Abstract / Summary:
The relationship between climate change and conflict (interstate and/or intrastate) has been the subject of voluminous recent research. With a few exceptions, this literature has not been able to establish the existence of a robust, systematic, causal relationship. This may reflect the absence of such a relationship in the real world. Or, and this is our view, this simply is a consequence of the theoretical and methodological limitations of existing work. In this project we revisit this issue along two dimensions. First, we carefully specify the mechanism through which climate may affect the incidence of conflict. In particular, while we focus on the chain linking climatic conditions, economic welfare, and conflict, we also emphasize how the latter part of this link depends critically on the institutional features of the political system. Second, at a methodological level our measures of key climatic conditions (temperature and precipitation) are of superior quality: they are exogenous to both economic conditions and conflict. Thereby, we solve the simultaneity problem that has plagued the literature in the past. Consequently, our results provide a more reliable basis for testing our theoretical predictions and for evaluating policy.
