Climate not driving civil unrest in Africa

Munyaradzi Makoni in Environmental Research Web: Climate change does not lead to strife in Africa, a political scientist with the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway has said. Halvard Buhaug believes there is no link between climate change indicators, such as temperature and rainfall variability and the occurrence of civil war over the past half-century in sub-Saharan Africa.

"The primary causes of civil war are political, not environmental," said Buhaug in research published this month in PNAS. Buhaug told environmentalresearchweb that statistical analysis reveals that short-term variations in climate cannot explain the timing and occurrence of civil war in Africa. "What seems to matter for conflict risk are structural political and economic conditions, including widespread marginalization of ethnic minority groups," he said.

Buhaug challenges a study published last year in PNAS that found a causal connection between global warming and civil violence in Africa. Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, US, said he and colleagues had established a strong historical relationship between temperature and the incidence of civil war.

Burke and his team acknowledged that despite a growing research effort, linkages between climate change and conflict remain uncertain, but their findings showed that past conflicts in Africa were more likely in warmer, drier years….

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