BackWeather that makes you kill
Lower rainfall and higher temperatures have a direct hand in aggravating crime
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We all love the smell of wet earth after the first rains, but has it ever stopped people from committing a crime? Evidence from recent scientific studies seems to suggest so.
Changes in weather patterns—be it extended hot summers or scanty rainfall—increase conflicts, concludes a study of 55 scholarly works on this topic. Indeed, in the face of rapid global warming, the US defence establishment, the Pentagon, has warned against the possibility of heightened conflict and terrorism caused by climate change.
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The link between climate change and crime is complex. Climate change impacts criminal behaviour through two channels—psychological and economic. Several studies have documented a direct link between weather changes and aggressive behaviour without any changes to income. That particularly seems true for temperature which impacts crime more through the psychological channel.
Alternatively, large climatic events exacerbate crime and conflict rate through the economic channel by causing scarcity of resources. In agrarian economies, climate change acts more significantly through the income channel by altering agricultural output. This is particularly well documented by a recent India-centric study by Lakshmi Iyer and Petia Topolova of Harvard Business School.
The study analyses one decade-long (1988-1997), district-wise crime and climate data, and concludes that, mainly by impacting income, “one standard deviation increase in log rainfall is associated with 3.6% lower total crimes per capita. This decrease is primarily driven by decreases in violent interpersonal crimes (4.2% decline), property crimes (2.2% decline) and economic crimes (3.8% decline)."
Surprisingly, in contrast to many other cross-country studies, this one concludes that temperature has little impact on per capita income in India, and thus rules out any impact of temperature on crimes. It also negates the popular belief that two factors—dams and the government’s rural employment scheme—have weakened the link between rainfall and income, concluding that neither has had any significant impact on the rainfall-crime relationship. However, just like the overall impact of climate change itself is strongly debated, other studies dispute the conclusion that rural job guarantee scheme hasn’t removed the relationship between monsoon rain and conflict.
Despite these contradictions, there is near unanimity that climate change has a significant impact on criminal behaviour across the world. This, added to the fact that climate change is responsible for an ever growing count of people displaced from their homesteads within their countries, makes for a dangerous mix. Nations would do well to debate this topic during the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Paris next year.
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