Does The Environment Matter? Climate Change, Transboundary Effects, Economic Growth and Conflicts

The relationship between climate change and violent conflict has been the focus of rigorous scholarly and policy discourse in recent decades. The adverse economic conditions can be a significant conduit that connects the two phenomena. We aim to explore the impact of economic growth and food production indices on conflict. Specifically, the objective is to link the causal path of climatic conditions to economic and food production outcomes and armed conflict. We apply Probit and Instrumental Variable (IV) Probit regressions using a panel of 16 countries in the MENA region, including Iraq and Turkey. We employ weather conditions as instruments for the economic and food production indices. Moreover, we use country dyadic data to examine the impact of shared river basins on conflict. For the incidence of armed conflict, we use the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset in 1960-2022, and for the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), food production indices and climatic conditions, we use data from the World Development Indicators. The findings show that international aid, GDP, and food production indices negatively affect the incidence of conflict, while natural resource rents increase the likelihood of conflict. Regarding the river-shared basins, we find that when the rivers cross the borders, and if two or more countries share a river basin, then the incidence of conflict increases. Future research should further explore the interaction between climatic change and conflict and whether is conditioned by economic, social, political, and demographic factors to understand how they contribute to conflict.