The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
November 24, 2009

Study: Climate Change Will Result In More Civil Wars in Africa
--------------------------------------------------------------



In climate change news, a team of researchers are predicting that rising
temperatures in Africa will lead to more civil wars over the next 20
years. The researcher’s study is said to provide the first quantitative
evidence linking climate change and the risk of civil conflict.

David Lobell, assistant professor at the Woods Institute at Stanford:
“What we found was, surprisingly, is that there is not only a clear
effect but a very strong effect in the incidents of civil war and the
state of the climate system. Looking forward from that we can say for a
degree increase, which is something we expect over the next few decades,
you could expect a roughly 50 percent increase in the occurrence of
civil war in Africa. Sort of a rough calculation is that about 400,000
people, additional, would die because of the climate change increase in
civil war conflict.”

The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.



.