethnic groups, and a low level of human development are particularly vulnerable. For such countries, almost one third of all conflict onsets over the 1980-2016 period have been preceded by a disaster within 7 days. The robustness of the effect is reduced for longer time spans. Case study evidence points to improved opportunity structures for armed groups rather than aggravated grievances as the main mechanism connecting disasters and conflict onset.

与气候有关的灾难是人为气候变化最具有社会破坏性的影响之一。在气候变化对安全的影响的背景下，人们对它们对武装冲突风险的潜在影响进行了激烈的辩论。但是，有关这种气候-冲突-灾害联系的证据仍然有限且存在争议。原因之一是，现有研究没有对来自不同方法的见解进行三角剖分，并且很少关注相关的背景因素，尤其是因果关系途径。通过在创新的多方法研究设计中将统计方法与来自QCA的系统证据和定性案例研究相结合，我们表明与气候有关的灾难会增加发生武装冲突的风险。此链接高度依赖于上下文，我们发现人口众多的国家，种族群体的政治排斥和人类发展水平低下尤其容易受到伤害。对于这些国家，在1980年至2016年期间发生的所有冲突中，几乎有三分之一是在7天内发生了灾难。较长时间跨度会降低效果的鲁棒性。案例研究证据表明，武装团体的机会结构有所改善，而不是加剧不满，因为这是连接灾害和冲突发作的主要机制。