Forecasting Civil Conflict under Different Climate Change Scenarios
Abstract
Major Goals: Develop forecasts of armed conflict under alternative scenarios for socioeconomic development and climate change. Investigate the empirical basis for the associations between climate variability and political violence via indirect pathways, such as livelihood, food security, and economic underperformance. Improve the use of socioeconomic development and climate change scenarios as well as the development of intermediate variables that are relevant for forecasting social instability and armed conflict. This project also includes an extension to conduct investigations on the role of migration and human displacement as an intermediate from climate change to social instability in both the receiving and sending communities. Accomplishments: Forecasting armed conflict over alternative socioeconomic and climate pathways: We modeled how socioeconomic development, namely economic growth and educational attainment, influences on future levels of intrastate armed conflict and on the challenges to mitigation and adaptation to climate change using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). Here, we build upon the simulation approach from Hegre et al. (2013) to model the propensity for armed intrastate conflict along the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). We find that projections for climate change as well as armed intrastate conflict depend on expectations of socioeconomic development, although conditions that promote peace may not necessarily facilitate climate mitigation and adaptation. While economic growth lowers the risk of armed conflict, this growth is generally associated with increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased costs of mitigation policies. We find that the sustainable development pathway that has lower challenges to mitigation and adaptation is as conducive to global peace as the higher economic growth associated with the fossil fuel based development pathway.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 13, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1070257
Entities
People
- Elisabeth A Gilmore
Organizations
- University of Maryland