Showing papers by "Marc A. Levy published in 2005"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the correlates of underweight status among children using two complementary methods in a framework that allows incorporating both environmental and household-level factors, using individual children as the units of analysis in 19 African countries, and subnational survey strata in 43 African, Asian and Latin American countries.
76 citations
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relationship between water availability and internal war outbreak and found that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood of conflict outbreak is significantly elevated in the subsequent year.
Abstract: We investigated the relationship between water availability and internal war outbreak. This work constitutes the first test of climate-security connections utilizing global subnational time series data. We created harmonized spatial time series databases on a subnational global grid of internal war, renewable freshwater surface water resources (in the form of runoff), rainfall deviations and population for the period 1980-2002. We utilize national-level data on infant mortality, political institutions, and trade openness as controls. We find that at the global scale there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal war. When rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood of conflict outbreak is significantly elevated in the subsequent year. We do not find a similar effect for the mean annual runoff at the global scale, but find some evidence at the continental scale. We also find no significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the onset of low-intensity internal wars. The capacity to geographically reference social science and biogeophysical data sets will create new opportunities for hypothesis testing with respect to the sources of internal conflict in the fast of climate change invariability
52 citations