Climate, Urbanization, and Conflict:

David Castells-Quintana,Thomas K.J Mcdermott

doi:10.22617/wps190254-2

Abstract

In this paper, we test the effect of weather shocks and floods on urban social disorder for a panel of large cities in developing countries. We focus on a particular mechanism, namely the displacement of population into (large) cities. We test this hypothesis using a novel dataset on floods—distinguishing those that affected large cities directly from those that occurred outside of our sample of large cities. Floods are found to be associated with faster growth of the population in the city, and in turn with a higher likelihood (and frequency) of urban social disorder events. Our evidence suggests that the effects of floods on urban social disorder occur (mainly) through the displacement of population, and the “push” of people into large cities. Our findings have important implications for evaluating future climate change, as well as for policies regarding adaptation to climate change and disaster resilience.

Highlights

In this paper, we test the effect of weather shocks on urban social disorder, with a particular focus on the role of floods that occur outside of large cities, in “pushing” population into these cites, potentially resulting in social tensions and conflict in urban areas
Floods is in logs and is measured as the people displaced by flood events which did not overlap with a country's largest city
Floods is in logs and is measured as the people displaced by flood events which did not overlap with a country's largest city; city population is the log of the population in the largest city

Summary

Introduction

We test the effect of weather shocks on urban social disorder, with a particular focus on the role of floods that occur outside of large cities, in “pushing” population into these cites, potentially resulting in social tensions and conflict in urban areas. Disasters related to natural hazards and weather shocks regularly cause displacement of population from rural to urban areas (see, for example, Barrios, Bertinelli, and Strobl 2006; Marchiori, Maystadt, and Schumacher 2012; Henderson, Storeygard, and Deichmann 2014). In particular, displace large numbers of people every year. In the past 30 years, they have displaced 650 million people worldwide, according to data from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory (Brakenridge 1985–present). The risk of flooding is anticipated to increase rapidly in the coming decades, due to a combination of increasing exposure—due to ongoing socioeconomic trends (including population and economic growth, and continuing urbanization)—and increasing hazard because of climate change effects on rainfall patterns and continuing sea level rise (Hallegatte et al 2013, Jongman et al 2014)

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