ABSTRACT
The linkage between environmental change and domestic conflict focus on the relationship between conflict and degradation and depletion of renewable resources. During the decades only a few studies, such as one by Nazli Choucri and Robert North, investigated environmental change as a cause of conflict. The reasoning behind using two different dependent variables is to see whether there are any differences in how our independent variables affect civil war compared with domestic armed conflicts. The Task Force explains the diverging results in the two works by differences in how the dependent variables are operationalized and how the independent variables are used. Environmental degradation, or supply-induced scarcity, is measured by three different variables: annual change in forest cover; land degradation; and freshwater availability per capita. Homer Dixon's demand-induced scarcity is operationalized as population density, with data from the Demographic Yearbook. Homer-Dixon's concept of structural scarcity as income inequality.
