Climate robustly linked to African civil war

Abstract

We previously documented a link between climate variation and historical civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa (1). Buhaug (2) disputes this link, generating a series of animated news reports. The relationship between climate and conflict is an important topic that deserves careful scientific scrutiny, but we believe Buhaug's approach is undermined by basic econometric mistakes, leading to what is currently an unhelpful debate. We briefly describe two main shortcomings in his analysis here, with a full analysis available as a working paper (3). First, Buhaug argues that our results are not robust to dropping country fixed effects (table 1 in ref. 2). Country … 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: marshall.burke{at}berkeley.edu.