Scholars, writers, and policymakers from Shakespeare to Obama have noted linkages between the physical environment and human behavior toward one another. Professor Burke synthesizes a growing cottage industry of research that seeks to quantitatively measure how changes in climate can affect various types of human conflict. He re-analyzes dozens of individual studies using a common empirical framework and uses Bayesian techniques to study whether – and why – effect sizes differ across settings. Professor Burke finds robust linkages between increasing temperature and multiple types of human violence, including individual level violence (e.g. homicide), organized group violence (e.g. civil war), and self-harm. He then draws implications for a world that continues to warm.
Marshall Burke is associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science and center fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, and research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on measuring and understanding economic livelihoods across the developing world. His work regularly appears in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Lancet. He holds a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from UC Berkeley, and a BA in international relations from Stanford. He is also co-founder of AtlasAI, a start-up using satellites and machine learning to measure livelihoods.