How climate volatility influences human rights

Abstract

We explore how climate volatility influences human rights practices. We argue that climate volatility intensifies competition for material resources, increases citizens’ grievances against the state, and leads to more frequent repression as governments seek to respond to environmentally induced protests and local conflicts. We situate this argument in the existing literature’s emphasis on three mechanisms linking climate shocks and repression: resource shocks, mobilization shocks, and migration shocks. We assert that the climate volatility-human rights relationship is strongest in the context of civil conflict as rebel groups and governments place a higher priority on survival and material well-being rather than governance and public goods provision. Using a pooled time series dataset of 194 countries from 1946 to 2017, we estimate a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model. Our analyses show that for countries experiencing armed conflicts, increased precipitation volatility significantly reduces human rights protections for multiple years. Indicators for the three mechanisms also show indirect relationships to repression through the precipitation variable, consistent with our theory. We illustrate our findings with case vignettes from Benin and Mali. Our results demonstrate that climate volatility alters states’ strategies for addressing internal security threats.