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ID: 136958

Economic shocks & civil conflict onset in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1981–2010 / Weezel, Stijn van

Weezel, Stijn van	Article
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A number of studies have examined the link between rainfall and conflict but results so far have been inconclusive. This study examines the effect of rainfall on economic performance in different sectors and conflict onset. The empirical analysis finds no support for a strong relation between rainfall and conflict as most results are not robust to different model specifications. The results also do not provide conclusive evidence for a link between growth in specific economic sectors and civil conflict onset.

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ID: 167279

On climate and conflict: Precipitation decline and communal conflict in Ethiopia and Kenya / Weezel, Stijn van

Weezel, Stijn van	Journal Article
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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 Niño 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 precipitation 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 accounting 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.

Key Words

Communal conflict ; Kenya ; Ethiopia ; Climate Change ; Cross-Validation ; Precipitation

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