A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article's underlying quantitative meta-analysis,
The evidence of coming climate change has generated catastrophe-like statements of a future where a warmer, wetter, and wilder climate leads to a surge in migrant streams and gives rise to new wars. Although highly popular in policy circles, few of these claims are based on systematic evidence. Using a most-likely case design on Kenya 1989–2004, with new geographically disaggregated data on armed conflicts below the common civil conflict level, this study finds that climatic factors do influence the risk of conflicts and violent events. The effect is opposite to what should be expected from much of the international relations literature; rather, it supports the observations made by recent anthropological studies. Years with below average rainfall tend to have a peaceful effect on the following year and less robustly so for the current year as well. Little support is found for the notion that scarcity of farmland fuels violence in itself or in election years. More densely populated areas – not areas with a low land per capita ratio – run a higher risk of conflict. Election years systematically see more violence, however. The findings therefore support the notion that large-scale intergroup violence is driven by calculation and political gain rather than desperate scrambles for scarce land, pasture, and water resources.
Earlier research that reports a correlational pattern between climate anomalies and violent conflict routinely refers to drought-induced agricultural shocks and adverse economic spillover effects as a key causal mechanism linking the two phenomena. Comparing half a century of statistics on climate variability, food production, and political violence across Sub-Saharan Africa, this study offers the most precise and theoretically consistent empirical assessment to date of the purported indirect relationship. The analysis reveals a robust link between weather patterns and food production where more rainfall generally is associated with higher yields. However, the second step in the causal model is not supported; agricultural output and violent conflict are only weakly and inconsistently connected, even in the specific contexts where production shocks are believed to have particularly devastating social consequences. Although this null result could, in theory, be fully compatible with recent reports of food price-related riots, it suggests that the wider socioeconomic and political context is much more important than drought and crop failures in explaining violent conflict in contemporary Africa.
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