Climate Change and Political Conflict – The Impact of Rising Sea Temperature on the Security of 123 Coastal Nations

• In Event: EXTREME Panel 2. Extremism in a changing landscape

Abstract

Sea surface temperature (SST) is a key indicator of climate change, yet its relationship with political violence remains underexplored. In this study, we analyze how SST deviations correlate with terrorism and political instability across 123 coastal nations over a 50-year period. Using NOAA’s ERSST V5 dataset, combined with geocoded conflict data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), we explore patterns at both national and regional levels using multi-level mixed effects negative binomial regression. Our findings indicate that three climate related independent variables (i.e. climate change, absolute climate change and global warming) are consistently linked to 12 political violence outcomes (i.e. incidences and fatalities of total, international and domestic attacks for both terrorism and civil conflict). Interactions models show that these associations are particularly strong in fail states, agriculturally dependent economies, countries with high precipitation and countries with weak institutions or limited adaptive capacity. These findings remain valid to a range of robustness checks and sensitivity analyses. Our study contributes to the growing literature on climate and security by offering new insights into the pathways connecting climate variability to political violence. We discuss how academics and policymakers can leverage these findings to better understand and mitigate the risks posed by climate change to global stability. This study concludes that SST must be treated not only as an environmental indicator but also as a strategic measure for assessing emerging security threats.

Authors

• Bo Jiang, University of Macau

• Gary LaFree, University of Maryland

• Madisen Placzkowski, University of Maryland