First publication out in Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment: Societal drought vulnerability and the Syrian climate-conflict nexus are better explained by agriculture than meteorology Abstract: Droughts are often suspected to increase the risk of violent conflict through agricultural production shocks, and existing studies often explore these links through meteorological proxies. In Syria, an alleged agricultural…
A paper that I’ve been working on since 2014 is finally done. Some papers take longer than others to mature, especially when they integrate different disciplinary perspectives. This paper is about agriculture in the Duhok governorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, the area i focused on in my PhD thesis. So in a way, this is an…
In November 2015, me and a colleague (Michael Degerald, visit his blog here) asked the question: how is agriculture affected in the areas seized by the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Da’esh)? We couldn’t find much information to answer our question, so we decided to investigate it ourselves. At first we wanted to look at…
Scale is a concept that have different meanings to different people. A cartographer most likely thinks scale refers to the scale of a map, i.e. the distance that one unit on the map represents in the real world. But scale doesn’t always refer to distances. It can be hierarchical and this refer to different levels…
A few days ago, the third paper in my thesis were accepted and published in Ambio – A Journal of the Human Environment, after a few rounds of revisions. Paper background I had had the idea for this paper since 2013 when I read Choman Hardi’s book about Anfal and realized that the Anfal Campaign’s…
Last week was open access week and I did not even hear about it. It is an event that seeks to promote “Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.”. So I’m a few days late, but here we go! Until a few decades ago there was one option for researchers who wanted to…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 