Bryan Fok

In recent decades, humans have transformed the Earth so much that we no longer live in the geologic epoch called the Holocene. Instead, many scientists believe that the Earth has entered a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene, which is marked by a new stratigraphic layer in the Earth’s crust characterized by human creations, such as plastics, pollution, and radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons. Besides the changes to the geologic structure of the Earth, the conditions of the...

Studies have shown that environmental stresses are increasingly correlated with conflicts. Miguel et al. (2004) posit that economic growth is strongly negatively correlated with civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, with rainfall being an exogenic instrumental variable for economic growth. Another study by Ash and Obradovich (2020) found that climate-induced internal migration led to increased political instability in Syria, which exploded into the Syrian Civil War in 2011. Environmental...