Although substantive agreement exists on the role of climate variability and food scarcity in increasing violence, a limited number of studies have investigated how food resources affect violent conflict. This article explores the complex linkages between climate variability, agricultural production and conflict onset, by focusing on the spatial distribution of crop production in a cross-country setting. We hypothesize that spatial differences in crop production within countries are a relevant factor in shaping the impact of climate variability on conflict in agriculturally -dependent countries. To test this hypothesis, we rely on high-resolution global gridded data on the local yield of four main crops for the period 1982–2015 and aggregate the grid-cell information on crop production to compute an empirical indicator of the spatial concentration of agricultural production within countries. Our results show that the negative impacts of climate variability lead to an increase in the spatial concentration of agricultural production within countries. In turn, the combined effect of climate extremes and crop production concentration increases the predicted probability of conflict onset by up to 14% in agriculturally dependent countries.

尽管就气候变化和粮食短缺在加剧暴力中的作用达成了实质性共识，但数量有限的研究已经调查了粮食资源如何影响暴力冲突。本文通过关注跨国环境下作物生产的空间分布，探讨了气候变异性，农业生产与冲突发作之间的复杂联系。我们假设国家内部作物生产的空间差异是影响气候变异性对依赖农业的国家冲突产生影响的一个相关因素。为了检验这个假设，我们依赖于1982-2015年间四种主要农作物的本地单产的高分辨率全球网格数据，并汇总了农作物生产的网格单元信息，以计算国家内部农业生产空间集中度的经验指标。我们的结果表明，气候变化的负面影响导致国家内部农业生产的空间集中度增加。反过来，极端气候和农作物生产集中的综合影响使在依赖农业的国家中发生冲突的预计可能性增加了14％。