Too hot to handle? Climate shocks, societal vulnerability and conflict forecasting

Abstract:

As global warming is projected to rise in the following decades, increasing temperature and more severe and frequent climate extremes have spread concern over the risk of mounting political instability, particularly in vulnerable regions such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Yet, existing research has thus far focused mostly on mean climate conditions, while the effect of climate extremes and their impact over space and time is poorly understood. This paper presents a systematic, data-driven, conflict forecasting model based on a comprehensive set of climate extreme indices and a refined spatio-temporal modelling of climate impacts on conflict risk. Informed by the findings of empirical studies on climate security and based on the setup provided by the ViEWS project (Hegre et al., 2021) the model uses 39 climate extreme indices and alternative spatio-temporal functions, coupled with indicators of socio-economic vulnerability, to predict the probability of state-based conflict in sub-national locations in Africa and the Middle East up to 48 months into the future for an out-of-sample test partition.

Authors:

Paola Vesco, Håvard Hegren and Ole Magnus Theisen