On climate variability and civil war in Asia

Abstract

Effects of climate change are frequently claimed to be responsible for widespread civil violence. Yet, scientists remain divided on this issue, and recent studies suggest that conflict risk increases with higher rainfall, loss of rainfall, higher temperatures or none of the above. Lack of scientific consensus is driven by differences in data, methods, and samples, but may also reflect a fragile and inconsistent correlation for the habitual spatiotemporal domain, Sub-Saharan Africa post-1980. This study presents a comprehensive, multi-scale empirical evaluation of climateconflict connections across Asia, the continent with the highest conflict rate per country. We find little evidence that interannual climate variability and anomalies are linked to historical conflict risk in the simple and general manner proposed by some earlier research. Although a significant parameter coefficient can be obtained under certain specifications, the direction and magnitude of the climate effects are inconsistent and sensitive to research design. Instead, Asian civil wars share central features with violent events elsewhere, proving the main correlates of contemporary armed conflict to be economic and socio-political rather than climatological.

Effects of temperature and precipitation variability on the risk of violence in sub-Saharan Africa, 1980–2012

“…Some studies indicate positive relationships between climate extremes and violence at the large scale (7)(8)(9), whereas contrasting work reports a lack of significant effects (10)(11)(12). Using fine-resolution spatial scales, other researchers find weak or no climate-conflict association; they conclude that the relationship is complex and depends on the social characteristics of the regional settings (13)(14)(15), or that the relationship is nonlinear across multiple regions and livelihood zones (16). In direct contrast to the scarcity narrative, some research suggests that an abundance of water is associated with conflict across the globe (17).…”

Perspectives on contextual vulnerability in discourses of climate conflict

“…Arguably, vulnerability in the totality of its meaning cannot be suitably portrayed in climate conflict research without reference to context and dynamism. Such a position was already apparent in studies from Scheffran et al (2012a), Adger et al (2013), Busby et al (2014b), and Wischnath and Buhaug (2014), which largely endorse a context centrism discourse frame. The most immediate insight here illustrates that it is preferable to say that to understand climate conflict relations is to understand nuanced and context-sensitive intervening factors.…”

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].…”

“…At most, some studies test whether there is a difference between the onset and incidence of civil conflict, but the latter measure constitutes a hybrid of onset and duration and therefore risks watering out effects that could affect one phenomenon but not the other. While firm conclusions are premature due to the low number of studies, the fact that studies that analyze incidence rather than onset find more support, and more importantly, the few studies that analyze the dynamics of civil conflicts [58,59,63] find support for more narrowly defined research questions, could indicate that what determines the onset of civil conflict is less affected by weather shocks than the dynamics of ongoing conflicts. Alternatively, the lack of a correlation for the outbreak of civil conflict should lead us to search for an alternative way of detecting systematic relationships.…”