Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries

Schleußner, Carl-Friedrich; Donges, Jonathan F.; Donner, Reik V.; Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim

doi:10.1073/pnas.1601611113

Cited by 296 publications

(215 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…This perspective fits within a growing body of literature that investigates links between climate-related disasters and conflict in different parts of the world (Bernauer et al 2012, Theisen et al 2013, Schleussner et al 2016. In this paper, we highlight the importance of looking at the actual vegetation changes taking place on the ground in connection to the reduction in precipitation during the drought years.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Differences in resource management affects drought vulnerability across the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey

Eklund¹,

Thompson²

2017

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Much discussion has taken place exploring a potential connection between the 2007-2009 Fertile Crescent drought and Syria's uprising-turned civil war beginning in 2011. This study takes an integrated perspective on the 2007-2009 drought in the border region of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey by looking at the meteorological, agricultural, and socioeconomic aspects of drought vulnerability. Satellite-based precipitation and vegetation data help outline the drought's spatial and temporal properties. In order to understand the context in which this drought happened, we also look at the trends in vegetation productivity between 2001 and 2015, as well as each country's different politico-economic factors affecting land and water resource management leading up to the drought. The findings show that, although the drought was severe in Syria, it was not the only country affected, nor necessarily the worst hit meteorologically. The agricultural drought lasted 2 yr in most affected areas on the Iraqi and Syrian sides, however, only 1 yr in the affected areas on the Turkish side. The vegetation trend analysis shows a striking difference between the Syrian and Turkish sides of the border. Turkey experienced a general improvement in land productivity between 2001 and 2015, whereas Iraq and Syria show a generally negative productivity trend. The fact that the decline in rainfall had different effects on crops in each of the three countries highlights the role government and private sector resource management and infrastructure play in reducing drought vulnerability. The findings of this study highlight the need for an integrated approach to research that investigates the interconnection between climate and conflict.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Differences in resource management affects drought vulnerability across the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey

Eklund¹,

Thompson²

2017

E&S

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“…S10 for examples of climate networks of several El Niño and La Niña events. Evidently, these enhanced and localized El Niño effects are associated with serious consequences in many aspects of human life (59)(60)(61)(62). In Fig.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Network analysis reveals strongly localized impacts of El Niño

Fan

Meng

Ashkenazy

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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108

101

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Climatic conditions influence the culture and economy of societies and the performance of economies. Specifically, El Niño as an extreme climate event is known to have notable effects on health, agriculture, industry, and conflict. Here, we construct directed and weighted climate networks based on near-surface air temperature to investigate the global impacts of El Niño and La Niña. We find that regions that are characterized by higher positive/negative network "in"-weighted links are exhibiting stronger correlations with the El Niño basin and are warmer/cooler during El Niño/La Niña periods. In contrast to non-El Niño periods, these stronger inweighted activities are found to be concentrated in very localized areas, whereas a large fraction of the globe is not influenced by the events. The regions of localized activity vary from one El Niño (La Niña) event to another; still, some El Niño (La Niña) events are more similar to each other. We quantify this similarity using network community structure. The results and methodology reported here may be used to improve the understanding and prediction of El Niño/La Niña events and also may be applied in the investigation of other climate variables.climate | dynamic network | ENSO M ore than a decade ago, networks became the standard framework for studying complex systems (1-5). In recent years, network theory has been implemented in climate sciences to construct "climate networks." These networks have been used successfully to analyze, model, understand, and even predict climate phenomena (6-16). Specific examples of climate network studies include the investigation of the interaction structure of coupled climate subnetworks (17), the multiscale dependence within and among climate variables (18), the temporal evolution and teleconnections of the North Atlantic Oscillation (19,20), the finding of the dominant imprint of Rossby waves (21), the optimal paths of teleconnection (22), the influence of El Niño on remote regions (8,23,24), the distinction of different types of El Niño events (25), and the prediction of these events (15,16). A network is composed of nodes and links; in a climate network, the nodes are the geographical locations, and the links are the correlations between them. The "strength" of the links is quantified according to the strength of the correlations between the different nodes (21,26,27).El Niño is probably the strongest climate phenomenon that occurs on interannual time scales (28,29). El Niño refers to the warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean by several degrees ( • C). La Niña is the cooling of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. La Niña usually follows an El Niño event, but not always; the overall phenomenon is referred to as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This cycle occurs every 3-5 y with different magnitudes. There are several indices that quantify the El Niño activity, including the Niño 3.4 Index, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) (see, e.g., ref. 30), and the Oceanic Niño ...

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“…One out of the three studies found a direct effect on civil conflict onset [46,82,83], and the three studies that analyze incidence, duration, and battles also find these to be more likely in the wake of a disaster [46,57,84] (not in Table 1). Overall, in the period under review, too few studies were conducted to draw firm conclusions, but as for temperature, results opposite of the scarcity scenario seem unlikely.…”

Section: Empirical Studies 2014-2017mentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

Theisen

2017

Curr Clim Change Rep

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Purpose of Review The aim of this review is to understand the state of the art of research related to climate change and collectively organized violence from a broad political science perspective. Recent Findings An increasing share of quantitative studies find a link between weather anomalies and violence for some forms of violence, but the directions are not always consistent and the mechanisms are not satisfactorily understood. Nonnaturalist scholars note important reservations. Summary Important improvements have been made during the last few years, but much remains to conclude that climate change will increase the risk of violence. An increased focus on the political consequences of adaptation and mitigation is needed.

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Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries

Cited by 296 publications

References 63 publications

Differences in resource management affects drought vulnerability across the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey

Differences in resource management affects drought vulnerability across the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Turkey

Network analysis reveals strongly localized impacts of El Niño

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

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