Date of Submission

Spring 2020

Academic Program

Economics

Project Advisor 1

Aniruddha Mitra

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The goal of this article is to explore the effects from climate change on the major determinants for the civil conflicts. For decades, climate change has been a hot concentration and many researchers have tried to find out the link between climate change and civil conflicts. However, the role that climate change is playing before, during, and after the conflicts still remains disputed among researchers. Variations in the methods used, datasets those researches based on, or different research design have all contributed to the obscurity in this topic. While there is the agreement that over decades climate change have increased the risk of civil conflicts and have revealed its influence on the progress of conflict, climate variability and its role of substantial factor for the civil conflicts have been doubted. In particular, recently the research papers from experts like Katharine J. Mach demonstrated the relatively weak link between climate variability and armed conflict. In Mach’s paper, it’s pointed out that climate change as the factor for conflicts has the most uncertainty among the outcomes from various research papers and at the same time it’s one of the least influential determinants in armed conflicts compared to other major determinants for conflicts. Thus, rather than letting climate change compete with other major and strong determinants for conflicts in a seemingly losing battle, this article aimed to clarify how we should control for the climate change in the conflict theory studies and to what extent it affect these factors so that it is able to make its weak, indirect but real and existing influence on the civil conflicts. In face of the lack of empirically direct link between climate change and the civil conflicts, we instead zoom into the empirical cases of effects of climate change in the direct determinants for civil conflicts and unfolds the indirect effects form climate change on the civil conflicts through several different intermediate progresses.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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