Five years ago, when helping to write a Government strategy paper on weak and failing states - Countries at Risk of Instability - we looked long and hard at the so-called 'drivers of conflict'. Those factors which quantitative and qualitative studies found increased a countries 'proneness' to civil war. Several such drivers were clearly and consistently present: low income; economic decline; a history of past conflict. Others needed more careful contextual analysis: the presence of 'point-sourced' natural resources, like oil, or a partial democracy in which elections gave birth to a government unfettered by checks and balances. Looking to the future we speculated that global warming might be such a factor.
To be honest, I was the sceptic within our team - believing that such a factor would be transmitted through other mechanisms. I'll try to put that without using jargon. Competition over resources - say arable land, or access to water - or climate refugees could be associated with conflict, or, indeed, they might not. A lot, I speculated, would be determined by the relative strength or weakness of institutions - whether informal local mechanisms of negotiating over sharing land 'rights' or formal systems of electoral or legal systems providing a peaceful forum for the airing and settling disputes.
Now academics have modelled the effects of global warming on civil war - finding that, by 2030, climate change will lead to a 54% increase in the incidence of civil conflict - leading to an additional 393,000 battle deaths.
The authors posit that the transmission mechanism is through the effect of climate change on agricultural output (the major factor for household welfare in much of Africa) and therefore economic performance - which is said to be linked with civil wars in a number of ways including making it cheaper to recruit young men to join rebel groups and reducing the military reach and deterrent capability of the state.
If true, the authors of the study suggest that, as well as trying to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions the world should be preparing to mitigate the effects of global warming. Specifically they suggest insurance schemes for climate caused harvest losses and the introduction of better adapted crop varieties.
The measure of political institutions used to control for the effect of 'democracy' is the well known Polity 2 dataset - very useful for cross-country analysis but certainly not fine grained enough to examine the effect of both formal and informal institutions.
Its time for all those on their way to Copenhagen to start putting money and political capital into both technocratic solutions like crop insurance and the deeply political effort needed to mediate local level conflicts such as those we're seeing in South Sudan at the moment.
