Researchers at Columbia University assert that changes in climate can exacerbate civil unrest in many parts of the world and have done so over much of the past 60 years, according to a paper Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The findings support other studies that have also tentatively linked excessive heat and drought that damaged crops or starved regions of water to government uprisings.
Continue ReadingStudying conflicts occurring between 1950 and 2004, the probability of new violence throughout tropical regions of the world double during the hot, dry periods of El Ni?o years relative to cool, wet La Ni?a conditions. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts.
Overall, the team calculated that El Ni?o may have played a role in a fifth of civil wars worldwide during the span of the study.
?We believe that these findings represent the first major evidence that the global climate is a major factor in global patterns of organized violence around the world,? lead author Solomon Hsiang said during a conference call with reporters.
?El Ni?o,? the paper states, ?might accelerate the timing of conflicts that would have occurred later.?
But Mark Crane, a climate modeler and co-author of the paper, was also clear about what the study does not say about the relationship between climate and conflict.
?No one should take this to say that climate is our fate. Rather, this is compelling evidence that it has a measurable influence on how much people fight overall,? he said. ?It is not the only factor ? you have to consider politics, economics, all kinds of other things.?
Crane said that he and his research partners preferred to avoid dabbling in any projections, especially how El Ni?o events might be affected by the overall increases in global temperatures.
?But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,? Hsiang said.
The study does not connect El Ni?o to specific wars or address the influence of long-term climate change on future conflicts directly. It also focuses on violent conflicts within a country between a government and ?an organized political opposition.?
The group statistically compensated for outliers based on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as well as several other factors, including the degree of urbanization, level of democracy and income growth.
?Even when we control for all these factors simultaneously, we still find that there?s a very large and pervasive effective El Nino [impact] on the rate of civil conflicts,? Hsiang said.
This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:34 p.m. on August 24, 2011.
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