Drought and Civil War in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

SummaryIn this paper, we show that drought has a positive effect on the incidence of civil war over the period in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index which is a richer measurement of drought than the measures used in the literature (rainfall and temperature) as it measures the accumulation of water in the soil in taking into account the temperature and the geological characteristics of the soil. We show that the risk of civil war increases by more than 42% from a "normal" climate to an "extremely drought" climate. Surprisingly, only 2.5% of this effect is channeled through economic growth. Keywords AbstractIn this paper, we show that drought has a positive effect on the incidence of civil war over the 1945-2005 period in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index which is a richer measurement of drought than the measures used in the literature (rainfall and temperature) as it measures the accumulation of water in the soil in taking into account the temperature and the geological characteristics of the soil. We show that the risk of civil war increases by more than 42% from a "normal" climate to an "extremely drought" climate. Surprisingly, only 2.5% of this effect is channeled through economic growth.

Water scarcity and rioting: Disaggregated evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Examples include Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2012) who focus on the consequences of ethnic partitioning; and Besley and Reynal-Querol (2014) who explore the role of historical con ‡icts. 9 The present focus on water competition and riots is also an important factor distinguishing our study from recent work by Wischnath and Buhaug (2014) who use subnational data from Indian states to explore how ‡uctuations in food production a¤ect the severity of ongoing con ‡icts.…”

“…In a recent paper, Fernandez-Val and Weidner (2014) show that this can cause biased results in a nonlinear setting. 13 There are alternatives to SPEI, in particular PDSI, which is used by Couttenier and Soubeyran (2014). We chose to use SPEI because of its higher level of disaggregation.…”

“…8 However, while all of these papers focus on extensisve and potentially sustained con ‡icts between organized groups, our focus here is on riots, i.e., on localized events that ‡are up spontaneously and die down quickly. 9 Consistent with this pattern, our empirical analysis relies on highly disaggregated data, both in terms of space (we focus on cells of 0:5 0:5 degrees) and in terms of time (we use monthly observations). This high level of disaggregation further allows us to shed light on a speci…c mechanism linking unusual dryness to local violence-competition over scarce resources-that di¤ers from the usual "opportunity-cost-of-…ghting"mechanism.…”

Climate-Induced International Migration and Conflicts

“…et al (2012), Couttenier and Soubeyran (2014), Hsiang et al (2013) and Cattaneo and Peri (2016) The inclusion of these additional controls above the inclusion of temperature, precipitations, droughts, floods and storms would produce a bad control problem.…”

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

“…Again, civil conflict onset seems unrelated to temperature shocks [58,59,61]; whereas, there is modest support for a relationship for its effect on incidence with some studies finding support [49,66] and others not [62,64]. Regarding conflict dynamics, there is modest support for a relationship [57, 62, 70•, 71].…”