Speaker: Joel Ferguson, Assistant Professor, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, UW–Madison
This talk will cover whether changes in violent conflict and economic growth caused by warming could interact to degrade economic opportunities and trap African countries in poverty. Ferguson will provide evidence of an emerging high-conflict and low-growth “poverty trap” equilibrium in Africa and describe theoretically how such an equilibrium could result from warming. He combines historical data on temperature, growth, and conflict with projections from a large ensemble of global climate models to evaluate the risk that warming and subsequent conflict could push African economies into a regime of sustained negative economic growth.