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Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium

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  • Published: 30 September 2009
  • volume 99, pages 65–79 (2010)
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Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium
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  • Richard S. J. Tol1,2,3 &
  • Sebastian Wagner4 

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Abstract

We investigate the relationship between a thousand-year history of violent conflict in Europe and various reconstructions of temperature and precipitation. We find that conflict was more intense during colder period, just like Zhang et al. (Clim Change 76:459–477, 2006) found for China. This relationship weakens in the industrialized era, and is not robust to the details of the climate reconstruction or to the sample period. As the correlation is negative and weakening, it appears that global warming would not lead to an increase in violent conflict in temperature climates.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland

    Richard S. J. Tol

  2. Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Richard S. J. Tol

  3. Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Richard S. J. Tol

  4. Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht, Germany

    Sebastian Wagner

Authors
  1. Richard S. J. Tol
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  2. Sebastian Wagner
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Correspondence to Richard S. J. Tol.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Tol, R.S.J., Wagner, S. Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium. Climatic Change 99, 65–79 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9659-2

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  • Received: 24 January 2008

  • Accepted: 26 July 2009

  • Published: 30 September 2009

  • Issue Date: March 2010

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9659-2

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Keywords

  • Temperature Reconstruction
  • Climate Model Simulation
  • Violent Conflict
  • Northern Hemisphere Temperature
  • Serial Autocorrelation

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