The impact of agricultural-droughts on conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa using meteorological and multispectral remote sensing indices

Diplôme Master The impact of agricultural-droughts on conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa using meteorological and multispectral remote sensing indices eng 2023-02-03 author Terristi Myriam 923753 director Lucchetti Jérémy 788145 director Kasparian Jérôme 0000-0003-2398-3882 662563 director Goyette Stéphane 0000-0001-5199-5974 647994 64 Sub-Saharan Africa is in the front line of mitigating and adapting from the adverse of global warming. Climate change affects dramatically the terrestrial water cycle while the region depends in majority on rain-fed agriculture. Consequently, abiotic stress such as, drought events threaten food production and could lead to socio-economics instabilities notably, conflicts occurrence. As such, this study introduce a novel approach on modeling drought-induced conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. We investigate an underlying agro-mechanism by comparing the performance of three climate-based drought indices: the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and two satellite-based vegetation health indices, the Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), Temperature Condition Index (TCI). We rely on monthly data at the cell level (0.5° x 0.5°) over 1997-2010 and build an agricultural-drought measure index of the cell’s main crops during their growing season and non-growing season to evaluate its impact on the incidence of different forms of conflicts namely, Battles and Social Unrest. We further investigate the relationship through the lens of biophysical factors i.e., the agro- ecological zones (AEZs) and their predicted spatial variability in a context of climate change, as well as agro-economic factors i.e., the farming systems. The study reveals that both remote sensing indices performed better than the SPEI in estimating the likelihood of any type of conflict occurrence in Sub-Saharan Africa with a larger influence during the growing season. We further observe that the effect of agricultural-drought shocks is substantially larger in cells representing areas of projected surface decrease and areas of farming vulnerabilities. Our findings highlight the importance of considering land-climate interactions in understanding the agricultural mechanism of the drought-induced conflict relationship across different agro-ecological and economic systems. Thence, more attention should be paid to these specific areas for food security analysis. Conflit Agriculture Afrique Sécheresse Dewey 330 Dewey 500.2 Dewey 333.7-333.9 Master universitaire en sciences de l'environnement 18 Institut des sciences de l'environnement 0DB 35 Groupe de physique appliquée 135 114 Institute of Economics and Econometrics S2 false 803 Groupe Kasparian 943 ISE Climat 938 ISE Pôle Sciences 941 ISE Pôle Informatique environnementale c26c41b1-bf75-40a5-b048-1a4de5a8d3a0 Master thesis Public file.pdf 11036815 application/pdf CC BY-NC-1.0 openAccess Centres et instituts / Institut des sciences de l'environnement Faculté des sciences / Section de physique / Groupe de physique appliquée Faculté d'économie et de management / Institute of Economics and Econometrics

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The impact of agricultural-droughts on conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa using meteorological and multispectral remote sensing indices				2023	645	133

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Terristi, Myriam