Predicting Conflicts and Displacements in Fragile Contexts: A Multi-Dimensional Model

The rise of awareness about climate change and its possible consequences has increased the interest in the impact of meteorological stressors on the sustainability of complex socio-economic systems. Sustainability can have many facets, ranging from economic to political and societal issues. This work focuses on political and humanitarian crises in fragile contexts. Spe-cifically, it aims at assessing the impact of droughts on conflicts and dis-placements in developing countries. To reach our goal, we proceeded as fol-lows. We first provided a theoretical model framing the problem and pro-posing hypotheses on the mutual relationships among variables. Hypothe-ses are then tested by estimating the parameters of a multi-variate linear cor-relation model. Finally, we propose an operational implementation of the model to forecast crises by training a machine learning model. Empirical tests have provided consistent and encouraging results supporting the abil-ity of the model to predict conflicts and displacements. We studied the im-pact of droughts on both phenomena, highlighting their role as an exacerbat-ing factor rather than a triggering one. The value of our work lies in the con-ceptual framework we provided, which is flexible and reusable to account for other stressors and impacts. Moreover, the system that we developed could be employed to perform crisis management in a variety of real-world applications.