Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Devlin, Colleen
• Hendrix, Cullen S.

Titel

Trends and triggers redux: Climate change, rainfall, and interstate conflict

Ist Teil von

• Political geography, 2014-11, Vol.43, p.27-39

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Given freshwater is crucial to sustaining life and forecasted to decline in relative abundance under most climate change scenarios, there is concern changing precipitation patterns will be a cause of future interstate conflict. In theorizing the impact of climate change for interstate conflict, we distinguish between trends (long-term means) that may affect the baseline probability of conflict, and triggers (short-term deviations) that may affect the probability of conflict in the short run. We jointly model the effects of mean precipitation scarcity and variability (trends) and year-to-year changes in precipitation (triggers) on militarized interstate disputes between states. We find higher long-run variability in precipitation and lower mean levels of precipitation in dyads are associated with the outbreak of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). Contra neo-Malthusian expectations, however, we find joint precipitation scarcity – defined as both countries experiencing below mean rainfall in the same year – has a conflict-dampening effect. These findings push the literature in a direction that more closely aligns our modeling of human impacts with our understanding of the physical impacts of climate change. •Precipitation affects militarized dispute behavior between sovereign states.•Short-term water scarcity has pacifying effect on interstate relations.•Longer-term water scarcity and variability make conflict more likely.•Temporal scale effects are evident.•Findings are not confined to states that share water resources.