Armed-Conflict Risks Enhanced by Climate-Related Disasters in Ethnically Fractionalized Countries
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Author(s): Carl-Friedrich Schleussnera, Jonathan F. Dongesa, Reik V. Donnera, and Hans Joachim Schellnhubera
Date: 2016
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes
Social and political tensions keep on fueling armed conflicts around the world. Although each conflict is the result of an individual context-specific mixture of interconnected factors, ethnicity appears to play a prominent and almost ubiquitous role in many of them. This overall state of affairs is likely to be exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change and in particular climate-related natural disasters. Ethnic divides might serve as predetermined conflict lines in case of rapidly emerging societal tensions arising from disruptive events like natural disasters. Here, we hypothesize that climate-related disaster occurrence enhances armed-conflict outbreak risk in ethnically fractionalized countries. Using event coincidence analysis, we test this hypothesis based on data on armed-conflict outbreaks and climate-related natural disasters for the period 1980–2010.