Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict - Science Careers Blog

Solomon M. Hsiang1,2,*,†‡, Marshall Burke3,†, Edward Miguel2,4 1Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 2National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 3Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. 4Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. ↵‡Corresponding author. E-mail: shsiang{at}berkeley.edu ↵† These authors contributed equally to this work. ↵* Present address: Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. A rapidly growing body of research examines whether human conflict can be affected by climatic changes. Drawing from archaeology, criminology, economics, geography, history, political science, and psychology, we assemble and analyze the 60 most rigorous quantitative studies and document, for the first time, a remarkable convergence of results. We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world. The magnitude of climate's influence is substantial: for each 1 standard deviation (1σ) change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises 14%. Because locations throughout the inhabited world are expected to warm 2 to 4σ by 2050, amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change. Received for publication 18 January 2013. Accepted for publication 23 July 2013. via Science - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHVeF4q-vKEb9gHXup2UrXhx9AowQ&url=http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1235367

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