On climate and conflict: Precipitation decline and communal conflict in Ethiopia and Kenya
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Author | Stijn van Weezel |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319826409 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
On climate and conflict: Precipitation
decline and communal conflict
in Ethiopia and Kenya
Stijn van Weezel
School of Economics, University College Dublin
Abstract
This study exploits a sudden and abrupt decline in precipitation of the long rains season in the Horn of Africa to
analyze the possible link between climate change and violent armed conflict. Following the 1998 El Nin
˜o there has
been an overall reduction in precipitation levels – associated with sea-surface temperature changes in the Indian and
Pacific Oceans – resulting in an increase in the number and severity of droughts. Given that the probable cause of this
shift is anthropogenic forcing, it provides a unique opportunity to study the effect of climate change on society
compared to statistical inference based on weather variation. Focusing on communal conflict in Ethiopia and Kenya
between 1999 and 2014, exploiting cross-sectional variation across districts, the regression analysis links the pre-
cipitation decline to an additional 1.3 conflict events per district. The main estimates show that there is a negative
correlation between precipitation and communal conflict with a probability of 0.90. Changing model specification to
consider plausible alternative models and accommodate other identifying assumptions produces broadly similar
results. The generaliziability of the link between precipitation decline and conflict breaks down when using out-
of-sample cross-validation to test the external validity. A leave-one-out cross-validation exercise shows that account-
ing for climate contributes relatively little to improving the predictive performance of the model. This suggests that
there are other more salient factors underlying communal violence in Ethiopia and Kenya. As such, in this case the
link between climate and conflict should not be overstated.
Keywords
climate change, communal conflict, cross-validation, Ethiopia, Kenya, precipitation
Introduction
Despite a growing and productive literature on climate
change and conflict, the possible nexus remains specula-
tive due to inconclusive results (Klomp & Bulte, 2013;
Theisen, Gleditsch & Buhaug, 2013).
1
An important
shortcoming of existing work, which this study aims to
overcome, is that most research conflates climate varia-
bility with climate change (Buhaug, 2015). Using inter-
or intra-annual weather variation might not be a suitable
climate change proxy (Selby, 2014). Although exploiting
relatively high-frequency data can provide information
on conflict seasonality (Witsenburg & Adano, 2009;
Ember et al., 2012, 2014) or weather’s strategic impor-
tance (Carter & Veale, 2014), a major limitation is the
implicit assumption that weather variation has an almost
immediate impact on conflict risk. Whereas using more
fine-grained spatial data can help account for subnational
variation in climatic conditions (e.g O’Loughlin et al.,
Corresponding author:
weezel.van@gmail.com
1
Bernauer, Bo
¨hmelt & Koubi (2012), Gleditsch (2012) and
Scheffran et al. (2012) also find no consensus in contrast with
Hsiang, Burke & Miguel (2013) and Hsiang & Burke (2014).
Hsiang, Burke & Miguel (2013) claim to find causal evidence
linking climatic events to human conflict, but these results have
been contested (Buhau g et al., 2014) (see also Hsiang, Burke &
Miguel, 2014). Others have shown that climatic conditions can be
linked to conflict, but its salience is often limited (O’Loughlin et al.,
2012; Ayana et al., 2016; von Uexkull et al., 2016).
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 514–528
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319826409
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