Floods and Armed Conflict
Publisher: Environment and Development Economics
Author(s): Ramesh Ghimirea and Susana Ferreira
Date: 2016
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes
This paper estimates the impact of large, catastrophic floods on internal armed conflict using global data on large floods between 1985 and 2009. The results suggest that while large floods did not ignite new conflict, they fueled existing armed conflicts. Floods and armed conflict are endogenously determined, and we show that empirically addressing this endogeneity is important. The estimated effects of floods on conflict prevalence are substantially larger in specifications that control for the endogeneity of floods, suggesting that treating natural disasters as exogenous phenomena may underestimate their impacts on sociopolitical outcomes.