Modeling Climate-Induced Food Insecurity, Migration, and Conflict in West Africa: Evidence from New Machine-Coded Environmental Event Data
Our proposal focuses on how food insecure West African communities adapt to climate change. We will generate original data on how climate stressors, including food insecurity, shape a broad range of individual and group adaptation behaviors, such as household migration or inter-group violence, which often precede wider societal disruptions. We will combine a series of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) applied to a unique corpus of 40 million articles published by more than 60 high-quality local news outlets based across 10 countries from 2012-2024. This will allow us to create a monthly, sub-national dataset on 10 distinct types of environmental, food, and hunger-related events never before measured at such scale. We will combine this data with high-resolution climate data, which will allow us to unravel social and political responses to the complex interaction between major environmental events and changing climate conditions. This work builds on Kleinman-funded research on Central America.
This grant is made possible by the Goldsmith Research Fund, a gift from Carl H. Goldsmith (W ‘88).
Erik Wibbels
Penn Compact Professor, Political ScienceErik Wibbels is a Penn Compact Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the co-director of PDRI/DevLab@Penn.
