The number of armed conflicts has declined after the end of the Cold War. There is also a long-term trend towards less severe armed conflicts, though climate change threatens to reverse this favorable trend. Rising in temperatures are likely to cause drought and increase natural hazards (including floods and hurricanes). Resulting migration and in turn, conflict with host communities can lead to local scarcities, increasing the risk of conflict. Climate change will possibly weaken politically-unstable regimes in low-development countries, in turn strengthening the hand of insurgent movements challenging governments and adding to communal conflict. The PIs will look at specific physical phenomena (droughts and natural hazards) whose social and economic effects will then be traced to estimate the probable implications for conflict. The projected impacts of climate change will not result in elevated conflict risk in all societies but depends on country-specific and contextual factors. The investigation will take place at two scales, the regional and the local, for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Using a predictive model of the coupled natural (climate) and social (violence) systems, with feedback loops and mediating socio-political-economic variables, the PIs will measure the impact of adverse climate change and/or changes in climate variability on the rate of armed conflict, determine which mediating factors influence the rate of this impact, and project the violence outcomes on the basis of different climate change/variability scenarios. The data from the substantial climate, satellite imaged environmental (land-use), socio-economic and violence sources will be integrated in a geographic information system, with 100 kilometers grids being the primary scale of analysis. Local studies in selected contexts in East Africa (with the support of local research networks) will complement the statistical study by exploring the locally-varying processes linking climate/environmental change to violent events.
Efforts to assess the security implications of climate change have foundered on the paucity of empirical evidence and the lack of consensus in the scientific literature of the extent of the possible relationship. Recent statements by U.S. and international agencies propose climate change/variability as a threat multiplier to existing problems (poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions) that might threaten domestic stability in weak states. Possible impacts of climate change/variability are mediated by contextual conditions, especially governmental policies, socio-economic resources, and existing fractures along regional and ethnic lines. Sub-Saharan Africa has been identified as the most vulnerable region, with the possibility of significant intra-regional migration/emigration to escape a worsening quality of life leading to communal conflict over declining resources. The research will contribute to policy debates within the US and internationally which, to date, have skirted the issue due to unreliable conflict measures, debatable climate change indicators, information on local differences, and the lack of contact between the natural/climate science and conflict studies communities.
A common theme of scenarios linking climate and violent conflict is that climate change will lead to local scarcities, which will increase the risk of conflict. While studies indicate that this link is plausible, statistical studies provide little support for a general link in the absence of other factors that make armed conflict more likely. The conflicting results from those initial studies, partly because of choices of conflict measures and modeling design, highlight the need for further study and collaboration between climate and social sciences. This project examined the putative link through both aggregate statistical analysis of violent events and climate explanations, and through a survey of attitudes and beliefs among residents of three Kenyan counties. Intellectual Merit: This research connects these two sources of expertise, conflict researchers from University of Colorado-Boulder and climate researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The effects of climate variability and climate change are both local and national in character; we analyze the data in grid cells that resolve complex physiography and climate zones. We use a conflict database that contains individual geolocated violent events for Sub-Saharan Africa from 1980 to 2012. Unlike previous studies that relied exclusively on political and economic controls, we analyze the many factors that have been shown to be important in understanding the distribution and causes of violence while also considering yearly and country fixed effects. For our observed climate indicators for 1980-2009, at gridded 1° resolution (∼100 km), we found that conflict risk in Sub-Saharan Africa increases with high temperatures but drought effects are small. The increased risk due to warmer temperatures is small compared to political, economic and geographic predictors of violence but significant. In addition, large variations in the climate–conflict relationships are evident between countries and across time periods. The models of violent conflict are also used to predict violent in small areas of Sub-Saharan Africa from present day to 2100. For future climate sensitive violence prediction, we utilize simulations from the NCAR Community Atmosphere Model (CAM). Precipitation and temperature anomalies are derived from climate simulations for 2006-2100; anomalies are relative to observations during the base period 1986-2005. We calibrate the conflict model using individual violent event point data aggregated to 1 x 1 degree grid cells for 1980-2010. Then, we use projections of population, infant mortality rates (IMR), and climate anomalies to predict future levels of violence under different climate change scenarios. On aggregate, warmer than normal temperatures are predicted to raise the risk of violence by 2100, doubling the number of violent events. The highest predicted risk for violence due to extreme high temperatures occurs in the Rift Valley areas mainly west and north of Lake Victoria, the Kenya-Somali coastal border, central and coastal Angola, and coastal areas of West Africa. For the most extreme temperature increase, the ratio of present to future predicted conflict is near zero or negative for most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The survey of over 500 Kenyan residents indicates that while most perceive that drought is becoming more frequent and rainfall less predictable, only a small minority support the use of violence to gain resources (grazing, animals or food) in a region of growing competition for them. Similarly, only a small minority has experienced violence due to conflict over food and animal supplies. While the sample regions contain both pastoral and agricultural populations, there were no significant differences in their experiences. Further analysis of the survey responses shows that the presence of local institutional mechanisms to resolve conflicts in the form of traditional leadership and governance helps to dampen competition and conflict and to distribute resources. Broader Impacts: Growing concern about the security implications of climate change has generated much debate from the UN Security Council to the US security community. However, many of the conclusions have largely been based on speculation, as the published literature had few quantitative assessments and those that existed were based on regional or national data and on decadal scale climate change scenarios. We focus on Sub-Saharan Africa because it is vulnerable to dramatic interannual-to decadal variability, such as the prolonged Sahel drought of the 1970s and early 1980s. Our study has shown that other drivers of conflict need to be considered, including economic, social and political factors that interact with, and mediate, the effects of climate variables. The project results contribute to scientific and policy debates within the United States and internationally as bodies such as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have skirted the issue due to previously unreliable conflict measures, and lack of collaboration between physical/climate science and conflict study communities to quantitatively assess the climate-conflict relationship. A global climate index dataset was created for the project and is now freely available for researchers and educators from the NCAR Research Data Archive, Archive at http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds298.0/.
