Water scarcity, climate adaptation, and armed conflict: insights from Africa
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Water scarcity, climate adaptation, and armed conflict: insights from Africa Patrick M. Regan 1 & Hyun Kim 2 Received: 23 October 2019 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The dynamic relationships between climate change and armed conflict have been discussed at length, but there have been few studies that integrate dimensions of climate adaptation into the processes linking climate change to armed conflict. By using geospatial grids for climate change and armed conflict, and country-level climate vulnerability measures of sensitivity and adaptive capacity, we empirically examine the effects of climatic and non-climatic conditions on the probability of armed conflict in Africa. Results suggest that there are close links between climate drivers and armed conflict. Importantly, greater levels of adaptive capacity lead to a lower likelihood of armed conflict. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that enhancing adaptive capacity under conditions of climate pressure will reduce the probability of people taking up arms in response to water scarcity. Keywords Adaptive capacity . Africa . Climate change . Sensitivity . Water scarcity
Introduction Understanding climate change requires that we understand the social consequences that can result. Recent evidence links water scarcity driven by climate change to the civil war in Syria (Kelley et al. 2015) and to the war and genocide in Darfur, Sudan (UNEP 2007). Droughts contribute to the stability risk of agriculturally dependent and politically excluded groups (von Uexkull et al. 2016), and more generally, climatedriven extreme weather disasters or mass displacement by natural disasters have been linked to armed conflict (Ghimire et al. 2015; Schleussner et al. 2016). There have been contentious arguments about the relationship between climatic pressures and armed conflict (e.g., Communicated by Chinwe Ifejika Speranza * Hyun Kim [email protected] Patrick M. Regan [email protected] 1
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1010 Jenkins Nanovic Halls, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
2
College of Social Science, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, South Korea
Schweizer 2019; Theisen 2017; van Weezel 2019). Burke et al. (2009) and Hsiang et al. (2013) demonstrate that temperature increases are linked to the onset of armed conflict, but this is challenged by Buhaug et al. (2014). Scarcity tied to water resources forms the core theoretical explanation in nearly all arguments, but not all research finds that water deficits increase conflict (Selby 2019; Selby et al. 2017). Salehyan and Hendrix (2014) demonstrate, for example, that increases in rainfall are associated with increased armed conflict. Intuition, conventional wisdom, and contemporary policy do not always comport with empirical evidence (e.g., the US DoD 2011). The empirical relationships or the conditions under which they hold can have profound political consequences. As noted by Hendrix (2017), Afr
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