Large weather and conflict effects on internal displacement in Somalia with little evidence of feedback onto conflict
Date
2023
Authors
Thalheimer, Lisa
Schwarz, Moritz P.
Pretis, Felix
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Global Environmental Change
Abstract
Extreme weather and conflict may drive forced displacement. However, their individual contribution to displacement is not fully understood due to challenges around isolating individual channels of causality. Here, we use novel disaggregated data on internal displacement in all of Somalia’s subregions from 2016 to 2018 broken down by reported reason of displacement and combine it with weather and conflict data. This allows us to isolate the effects of extreme weather and conflict on forced displacement, as well as the effects of displacement on conflict itself. We find large non-linear effects of weather on displacement where an increase in temperature anomalies from 1 °C to 2 °C (to approx. 1.5 standard deviations, SD) leads to a tenfold increase in displaced people, and a reduction in precipitation from 50 mm to 0 mm (approx. 1.5SD) leads to around a fourfold increase in displacement. We find significant effects of conflict events on displacement (which are masked when the data is aggregated) with a 1.5 standard deviation increase in conflict events increasing displacement 50-fold. We further show that displacement itself has little detectable effect on the occurrence of conflict events.
Description
The authors thank Friederike Otto, Myles Allen, Michael J. Puma, and Michael Oppenheimer for reviews on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also wish to thank colleagues at the University of Oxford, in particular Simon J. Abele and Jonas Kurle for discussions on the data and models, as well as the reviewers and editors for providing valuable contributions to this project. We thank the PRMN team for facilitating this research through their data collection in drought and conflict situations. The authors are grateful to the Nuffield College Buttery for improving the overall research outputs in this project.
Keywords
displacement, drought, conflict, vulnerability, Africa, climate change
Citation
Thalheimer, L., Schwarz, M. P., & Pretis, F. (2023). Large weather and conflict effects on internal displacement in Somalia with little evidence of feedback onto conflict. Global Environmental Change, 79, 102641. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102641