Climate and Conflict

Marshall Burke (), Solomon M. Hsiang () and Edward Miguel
Additional contact information
Marshall Burke: Department of Earth System Science, and Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
Solomon M. Hsiang: Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720

Annual Review of Economics, 2015, vol. 7, issue 1, 577-617

Abstract: We review the emerging literature on climate and conflict. We consider multiple types of human conflict, including both interpersonal conflict, such as assault and murder, and intergroup conflict, including riots and civil war. We discuss key methodological issues in estimating causal relationships and largely focus on natural experiments that exploit variation in climate over time. Using a hierarchical meta-analysis that allows us to both estimate the mean effect and quantify the degree of variability across 55 studies, we find that deviations from moderate temperatures and precipitation patterns systematically increase conflict risk. Contemporaneous temperature has the largest average impact, with each 1σ increase in temperature increasing interpersonal conflict by 2.4% and intergroup conflict by 11.3%. We conclude by highlighting research priorities, including a better understanding of the mechanisms linking climate to conflict, societies’ ability to adapt to climatic changes, and the likely impacts of future global warming.

Keywords: violence; crime; weather; econometrics; meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 O1 P48 Q51 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (175)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115430 (application/pdf)
Full text downloads are only available to subscribers. Visit the abstract page for more information.

Related works:
Working Paper: Climate and Conflict (2015)
Working Paper: Climate and Conflict (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anr:reveco:v:7:y:2015:p:577-617

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.annualreviews.org/action/ecommerce

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annual Review of Economics from Annual Reviews Annual Reviews 4139 El Camino Way Palo Alto, CA 94306, USA.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by http://www.annualreviews.org ().