Moving into Terrorism: How Climate-Induced Rural-Urban Migration May Increase the Risk of Terrorism

How can we expect climate change to affect terrorism? Research on climate-conflict links argues that climate and conflict are unlikely to exhibit a direct relationship. Instead, these links are likely to be indirect, often through negative shocks to agriculture. Even then, politics remains a far stronger influence on conflict than climate. Terrorism appears particularly unlikely to be directly linked to climate change, since climate change disproportionately affects rural areas and terrorism disproportionately affects urban areas. Yet, we argue that there is a process through which climate change could increase the risk of terrorism. This process involves failure to adapt in rural areas, rural-urban migration, and then a failure of cities to incorporate new population influxes. Meanwhile, rural-urban migration is likely to trigger path-dependent urbanization processes that will increase the share of the world’s population living near country borders. We expect this process to increase the motivation and opportunity for terrorism as climate change continues. Policies that help rural areas adapt through new livelihood strategies and cities adapt to large population influxes are critical to reducing this threat.