@article{ref1,
title="Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries",
journal="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America",
year="2016",
author="Schleussner, Carl-Friedrich and Donges, Jonathan F. and Donner, Reik V. and Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim",
volume="113",
number="33",
pages="9216-9221",
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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0027-8424",
doi="10.1073/pnas.1601611113",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601611113"
}