Unequal Adaptation: The Compounding Effect of Conflict on Climate Inequality

The ability to adapt to climate change is unequally distributed across the globe. While existing research shows how climate hazards disproportionately affect low-income countries, we know less about the social and political drivers that create inequalities in adaptive capacity itself. This paper investigates the micro-foundations of one persistent driver of this inequality: armed conflict. While armed conflict is known to increase the vulnerability to climate hazards, we ask whether and how exposure to conflict also impedes households’ adaptation behavior. Our core argument is that exposure to armed conflict exacerbates climate-related inequality by impeding households’ ability to adapt, an effect that is most severe for poor households. We theorize that conflict operates through several causal channels: it destroys productive assets, disrupts local markets, and shortens planning horizons. We also hypothesize that conflict erodes the social cohesion necessary for many adaptive strategies. Crucially, this widens the gap between rich and poor households, as poorer households have fewer resources to buffer these shocks. This study empirically investigates how conflict deepens adaptation inequality and seeks to disentangle the underlying mechanisms. We explore the inequality implications of conflict for climate adaptation using an original household survey in northern Ghana (n=1,000), linking geocoded responses to high-resolution conflict event and meteorological data. The region is not only beset by persistent violence but is also exposed to recurrent droughts. Importantly, our survey captures a range of specific adaptation strategies, allowing us to examine how conflict influences not only the propensity to adapt but also the type of adaptation undertaken. We model different adaptation strategies as a function of conflict exposure, household wealth, and village-level social trust using multilevel regression models. This allows us to specifically examine how conflict exacerbates within-village wealth disparities in adaptation. Furthermore, we employ mediation analysis to explore the extent to which the effect of conflict on adaptation is channeled through different mechanisms. Our findings reveal a troubling pattern of compounded inequality: the impact of conflict exposure on climate adaptation is significantly more pronounced for poorer households. The populations already most vulnerable to climate hazards are also the ones least able to adapt. Our mediation analysis also confirms that a significant part of this harm is channeled through the erosion of social trust. Understanding the causal pathways of how conflict contributes to climate inequality is critical for designing policies and interventions that can build equitable and lasting climate resilience.