In Sudan – battling the twin forces of civil war and climate change, Guardian blogger John Vidal argues that deep-set tensions between hostile groups have flared into full conflicts in the country as a result of food shortages caused by climate change.
To investigate the effects of rainfall changes on food supply, we visualized changes in main crop yields over the past 20 years as the climate has become more unpredictable (click the image for the interactive version):
Food supply, while showing peaks and troughs, actually seems to show a trend towards increase in the past 20 years.
So, has conflict actually increased over these past 20 years? We compared arms imports to GDP to see if Sudan was spending any extra income on conflict:
(Although it’s difficult to tell in this screenshot, the interactive version shows sporadic spending, with a peak in arms imports in 2004)
To summarize the connection between climate change and conflict, we produced a map of precipitation change (1990s average compared to average from 1911-1951) and major conflict zones in Sudan:
Marker colour code: Red: -30 to -21% rainfall change; Yellow: -20 to -11; Blue: -10 to 0; Green: positive rainfall change.
It’s hard to draw solid conclusions from this. What we had originally envisioned was comparing desertification with conflict zones, but data on the encroaching desert was impossible to come by. While precipitation change seems like a worthy proxy for desertification, the climatic factors that contribute to a drying land are many and varied. The timing of precipitation, the severity and the associated temperature are all contributing factors.