Complexity, Climate Change, and Conflict
Published: July 25, 2009
ACDIS faculty affiliate Jürgen Scheffran is quoted in the 24 July 2009 issue of Science magazine, discussing his research on complex systems and modeling the Darfur conflict.
Article excerpt:
Even more ambitiously, Jürgen Scheffran, a political scientist at the
University of Hamburg in Germany, hopes to model the impact of climate
change on regional conflicts. He and his colleagues are modeling the
ethnic conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, where the southward
expansion of the desert has driven Arab herders onto the land of sub-
Saharan farmers. “This may be one of the first cases where climate
change has already affected a conflict,” he says.
Over the next 5 years, Scheffran and colleagues aim to reproduce the
conflict in a detailed agent-based computer model. That daunting task
requires quantifying the interactions between numerous actors, including
farmers, herders, rebels fighting on behalf of the farmers, the
Janjaweed militiamen who oppose them, the Sudanese government, aid
organizations, and others. “Hopefully, we would get better strategies
for limiting the violence,” Scheffran says."