Increased temperatures associated with climate change are likely to significantly increase the incidence of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa within the next two decades, according to a new study by US researchers.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, New York and Harvard universities, provides the first quantitative evidence linking climate change and the risk of civil conflict.

Marshall Burke, the study's lead author and a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, said the study found climate change could increase the risk of African civil war by more than 50% in 2030 relative to 1990.

The researchers combined historical data on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa with rainfall and temperature records across the continent. They found that between 1980 and 2002, civil wars were significantly more likely in warmer-than-average years, with a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature in a given year raising the incidence of conflict across the continent by nearly 50%.

They then used projections of future temperature and precipitation change to quantify future changes in the likelihood of African civil war. Based on climate projections from 20 global climate models, the researchers concluded that the incidence of African civil war could increase 55% by 2030, resulting in an additional 390,000 battle deaths if future wars were as deadly as recent ones.

David Lobell, study co-author and an assistant professor of environmental earth systems science at Stanford, said climate models suggested temperatures in African would increase by slightly more than 1 degree Celsius by 2030.

"Given the strong historical relationship between temperature rise and conflict, this expected future rise in temperature is enough to cause big increases in the likelihood of conflict."

To confirm their projection was not the result of large effects in just a few countries or due to over reliance on a particular climate model, the researchers recalculated future conflict projections using alternate data.

"No matter what we tried - different historical climate data, different climate model projections, different subsets of the conflict data - we still found the same basic result," said Lobell.

Burke said the findings provided strong impetus to ramp up investments in African adaptation to climate change through measures such as developing crop varieties less sensitive to extreme heat and promoting insurance plans to help protect farmers from adverse effects of the hotter climate.

"If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering," he said.

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