{"id":428,"date":"2011-08-25T23:04:51","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T04:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edwardrcarr.com\/opentheechochamber\/?p=428"},"modified":"2011-08-25T23:04:51","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T04:04:51","slug":"conflict-and-el-nino-how-did-this-get-through-peer-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edwardrcarr.com\/opentheechochamber2\/2011\/08\/25\/conflict-and-el-nino-how-did-this-get-through-peer-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Conflict and El Nino: How did this get through peer review?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I opened my email this morning to a message from a colleague that linked to a new study in Nature: “Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate.”<\/a>\u00a0(the actual article is paywalled).\u00a0 Well, that is assertive . . . especially because despite similar claims in the past, I have yet to see any study make such a definitive, general connection successfully. \u00a0Look, the problem here is simple: the connection between conflict and the environment is shaky, at best. For all of the attention that Thomas Homer-Dixon gets for his work, the simple fact is that for interstate conflict, there are more negative cases than positive case . . . that is, where a particular environmental stressor exists, conflict DOES NOT happen far more often than it does. \u00a0Intrastate conflict is much, much more complex, though there are some indications that the environment does play a triggering\/exacerbating role in conflict at this scale.
\nSadly, this article does not live up to its claims. \u00a0It is horrifically flawed, to the point that I cannot see how its conclusions actually tell us anything about the relationship between El Nino and conflict, let alone climate and conflict. \u00a0Even a cursory reading reveals myriad problems with the framing of the research design, the regression design, and the interpretation of the regression outputs (though, to be honest, the interpretation really didn’t matter, as whatever was coming out of the regressions was beyond salvation anyway) that lead me to question how it even got through peer review. \u00a0My quick take:
\nLet’s start with the experimental design:<\/p>\n

… We define annual conflict risk (ACR) in a collection of countries to be the probability that a randomly selected country in the set experiences conflict onset in a given year. Importantly, this ACR measure removes trends due to the growing number of countries.<\/p>\n

In an impossible but ideal experiment, we would observe two identical Earths, change the global climate of one and observe whether ACR in the two Earths diverged. In practice, we can approximate this experiment if the one Earth that we do observe randomly shifts back and forth between two different climate states. Such a quasi-experiment is ongoing and is characterized by rapid shifts in the global climate between La Ni\u00f1a and El Ni\u00f1o.<\/p>\n

This design makes sense only if you assume that the random back-and-forth shifting did not trigger adaptive livelihoods decisions that, over time, would have served to mitigate the impact of these state shifts (I am being generous here and assuming the authors do not think that changes in rainfall directly cause people to start attacking one another, though they never really make clear the mechanisms linking climate states and human behavior). \u00a0The only way to assume non-adaptive livelihoods is to know next to nothing about how people make livelihoods decisions. \u00a0Assuming that these livelihoods are somehow optimized for one state or the other such that a state change would create surprising new conditions that introduced new stresses is more or less to assume that the populations affected by these changes were somehow perpetually surprised by the state change (even though it happened fairly frequently). \u00a0After 14 years of studying rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, I find that absolutely impossible to believe. \u00a0Flipping back and forth between states does not give you two Earths, it gives you one Earth that presented certain known challenges to people’s livelihoods.<\/p>\n

To identify a relation between the global climate and ACR, we compare societies with themselves when they are exposed to different states of the global climate. Heuristically, a society observed during a La Ni\u00f1a is the \u2018control\u2019 for that same society observed during an El Ni\u00f1o \u2018treatment\u2019.<\/p>\n

No, it is not. \u00a0This is a false parsing of the world, and as a result they are regressing junk.
\nThis is not the only problem with the research design. Another huge problem with this study is its treatment of the impact of ENSO-related state changes on people. \u00a0These state changes in the climate do not have the same impact everywhere, even in strongly teleconnected places. \u00a0The ecology and broader environment of the tropics is hardly monolithic (though it is mostly treated this way), and a strong teleconnection can mean either drought or flooding . . . in other words, the el Nino teleconnection creates a variety of climatological phenomena that play out in a wide range of environments that are exploited by an even larger number of livelihoods strategies, creating myriad environmental and human impacts. \u00a0These impacts cannot be aggregated into a broad driver of conflict – basically, their entire regression (which, mind you, is framed around a junk “counterfactual”) is populated with massively over-aggregated data such that any causal signal is completely lost in the noise.
\nMost reasonable approaches to the environment-conflict connection now treat environmental stresses as an exacerbating factor, or even a trigger, for other underlying factors. \u00a0Such an approach seems loosely borne out in the Nature article. \u00a0The authors note that in the “teleconnected group, low-income countries are the most responsive to ENSO, whereas similarly low income countries in the weakly affected group do not respond significantly to ENSO.” \u00a0This certainly sounds like a broad stressor (state change in the climate) is influencing other, more directly pertinent drivers of conflict. \u00a0But then we get to their statement of limitations:<\/p>\n

Although we observe that the ACR of low-income countries is most strongly associated with ENSO, we cannot determine if (1) they respond strongly because they are low-income, (2) they are low income because they are sensitive to ENSO, or (3) they are sensitive to ENSO and low income for some third unobservable reason. Hypothesis (1) is supported by evidence that poor countries lack the resources to mitigate the effects of environmental changes. However, hypothesis (2) is plausible because ENSO existed before the invention of agriculture\u00a0and conflict induces economic underperformance.<\/p>\n

Even here, they have really oversimplified things: the way this is framed, either the environment causes the conflict (pretty much established by the literature that this is not the case), the environment causes economic problems that cause the conflict, or it is something else entirely. \u00a0Every other possible factor in the world is in that third category, and most current work on this subject concentrate on other drivers of conflict (only some of which are economic) and how they intersect with environmental stresses.
\nThis paper is a mess. \u00a0But it got into print and made waves in a lot of popular outlets (for example, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because it is reviving the long-dead corpse of environmental determinism…people really want the environment to in some way determine human behavior (we like simple explanations for complex events), even if that determination takes place via influences nuanced by local environmental variation, etc. \u00a0Environmental determinism fell apart in the face of empirical evidence in the 1930s. \u00a0But it makes for a good, simple narrative of explanation where we can just blame conflict on climate cycles that are beyond our control, and look past the things like colonialism that created the foundation for modern political economies of conflict. \u00a0This absolves the Global North of responsibility for these conflicts, and obscures the many ways in which these conflicts could be addressed productively.
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