Climate, Conflict, and Fire: Examining Correlations and Fire Indicators in Manisa and Diyarbakir, Turkey

Sammanfattning: Climate issues are currently of attention in various contexts as changing climate factors affect us in many ways. One of these effects is the influence on the probability and frequency of fires, although other factors, especially anthropogenic ones, also play a role. In the Diyarbakir region, a Kurdish-Turkish province affected by the PKK's conflict (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan - Kurdistan Workers' Party) with Turkey, an exceptionally high number of vegetation fires and armed conflicts occurred in the year of the failure of the peace process in 2015. Diyarbakir is here compared with the non-conflict region of Manisa, which are climatically comparable and mainly characterised by agricultural land. Climatic and conflict related influencing factors to the appearance of vegetation fires are examined and compared for these two regions in this Bachelor thesis. This study finds that Diyarbakir has more recorded vegetation fires in almost all years considered from 2001-2021, despite climate conditions similar to Manisa. Further, the spatial proximity of vegetation fires and armed conflicts was studied in Diyarbakir in 2015 using the Bivariate Local Moran’s I analysis (BiLISA). It reveals a correlation between the number of armed conflicts and vegetation fires from June to September. Significant correlations are found in cities and agricultural land. By performing the Spearman’s Rank Correlation test between climatic variables, the occurrence of armed conflict and the number of vegetation fires to better understand how well they correlate, a relationship is found between the climatic variable and fire in both provinces. However, only one correlation between armed conflicts and vegetation fires was found in December Diyarbakir 2015. The results of the quantitative analysis show that the relationship is very localised. Thus, considering the complexity of fire occurrence and connections to climatic, topographical and anthropogenic factors, further investigation of the occurrence of vegetation fires should also take into account political and socio-economic factors and be assessed at different local scales and various regions.