Climate and Criminal Life Paths: Evidence from El Salvador

• In Event: Climate, Conflict and Crime: New Research on the Climate-Conflict Nexus

Abstract

Climatic stressors like high temperature and drought have been shown to influence human responses ranging from reduced cognitive capacity and aggression, to suicide, homicide and even intergroup violent conflict (Obradovich, Tingley and Rahwan, 2018, Obradovich et al., 2018, Burke et al., 2018, Baysan 2019, von Uexkull et al., 2016). When scholars seek to identify the causal mechanisms explaining the links between climate stress and violence, one of the most commonly considered is the “opportunity cost” mechanism. Drawing on the work of Becker (1968), this mechanism suggests that when an individual is facing stressful economic circumstances they may leave more licit work, for example in agriculture, for more violent criminal or armed group activity. Most often, this has been tested using a geographic region as a unit of analysis, for example, showing that when a subnational administrative area faces higher temperatures or drought stress, the viability of economic activity in the area is reduced (e.g. crop yields drop), and the level of violence rises. This approach may offer a reasonable proxy that is suggestive of the opportunity cost notion, but it does not actually examine effects at the implied unit of analysis: the individual. If this mechanism in fact explains much of the influence of climate stress on conflict, then it should be the case that we find evidence that individuals who have faced or are facing climate stress disproportionately engage in criminal or otherwise violent work.

In this study we take advantage of detailed, comprehensive, individual-level data on entry into prison in El Salvador. These data include date of entry into prison, location of birth and location of criminal activity (that led to capture and imprisonment). We seek to understand: are individuals who experienced more climate stress during particular periods in their lives more likely to pursue a criminal life path (as proxied by entry into prison). Various points in one’s life course could matter for increasing the likelihood that climatic stress leads to criminal activity. Experiencing stress just before potential imprisonment could induce a short-term response to that stress, pivoting towards more violent livelihoods. Stress upon entering the workforce could make legal income generating activities like farming or other outdoor (climate-exposed) labor less viable as compared to criminal work. Dating further back, stress during childhood or even stress prior to birth could influence a child’s birth outcomes, nutrition, development or security in other ways that make criminal activity later in life more likely.

We take advantage of long time series and geographically precise climate data to construct various temperature and agricultural-stress indices for each municipality from which a potential member of the prison population might be drawn. Using these, we construct climate stress indices for each life period, at the individual level. We then compare the climatic experience during the life course for individuals who entered prison with the climatic experiences of the general population. We explore whether we find evidence of heightened climate stress at various life stages: pre-birth, early childhood, early years in the workforce and the years just prior to imprisonment. We compare the life courses of imprisoned individuals to hypothetical individuals in the general population. Results, to be determined, will shed light on the potentially hazardous implications of climate change for life paths and present new evidence about the role of the “opportunity cost” mechanism in explaining links between climate stress and violence.

Authors

• Garrett Michael Albistegui Adler, Princeton University

• Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, University of California, Berkeley