Abstract
We examine the impact of temperature variations on the incidence of civil state conflicts, focusing on a specific mechanism: the agricultural potential of a country, i.e., its initial agricultural conditions before human interventions. Using data for 172 countries from 1946 until 2014, we conduct a natural experiment and identify the effect of the interaction between time-wise variations in temperature within a country and the cross-country variation in agricultural potential on conflict incidence. We find that there is a significantly higher probability to be in conflict when annual temperature deviates from its mean in a country with low agricultural potential relative to a country with high agricultural potential. An analysis of the long-term relationship (decennial averages) points to an exacerbation of the negative impact of the agricultural potential-temperature interaction on civil conflicts. The findings also suggest that the interaction has similar effects across development levels, no matter the share of agriculture in a country's GDP, and no significant effect in countries with exportable resources such as oil. The results are robust to a high resolution grid analysis when we use a suitability index for wheat. For other cereals and other specifications, including standardized temperature and long differences, the results are significant when controlling for the distance to the capital. This is the first study to show that initial agricultural conditions play a significant role to understand the climate-conflict linkages on a global scale.
Highlights
Climate change will have many adverse consequences on human kind, one of which is potential increases in interpersonal and intergroup violence (6)
There is a long tradition of scholarly thinkers who argue that climate and geography have shaped human societies (10), (11) and that some of the aforementioned drivers of conflicts are potentially correlated to climate and geography through a historical process (12)
There are at least two issues which complicate the statistical analysis of the climate-conflict linkage: 1) drivers of conflict may interact in a feedback loop with conflict, and 2) we might observe a correlation between conflict and a potential driver because both variables are related to a third unobserved variable
Summary
Climate change will have many adverse consequences on human kind, one of which is potential increases in interpersonal and intergroup violence (6). There is a long tradition of scholarly thinkers who argue that climate and geography have shaped human societies (10), (11) and that some of the aforementioned drivers of conflicts are potentially correlated to climate and geography through a historical process (12). Analysis of archeological data on the collapse of various civilizations shows that rather than being the cause of the disintegration, violent conflicts commonly resulted from natural resource degradation (13) or from the non-linear impact of a climate event (14),(15). Disentangling the effects of the drivers of conflict which result from a historical process from the effect of the initial geographical conditions of a country might inform us on specific mechanisms linking climate to violence. This study aims at establishing the causal link between temperature and conflicts through the magnifying effects of agricultural potential, using a natural experiment approach
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