Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen are currently facing famine conditions - the first recorded instance of four countries experiencing such declared crises simultaneously. All these countries have been prone to violent conflict and remain susceptible to climate shocks, contributing to greater vulnerability to famine. The gravity of these situations serves as inspiration for devising effective means to better anticipate crises and guide appropriate responses. This paper presents initial results of empirical analyses focusing on the cases of Karamoja, Uganda and West Pokot, Kenya. An evidence-driven computational model is used to assess the reliability of leading indicators in predicting trajectories of susceptibility to acute malnutrition of children at different levels of spatial and temporal granularity. Household and expert surveys administered in both contexts shape the design of the model, which is then seeded and calibrated with data on individuals, households and their environment, as well as validated with out-of-sample tests. A final step uses the model to explore counterfactual scenarios of different interventions, including allocations of humanitarian and development assistance.
The impact of climate change on migration and, subsequently, conflict is likely to be one of the most serious challenges societies will face in the future. Environmental events could force millions of people to leave their homes. This mass movement of individuals could strain resources and affect communal cohesion in receiving areas, which may lead to insecurity and conflict. Yet, we have limited understanding of the precise mechanisms underlying these processes as well as empirical evidence. We examine the relationship between environmental change, migration to urban areas, and conflict. We contend that conflict is more likely to occur when migration is triggered by long-term (droughts) than short-term environmental events (floods). Migrants having experienced long- term environmental events are more likely to suffer from grievances that induce conflict perceptions and urbanites perceive these migrants as competitors for public services and jobs. We empirically analyze this argument with newly collected micro-level data comprising more than 3,500 migrants and urbanites from three cities in Vietnam. The results support our proposition and emphasize that local socio-economic/institutional conditions matter for the emergence of conflict.
What explains local-level conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa? Recent research uses climate and price variation to identify effects of economic shocks on conflict. Beyond opportunity cost and rapacity mechanisms, the causal channels and scope conditions remain elusive. In this paper, I show that agriculture-related conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa is about more than income fluctuations or economic vulnerability to weather shocks. Instead, local conflict is most likely where a historically inherited mix of communal governance and ethnic diversity fuels ethnic competition between “sons of the soil” and in-migrating “ethnic strangers”. Such conditions tend to prevail in areas that have produced export crops from the colonial age onward. I use fine-grained geospatial data on historical resource production, conflict events, weather shocks, world market prices, and local-level ethnic demography to test my argument. Preliminary findings suggest that economic downturns have stronger conflict-inducing effects in more “modern” cash crop regions than in other areas that depend on agriculture. These effects are driven by ethnically heterogeneous cash crop zones, indicating that agricultural conflict in Africa has an identity component that remains underappreciated in the quantitative literature.
Kenya and Ethiopia are undergoing an energy transformation from fossil-fuels to renewable energy. While this expansion can provide many benefits, such growth is not without risks. Hydroelectric dams alter ecosystems, decreases water spots and available grazing land to feed livestock. Pastoral communities are among the first casualties of hydroelectric dams due to their strong dependence on changing ecosystems for their livelihoods. Moreover, previous research suggest that temperature and precipitation variability increase tensions between pastoral groups. We argue that pastoral communities in the region may experience a “double whammy” from hydroelectric dams and a changing climate by increasing the risk of violent events. We employ a multilevel model across local Ethiopian and Kenyan administrative units from 1990 to 2013. While we find that the frequency of pastoral violence decreases in level-2 administrative units with a hydroelectric dam, we also find some evidence of a double whammy effect. We find some evidence that the effect of warmer than average years on the risk of pastoral conflict is amplified in level-2 administrative units with a hydroelectric dam.