The nexus between climate change, conflicts and food security in Somalia: empirical evidence from time-varying Granger causality

Global food insecurity is projected to increase in distant years, which is challenging to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, viz. zero hunger in 2030. However, recent reports and studies suggest that climate variabilities and conflicts are the main hurdles developing and less developed nations face to overcome food insecurity and hunger. This undertaking assesses the effect of climate change and conflicts (external and internal conflicts) on food security in Somalia. To this end, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, and time-varying Granger causality are utilized with annual data spanning 1985–2016. The empirical results show that average temperature and internal conflicts significantly hamper food security whereas rainfall and external conflicts are statistically insignificant in the long run. Besides, the time-varying Granger causality reveals that annual rainfall and temperature uniformly cause food security in two episodes (i.e. 1990–1992 and 2011–2012). Notably, Somalia experienced severe droughts which later led to a famine in 1992 and 2011. Similarly, both internal and external conflicts Granger cause food security in two similar episodes (i.e. 1990–1991 and 2010–2015). Our study underscores the importance of de-escalating the prolonged conflicts in Somalia and the need for designing policies that improve water availability to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.