Weather Station Coverage Fails in Conflict Zones: Implications for Climate Research

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.