Local warming and violent armed conflict in Africa

Stijn van Weezel

World Development, 2020, vol. 126, issue C

Abstract: Research on the effect of climate change on violent armed conflict relies almost exclusively on analysing annual variation in climatic conditions. A shortcoming of this approach is that it conflates weather variation with climate change, while implicitly assuming that adverse weather shock could immediately trigger conflict. Although this relatively high-frequency data can help understand conflict seasonality, it fails to address the question of whether climate change is an important conflict determinant. This study tries to address this issue using long-term change in local climate to proxy climate change. Focusing on the African continent, shifts in average temperature and precipitation levels are used to estimate the effect on conflict risk between 2003–17. The data is analysed using Bayesian model averaging to test if the variables measuring local climatic conditions contribute consistently in explaining conflict risk. The reduced-form estimations show that temperature is robustly linked to armed conflict: a two-standard deviation increase in average temperature corresponds to about a 31 percent increase in conflict risk. Precipitation changes have no discernible effect. Changes in local climate are more strongly linked to the continuation of existing conflicts, rather than the outbreak of new ones. The association between climate and conflict found in the analysis also suggests a potential lack of adaptation. While the findings of this study are in agreement with earlier results, one remaining shortcoming is that the analysis does not provide much insight into the specific mechanisms linking climate and conflict.

Keywords: Africa; Bayesian model averaging; Civil conflict; Climate change; Cross-validation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X19303560
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:wdevel:v:126:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x19303560

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104708

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().