Climate change impacts political stability. This study shows that civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa reduces the number of weather stations.
Data & Methods
Using station-level data from Berkeley Earth, we demonstrate a negative correlation between conflict risk and weather station density across countries like Nigeria and Kenya.
Key Findings
- Countries with higher conflict risk have fewer temperature records.
- This leads to interpolation bias in climate datasets (Berkeley Earth).
- Combining multiple data sources nearly doubles estimates of how temperature affects conflict likelihood.
These results highlight the importance of accounting for data quality issues when studying short-term weather effects on political outcomes.
