When the Heat Rises, So Does Our Anger: The Connection Between Climate Change and Violence
- Ana Petriashvili
- Dec 21, 2025
- 5 min read
How Rising Temperatures are Reshaping Human Behaviour and Fuelling Conflict
In our recent posts, we've explored how climate change affects our mental health, triggering anxiety, depression, and profound loss. But there's another consequence emerging from the data, one that's perhaps even more unsettling. As our planet heats up, patterns of human violence are shifting in different ways. Climate change isn't just altering ecosystems and weather systems, but influencing fundamental aspects of human behaviour.
More than 60% of scientific studies examining the relationship between climate variables and conflict find evidence of correlation: as temperatures rise and environmental conditions change, rates of violent behaviour increase. The connection operates through three distinct pathways, some direct, others mediated through economics, food systems, and mass displacement.
The Biology of Heat and Aggression
When Your Brain Can't Separate Temperature from Threat
There's something fundamental in our neurological architecture about heat and emotional regulation. When temperatures climb, the same brain region responsible for thermoregulation also manages emotional processing. This overlap isn't coincidental, it's a feature of our biology. When this system activates to manage heat stress, it simultaneously affects how we process social situations and emotional responses.
Heat also triggers increased adrenaline production, priming the body for heightened reactivity. The body responds to thermal stress by preparing for potential conflict, regardless of conscious intention.
Research confirms this biological link across diverse cultures and socioeconomic contexts, suggesting a universal human response pattern. Heat doesn't merely create discomfort. It fundamentally alters how our brains process emotions and interpret social interactions.
The Psychology of Thermal Discomfort
Why Heat Distorts Social Perception
Even the conceptual representation of heat influences aggressive cognition. In controlled experiments, researchers exposed participants to images associated with high temperatures. Those exposed to heat-related imagery demonstrated increased likelihood of interpreting neutral facial expressions as hostile and showed elevated aggressive thought patterns. The mere cognitive priming of heat activated mental frameworks associated with conflict.
Our physical environment shapes cognitive processes and perception. Heat generates discomfort, which elevates irritability and increases the tendency to perceive threat in ambiguous social situations. We become quicker to anger, more prone to attribute hostile intent, and more prepared to respond aggressively to neutral stimuli.
One particularly striking study examined police officers during training exercises. Officers randomly assigned to uncomfortably hot conditions showed significantly higher rates of weapon deployment during simulated scenarios compared to those in comfortable temperatures. The thermal environment didn't just affect mood, but it altered critical decision-making processes regarding use of force.
Research suggests that each degree Celsius increase in global temperature could correspond to a 6% increase in homicide rates. Other projections indicate that even a relatively modest temperature increase could result in approximately 25,000 additional severe assaults annually in the United States alone.
When Agricultural Systems Fail, Violence Follows
The Profound Connection Between Nutrition and Behaviour
Even in developed economies like the United States, one in eight households experiences food insecurity. Globally, the proportion is significantly higher. Research consistently demonstrates that food insecurity, prenatal malnutrition, and early childhood nutritional deficits substantially increase the probability of aggressive and antisocial behaviour in later life.
One of the most compelling demonstrations comes from the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. During the final months of World War II, a German blockade severed food supplies to western Netherlands. Subsequent research tracked 100,000 men born during and after this period, comparing developmental outcomes for those whose mothers experienced malnutrition during pregnancy with those whose mothers had adequate nutrition.
The findings were significant: men whose mothers suffered malnutrition during the first and second trimesters showed 250% higher rates of antisocial personality disorder in adulthood. Prenatal deprivation shaped behavioural patterns decades later.
The mechanisms likely involve maternal cortisol release during stress and the effects of inadequate nutrition on neurodevelopment. Regardless of the precise pathways, the relationship has been replicated across multiple populations and contexts.
Now consider this within the framework of climate change. Global warming will severely impact agricultural productivity worldwide by reducing crop yields, degrading pastoral land, and disrupting food distribution systems. If early-life malnutrition increases violent propensity in adulthood, we're not merely facing immediate food crises. We're potentially programming future generations for elevated rates of aggression and antisocial behaviour.
Economic Disruption and Social Instability
When Climate Change Undermines Livelihoods
Poverty and income inequality represent well-established risk factors for violence. For communities and nations already facing economic challenges, accelerating climate change intensifies these stressors. The concern isn't merely about recovering from individual disasters. It's about the cumulative burden of repeated environmental shocks, the erosion of economic opportunity, and the desperation that accompanies watching one's livelihood systematically undermined.
Climate-related disasters interact with economic conditions through complex feedback loops. Extreme weather events impair economic growth. Agricultural failures precipitate food shortages. The resulting social tensions create conditions conducive to violent conflict. The presence of ethnic fragmentation, weak institutional capacity, and existing resource competition can amplify these dynamics, transforming environmental stress into social instability.
Ecomigration and the Possibility of Conflict
Increased competition for Resources
There exists a third mechanism by which climate change influences violence, one we'll examine more thoroughly in our next discussion. When environmental disasters render regions uninhabitable, populations must relocate. This ecomigration, large-scale movement in response to ecological disruption, doesn't directly cause violence. But it creates conditions where violence becomes substantially more probable.
When significant populations arrive in new regions, tensions emerge around multiple dimensions. Competition for resources intensifies. Cultural differences become potential flashpoints. Infrastructure systems strain under increased demand. Combined with economic stress, perceived identity threats, and political instability, these factors create substantial potential for conflict.
This dynamic proves especially pronounced in regions already experiencing vulnerability; areas characterised by high population density, resource scarcity, weak governance capacity, or existing ethnic tensions. Climate change doesn't create these vulnerabilities from nothing, but it magnifies them dramatically, transforming manageable challenges into potential crises.
Beyond Reactive Responses
The Need for Systematic Preparation
What proves most troubling is that we possess knowledge about effective disaster response. We've accumulated sufficient experience with environmental catastrophes to understand functional approaches, we can develop comprehensive policies and emergency frameworks, we can allocate resources and establish funds and assist displaced populations through humane, conflict-reducing mechanisms.
Yet wealthy nations often respond to migrants and refugees with restriction rather than integration; We construct barriers rather than pathways, generate justifications for exclusion rather than frameworks for inclusion.
Future research must focus not only on projecting climate change trajectories but on identifying proactive interventions to prevent the most severe consequences. How can we interrupt the connections between thermal stress and aggression, between food insecurity and violence, between displacement and conflict?
The solutions will be complex and multifaceted. But understanding these mechanisms with clarity and precision represents the essential first step. Climate change isn't solely an environmental issue. It's fundamentally intertwined with human behavior, public health, and violence prevention. Recognising this reality increases our capacity to develop systems that protect both environmental stability and social cohesion.
Cover photo: The weather project, 2003 Tate Modern, London. Photo: Olafur Eliasson
Source of photos: https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003/
The information presented this blog-post is based on research. Key references include:
Sakaguchi, K., Varughese, A., & Auld, G. (2017). Climate wars? A systematic review of empirical analyses on the links between climate change and violent conflict. International Studies Review, 19(4), 622–645. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/vix022
Miles-Novelo, A., & Anderson, C. A. (2019). Climate change and psychology: Effects of rapid global warming on violence and aggression. Current Climate Change Reports, 5(1), 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40641-019-00121-2
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