CLIMATE CHANGE AND CIVIL WAR Toni Sipic, Mikesell Lab, University of Oregon

Introduction IPCC identified climate change as a threat to social stability Climate Change – Change in average temperature and precipitation patterns – Change in the number and severity of climate change related disasters Goal – Identify and measure the potential effects of climate change that lead to violent conflict with a goal of informing policy

Introduction  Climate Change and Civil War  Civil war measures  Onset or start  Incidence or occurrence  Duration  Climate change related disasters  Income shock channel  Such events decrease the opportunity costs of using violent conflict as a method to assert power over allocation of scarce resources  Other channels

Literature Overview Civil War Literature (Unrelated to Climate Change) – Blattman and Christopher (2010) Literature Review – Fearon and Laitin (2003) Civil War Onset – Fearon (2004) Civil War Duration Average Temperature and Precipitation Effects on Civil War – Hendrix and Glaser (2007) average precipitation in Africa – Burke et al. (2009) average precipitation and temperature in Africa – Zhang et al. (2006) Low average temperatures in China – Tol and Wagner (2010) Low average temperatures in Europe – Miguel et al. (2004)

Literature Overview Extreme Weather Effects on Civil War Nel and Righarts (2008) single index of disasters on civil war onset Besley et al. (2009) theoretical model for the civil war incidence, some empirics No research on the impacts of climate change on civil war duration

Contribution  First study to look at the differentiated effects of variety of climate change related disasters on various measures of civil war  Quantifying the costs of climate change  As such it can inform climate change mitigation and adaptation policies

Data  Civil War  Fearon and Laitin (2003) Civil War Onset 161 countries,  Fearon (2004) Civil War Duration 73 countries,  Natural Disasters  Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT), a global database on natural and technological disasters, 1900 – Present  Droughts, epidemics, extreme cold temperatures, extreme hot temperatures, floods, storms and wildfires  Other controls from a variety of sources: World Development Indicators, Quality of Government

Summary statistics: Onset and Incidence

Summary statistics: Duration

Econometric Specifications: Onset and Incidence  Panel logit specification  Random effects logit  Conditional (Fixed Effects) Logit Significant loss of observations  Fixed-Effects Linear Probability Model

Econometric Specification: Onset Onset Disasters are: droughts, epidemics, extreme cold temperatures, extreme hot temperatures, floods, storms and wildfires Occurrence of civil war in the previous year, income per capita lagged one year, log(population density), log(percent of country’s terrain classified as “mountainous”), states with noncontiguous territories, oil-producing country, newly formed state, Polity IV, anocracy

Results  Since the complete set of results is so voluminous, I will focus on just the key estimated coefficients  For each 7 disaster types (and the joint model) there are 8 regressions, and 3 types of specifications, for a total of 192 regressions  Only the significant coefficients on the disaster variables are summarized in these tables

Individual Disaster Events Regression Results: Onset

Many Disaster Events Regression Results: Onset

Econometric Specification: Incidence Incidence Disasters are: droughts, epidemics, extreme cold temperatures, extreme hot temperatures, floods, storms and wildfires Income per capita lagged one year, log(population density), log(percent of country’s terrain classified as “mountainous”), states with noncontiguous territories, oil-producing country, newly formed state, Polity IV, anocracy

Individual Disaster Events Regression Results: Incidence

Many Disaster Events Regression Results: Onset

Econometric Specification: Duration Duration – I allow climate-change-related disasters to vary over the duration of a war – Specifications – Cox proportional hazards model – Exponential – Weibull – Gompertz – a discrete time proportional hazards model (Prentice-Gloeckler, 1978) – Logistic regression models

Econometric Specification: Variables  Duration  Disasters: droughts, epidemics, extreme cold temperatures, extreme hot temperatures, floods, storms and wildfires  Controls: Coups, anti-colonial wars, Eastern Europe, “Sons of soil”, contraband production and trade, income, democracy,

Individual Disaster Events Regression Results: Duration

Many Disaster Events Regression Results: Duration

Conclusion  First evidence on the impact of individual climate- change-related natural disasters on various measures of civil war  Extreme cold events and epidemic outbreaks increase the probability of civil war onset  Previous years’ extreme heat events increase the probability of civil occurring  Drought events prolong civil war duration  Results can inform policy makers as they contemplate policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change

Future Research  Explore policy effectiveness in preventing and shortening civil war  Government spending on disaster preparedness  Aid  Explore disaggregated data  Indian province level data