Climate Change And Violent Conflict In Africa Essay

The reviewed literature points to some degree of a relationship between climate change and violent conflict in Africa. However, the majorities of studies, especially those in West Africa employed descriptive research methods. This type of the investigation method, as we know it, do not make accurate predictions and do not determine cause and effect. Additionally, the vast majority of the literature heavily uses civil war and political violence datasets, as the dependent variables, which may be missing the most important features of the accuracy, degree and severity of the impact of climate change on Africa’s security environment. The use of civil war and political violence datasets to capture the impact of climate change may produce misleading outcomes. Unlike civil conflict and political violence, climate-related conflicts are inherently spontaneous, and sporadic, mirroring the ebb and flow climatic conditions. Different from civil strife and political violence, climate-related conflicts may become intense during the drier …show more content…
For the dependent variable to accurately capture the dynamics of this dispute, one of the parties must initiate the conflict while the other is at the receiving end. At the center of the conflict is misunderstandings regarding resource (grazing field and farmland use). Other related skirmishes that do not capture this dynamic will not be reported in the study. Data for the dependent variable comes from different sources, including news from the local Ghanaian media. Relying on the local news sources, I will track all Fulani-farmer related conflicts occurring from 2006 to 2016. These conflicts are recorded based on the months in which they occurred. The rational is to map the conflicts to the average rainfall and temperature patterns, to see if there is a causal link between the emergence of these conflicts and climatic