Resource Scarcity Caused by Environmental Changes: Driving Factor in Terrorism Attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria
Abstract
Climate change, resource scarcity, and terrorist attacks are ever-growing crises that disproportionately impact different states. They are crises that can impact the stability and resilience of humanity in the following decades if they are not addressed and mitigated. This study addresses the impact of resource scarcity caused by climate change that can then serve as a driving force in terrorist attacks in climate-sensitive and conflict-prone states. The objective of this mixed-methods study is to identify the correlation between climate changes that lead to resource scarcity such as rainfall and surface temperatures with terrorist attacks when taking into consideration other demographic, economic, and political stressors, in the states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria. This study will obtain time series data between 1989 and 2019 from the following sources: World Bank, Freedom House, UN Database, and the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The correlation between the independent variables of rainfall and surface temperatures and the number of total annual terrorist attacks per state will be evaluated and compared to the correlation that the control variables (stressors) will have on these documented terrorist attacks. Upon lagging all the variables observed and running a fixed-effects model on STATE to assess the relationship amongst variables, the results proved to be unsupported by the data. Such results were likely attributed to the overall sample size used and limitation of data. However, to further evaluate the trends that exist within the observed variables line charts were created. Such trends further indicated the need for future studies that integrate data from a larger sample size across a greater range of states.
Subject Area
Criminology|Climate Change|Environmental Studies
Recommended Citation
Bustamante, Amaris, "Resource Scarcity Caused by Environmental Changes: Driving Factor in Terrorism Attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria" (2024). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI31297783.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI31297783