Global climate change is projected to generate wide-ranging impacts on ecological and human systems, from coral reef and species loss, to agricultural and human health effects. Communities in the Global South are expected to bear the brunt of the consequences of climate change, while richer nations shoulder far greater responsibility for adding carbon to the atmosphere (IPCC, 2014). In Africa, the context for the studies in my dissertation, communities are expected to face a high risk of reduced water availability and drought, crop failure, and changes to the geographic range and incidence of vector and water borne diseases (Lobell et al., 2011; IPCC, 2014, p 21).

I am a quantitative environmental political scientist who studies human security impacts of climate change and climate stress. How will climate change impact human political and social conditions? How can international actors, governments and local communities respond, to increase resilience and equity and prevent the worst of these outcomes? I employ methods from econometrics and data science; informed by political science, development economics, earth systems science and geography; and generate my findings using data from surveys, behavioral games, administrative records, satellite sources and climate models. My current research focuses in particular on links between climatic conditions and violent conflict. Do higher temperatures or droughts lead to more conflict? If so, why and under what conditions? And what can we do about it?

If warming is increasing the likelihood of violence, two approaches will be necessary to mitigate climate change’s most hostile effects. First, we need to understand the causal mechanisms, identifying links in the causal chains that connect climate to conflict. Policymakers can then craft effective interventions that block one or more of those links. Second, we need to identify the moderators that enhance or suppress the influence of climate on conflict. Policymakers and administrators can then more effectively determine the countries, regions or individuals that are most vulnerable to climate-related violence. Together, they can optimally target those interventions towards those most vulnerable areas or individuals. The combination of effective policy, informed by greater knowledge of causal mechanisms, and effective targeting, informed by increased understanding of effect moderators, can successfully reduce the likelihood that climate change leads to violence.

My dissertation, “Climate, Social Order and Social Protection: Mechanisms and Moderators in Climate-Related Violent Conflict,” is composed of three separate but thematically related studies. It seeks to better elucidate both moderators and mechanisms in climate-conflict relationships, particularly those involving local-level social relations and institutions, and national-level social insurance policies. Specifically, my dissertation explores 1) whether trust and social capital moderate temperature’s influence on conflict across 33 countries in Africa, 2) whether climate stress is more likely to lead to conflict or cooperation in northern Namibia and 3) whether a programmatic social safety net policy in Ethiopia can block links in the causal chain from climatic stress, to economic hardship, to violence. Collectively, these studies provide novel empirical tests of a set of notable factors – suggested by the literatures on political and economic development, social capital, political economy of conflict, and climate resilience – that may moderate or explain the influence of climatic factors on conflict in countries in the Global South.

Climatic stressors like high temperature and drought have been shown to influence human responses ranging from reduced cognitive capacity and aggression, to suicide, homicide and even intergroup violent conflict. When scholars seek to identify the causal mechanisms explaining the links between climate stress and violence, one of the most commonly considered is the “opportunity cost” mechanism. This mechanism suggests that when an individual is facing stressful economic circumstances they may leave more licit work, for example in agriculture, for more violent criminal or armed group activity. Most often, this has been tested using a geographic region as a unit of analysis, for example, showing that when a subnational administrative area faces higher temperatures or drought stress, the viability of economic activity in the area is reduced (e.g. crop yields drop), and the level of violence rises. This approach may offer a reasonable proxy that is suggestive of the opportunity cost notion, but it does not actually examine effects at the implied unit of analysis: the individual. If this mechanism in fact explains much of the influence of climate stress on conflict, then it should be the case that we find evidence that individuals who have faced or are facing climate stress disproportionately engage in criminal or otherwise violent work. 

In this study we take advantage of detailed, comprehensive, individual-level data on entry into prison in El Salvador. These data include date of entry into prison, location of birth and location of criminal activity (that led to capture and imprisonment). We seek to understand: are individuals who experienced more climate stress during particular periods in their lives more likely to pursue a criminal life path (as proxied by entry into prison). Various points in one’s life course could matter for increasing the likelihood that climatic stress leads to criminal activity. Experiencing stress just before potential imprisonment could induce a short-term response to that stress, pivoting towards more violent livelihoods. Stress upon entering the workforce could make legal income generating activities like farming or other outdoor (climate-exposed) labor less viable as compared to criminal work. Dating further back, stress during childhood or even stress prior to birth could influence a child’s birth outcomes, nutrition, development or security in other ways that make criminal activity later in life more likely. 

We take advantage of long time series and geographically precise climate data to construct various temperature and agricultural-stress indices for each municipality from which a potential member of the prison population might be drawn. Using these, we construct climate stress indices for each life period, at the municipality-cohort of birth level. We then explore whether the experience of climate stress influences the likelihood of an individual being imprisoned. We further explore heterogeneity in this effect between imprisonment for violent as opposed to non-violent crimes and for indivduals' membership or non-membership in gangs. Results, to be determined, will shed light on the potentially hazardous implications of climate change for life paths and present new evidence about the role of the “opportunity cost” mechanism in explaining links between climate stress and violence.

How does the interplay of geological mineral resources and climate-affected agricultural and livestock resources influence conflict patterns in sub-Saharan Africa? Climate stress and mineral extraction both exert negative influences on the arability and productivity of land in sub-Saharan Africa. Where climatic shifts and mining meet, these forces may compound to increase the propensity for conflict in affected regions. 

There are a variety of related pathways through which the presence of mineral resources may influence the level of conflict in response to climate stress. Mining activity may directly compete for the use of arable land with farmers and pastoralists. If climatic conditions are diminishing proximate communities’ livelihoods, the presence of resource extraction activity nearby may make for an easy scapegoat, leading to conflict between such communities and those extracting resources. Those extraction activities themselves may pollute or otherwise diminish the quality of nearby arable land, harming livelihoods and leading nearby locals to migrate or pursue work in more violent or insecure economic activities. In addition, mining may generate “Sons of the Soil” (Fearon & Laitin 2011) dynamics. Resource extraction workers arrive from outside an area and who are culturally or ethnically distinct from the local populations, exposing possibilities for communal conflict.

Our project makes new contributions to the study of resources’ influence on conflict by examining, for the first time to our knowledge, the interaction between mineral resources and climate-influenced agricultural and livestock resources. To do this, we take advantage of GEM-RoaD, a novel dataset on the (time-invariant) presence of geological resources and mining activity across sub-Saharan Africa that identifies the geographic locations and geological characteristics of nearly 200 types of mineral deposits. This allows us to explore whether the presence of mineral resources moderates the likelihood that climatic stress (as measured by inter-annual anomalies in temperature and precipitation) or climatic shifts (measured as long-term shifts in the distributions of these variables) leads to conflict. 

Given the set of possible mechanisms described above, we hypothesize that the presence of mineral resources makes the influence of climate stress (inter-annual high temperatures, extremes in rainfall or droughts) or climate shifts (longer-term shifts to high temperature, low rainfall or high volatility) more harmful: i.e., more likely to drive conflict. We model this as an interaction between climatic conditions and the presence or lack of a mineral deposit in the local area. We further explore the heterogeneity of this influence of mineral deposits, across resource types (e.g. more or less lootable) and geological characteristics (e.g. rock type). We expect that, while mining of resources in igneous and metamorphic deposits may play some role, we will find the strongest interactions where resources from sedimentary deposits are proximate to valuable land for agriculture or pastoralism. As mineral resource extraction in the region grows and climate change continues apace, our results will provide new insights into the links between natural resources and conflict and allow for better projections of conflict patterns into the future.