Climate Conflict: Warmer World Could Be More Violent
Climate Conflict: Warmer World Could Be More Violent
If climate change predictions turn out to be true, some parts of the world could become a more violent place, according to a new study released today.
“The relationship between temperature and conflict shows that much warmer-than-normal temperatures raise the risk of violence,” the authors write in the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study was led by John O’Loughlin, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado.
This isn’t just using modeling data looking forward at a possible future scenarios — O’Loughlin and his team actually examined the influence of temperature and precipitation on the risk of violent conflict in nine East African countries between 1990 and 2009, and found that increased precipitation dampened the risk of violence, whereas increased temperatures raised it.
As precipitation increases, then the conflict risk goes down dramatically, the study found, as there is more rain for the crops and grasslands.