title: Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries.
abstract: Social and political tensions keep on fueling armed conflicts around the world. Although each conflict is the result of an individual context-specific mixture of interconnected factors, ethnicity appears to play a prominent and almost ubiquitous role in many of them. This overall state of affairs is likely to be exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change and in particular climate-related natural disasters. Ethnic divides might serve as predetermined conflict lines in case of rapidly emerging societal tensions arising from disruptive events like natural disasters. Here, we hypothesize that climate-related disaster occurrence enhances armed-conflict outbreak risk in ethnically fractionalized countries. Using event coincidence analysis, we test this hypothesis based on data on armed-conflict outbreaks and climate-related natural disasters for the period 1980-2010. Globally, we find a coincidence rate of 9% regarding armed-conflict outbreak and disaster occurrence such as heat waves or droughts. Our analysis also reveals that, during the period in question, about 23% of conflict outbreaks in ethnically highly fractionalized countries robustly coincide with climatic calamities. Although we do not report evidence that climate-related disasters act as direct triggers of armed conflicts, the disruptive nature of these events seems to play out in ethnically fractionalized societies in a particularly tragic way. This observation has important implications for future security policies as several of the world's most conflict-prone regions, including North and Central Africa as well as Central Asia, are both exceptionally vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change and characterized by deep ethnic divides.
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany; Climate Analytics, 10969 Berlin, Germany; Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems, Humboldt University, 10099 Berlin, Germany; john@pik-potsdam.de schleussner@pik-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Carl-Friedrich
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Schleussner
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany; Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, 114 19 Stockholm, Sweden;
authors.forename: Jonathan F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Donges
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany;
authors.forename: Reik V
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Donner
authors.affiliation: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 14473 Potsdam, Germany; Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 john@pik-potsdam.de schleussner@pik-potsdam.de.
authors.forename: Hans Joachim
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Schellnhuber
mesh_terms: D000068337:Armed Conflicts; D002980:Climate; D057231:Climate Change; D003906:Developing Countries; D004190:Disasters; D059066:Gross Domestic Product; D006801:Humans; D012306:Risk
keywords: armed conflicts; climate-related natural disasters; ethnic fractionalization; event coincidence analysis