Civil conflict sensitivity to growing season drought
Significance Understanding the conflict potential of drought is critical for dealing effectively with the societal implications of climate change. Using new georeferenced ethnicity and conflict data for Asia and Africa since 1989, we present an actor oriented analysis of growing season drought and conflict involvement among ethnic groups. Results from naive models common in previous research suggest that drought generally has little impact. However, context sensitive models accounting for the groups' level of vulnerability reveal that drought can contribute to sustaining conflict, especially for agriculturally dependent groups and politically excluded groups in very poor countries. These results suggest a reciprocal nature society interaction in which violent conflict and environmental shock constitute a vicious circle, each phenomenon increasing the group's vulnerability to the other. To date, the research community has failed to reach a consensus on the nature and significance of the relationship between climate variability and armed conflict. We argue that progress has been hampered by insufficient attention paid to the context in which droughts and other climatic extremes may increase the risk of violent mobilization. Addressing this shortcoming, this study presents an actor oriented analysis of the drought conflict relationship, focusing specifically on politically relevant ethnic groups and their sensitivity to growing season drought under various political and socioeconomic contexts. To this end, we draw on new conflict event data that cover Asia and Africa, 1989 2014, updated spatial ethnic settlement data, and remote sensing data on agricultural land use. Our procedure allows quantifying, for each ethnic group, drought conditions during the growing season of the locally dominant crop. A comprehensive set of multilevel mixed effects models that account for the groups' livelihood, economic, and political vulnerabilities reveals that a drought under most conditions has little effect on the short term risk that a group challenges the state by military means. However, for agriculturally dependent groups as well as politically excluded groups in very poor countries, a local drought is found to increase the likelihood of sustained violence. We interpret this as evidence of the reciprocal relationship between drought and conflict, whereby each phenomenon makes a group more vulnerable to the other.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences