Climate change and civil wars: a cross country comparison
Student name: Ms Bakul Chugh
Guide: Dr Seema Sangita
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: Kennesaw University, USA
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Aniruddha Bagchi
Abstract: The conflicts taking place around the world in the recent times as the Syrian conflict, civil
wars in more than two-thirds of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as South Sudan,
Somalia, in Indonesia and other parts of the world resulting into monumental human
suffering are of great concern. These civil wars are commonly rooted in the economical or
political causation for the emergence of a conflict. Deviating from the routinized archetype
in my paper, I have scrutinized such conflicts from the climate change perspective. As, this is
a recent field of research lacking large-scale empirical evidence. My paper aims at
empirically validating the causal relationship between climate change and civil wars within
the political boundaries of a country.
This dissertation brings out the findings of my study done by the interaction of climate
change indicators on the possible outcome of a civil war in a cross-country analysis. Climate
patterns across the world are volatile and most of the research in this field does not capture
the link between the changing climatic conditions and its impact on violence amongst people.
This paper tries to observe the linkage of such a relation while also, accounting for the
different factors contributing to the climate-conflict nexus.
The context of the research constitutes for climatic indicators capturing the climatic records
over the past nineteen years and an array of indicators crucial to draw the pathways linking
climate change to civil wars. These records correspond to violent conflicts viewed within the
political boundaries for countries across the world. The study is primarily a quantitative
research carried out by the collection, arrangement and uses of secondary data for deriving
the results. In this paper we try to contribute to the new branch of research that is dwelling
into the contribution of climate change and its effect on violent conflicts.
The present study uses statistical regression models to estimate the relative significance of
various factors, which need to be targeted so as to achieve the goal of estimating the level of
contribution of climate change in civil wars. We utilize a data set that encompasses 152
countries while controlling for different economy, geographical, political, agricultural and
fractionalization variables to best capture the outcome. Temperature deviation, one of our
climatic indicator turns out be significant and other independent variables such as area,
language fractionalization, political stability, religious fractionalization, voice and
accountability are some of the important factors that turn out to be statistically significant.
KEY WORDS: Climate Change, Civil Wars, Temperature deviation, Regression, countryyear
