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.