Master
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English

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

ContributorsTerristi, Myriam
Number of pages64
Master program titleMaster universitaire en sciences de l'environnement
Defense date2023-02-03
Abstract

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.

Keywords
  • Conflit
  • Agriculture
  • Afrique
  • Sécheresse
Citation (ISO format)
TERRISTI, Myriam. The impact of agricultural-droughts on conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa using meteorological and multispectral remote sensing indices. Master, 2023.
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Master thesis
Identifiers
  • PID : unige:166876
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Technical informations

Creation02/14/2023 1:55:00 PM
First validation02/14/2023 1:55:00 PM
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Status update03/16/2023 10:38:19 AM
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