Fonti locali di vulnerabilità al cambiamento climatico e ai conflitti armati in Africa orientale

Our empirical work sheds new light on the climate-conflict nexus by investigating the vulnerability factors which explain why some locations are more
likely to engage in armed conflicts than others in the presence of a similar
level of exposure to climatic changes. In particular, we focus our analysis on
the concept of vulnerability to both climate change and armed conflicts and,
accordingly, on the identification of a specific set of factors that enhance
vulnerability of some shares of the population at the local level. We employ
a Spatial Autoregressive Model to capture the spatial and context-specific
dimension of vulnerability factors in driving the climate-conflict nexus in
East Africa at a high-resolution geographical level (about 25 km). Results
from our analysis provide some interesting insights: first, we find that climate
change does not increase conflict risk per sé, but only in the presence of preexisting vulnerabilities. Second, in line with the literature on climate change
vulnerability, we find that socioeconomic factors play a key role in the
climate-conflict nexus. In particular, vulnerability is enhanced whenever
power is not distributed in such a way as to ensure an equitable distribution
of resources.