Climate wars

Does climate change make conflict in Africa more likely?

In his popular 2008 book Climate Wars, the US journalist Gwynne Dyer depicted a terrible scenario. Climate change would put pressure on fresh water and food over the next hundred years, he wrote, causing social disorder, mass migration and violent conflict.

But is there real evidence of a link between climate change and civil war — particularly in parts of Africa?

Yes, a study published last year said they had found a causal connection between climate warming and civil violence in Africa. Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, reported a strong historical relationship between temperature and the incidence of civil war. They found that the possibility of armed conflict across the continent went up by around 50% in unusually warm years during 1981-2002.

No, says Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway. In research just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he finds virtually no correlation between climate-change indicators such as temperature and rainfall variability and the frequency of civil wars over the past 50 years in sub-Saharan Africa, possibly the part of the world that is socially and environmentally most vulnerable to climate change.

The two rival groups are now disputing the validity of each other's findings. Perhaps more research is needed to know who is right in such a highly controversial issue...
 Adapted from an article by Quirn Schiermeier in Nature (picture:  Ismail Taxta / Reuters / Corbis)