Since the end of the Cold War, Ethiopia has borne the brunt of a trifecta of development challenges: humanitarian conflict, climate change, and poverty. This paper uses geospatial methods to examine which provinces in Ethiopia suffer most from climate change, poverty, and conflict simultaneously. This study develops and/or employs three measures, one for poverty, conflict, and climate change respectively: (1) the 2020 MPI, (2) the number of fatalities due to conflict per 100,000 people, and (3) a simplified Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), which uses annualized temperature and precipitation data to measure drought and flood risk. The techniques employed include map algebra to normalize historic annual temperature and precipitation data, resampling rasters, and spatial joins to generate Adm 1-level choropleth maps of Ethiopia on the three measures. The study finds that no one Adm 1 region of Ethiopia ranks high on all three indices. All Adm 1 regions indicate being at either drought or flood risk with simplified PDSI values between 0.4 and 0.7. The eastern Afar and Somali regions experience severe poverty and high drought and flood risk, scoring high on the 2020 MPI (>= 0.5) and simplified PDSI (0.3 - 0.5), while the western Benshangul-Gumaz region experiences severe conflict (1.6 conflict-driven fatalities per 100,000 people) and high drought/flood risk (simplified PDSI score of 0.65). These findings can be used to support policymakers and civil society in Ethiopia responsible for the geographic targeting of social programs (climate adaptation programs, humanitarian aid, cash transfers, etc) that could ameliorate the trifecta of challenges.
Rendered HTML version of this project can be found for free here on RPubs: A Triple Threat: Examining Poverty, Conflict and Climate Change in Ethiopia