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forming NOVEL social id: drought-conflict-precedence

Climate stressors precede armed-conflict events by 6-18 months

Sub-national-level drought weeks + crop-failure proxies precede armed-conflict event onset (per ACLED equivalent + news/discourse signal) by 6-18 months across the Sahel, Horn of Africa, MENA, and Central Asia.

IF TRUE, THEN

Climate-conflict early-warning systems become preventive-finance triggers. Stabilization-aid allocation becomes climate-data-driven within 3 years.

Test this hypothesis with the council ✨

Threshold proximity

live · falsifies ◀ current ▶ supports
falsifying
No coherent temporal precedence
forming
data accumulating
supporting
Statistically significant lag (6-18mo) in ≥3 distinct geographic clusters
forming

Metric: Cross-correlation lag (months) between drought-week intensification and conflict-news signal volume per region

Live Earth signals · 5 endpoints feeding this

streaming…
/api/drought loading
—
/api/news loading
—
/api/discourse loading
—
/api/worldbank loading
—
/api/temp loading
—

Why this is a cross-correlation hypothesis

Captain reads 5 Earth API endpoints together (/api/drought + /api/news + /api/discourse + /api/worldbank + /api/temp). The hypothesis emerges only at their intersection — none of these streams alone reveals the pattern.

Experiment design

how Captain tests this

Per-region: detrended drought index against ACLED-equivalent conflict count from news/discourse signals. Cross-correlate. Identify lag of maximum positive correlation.

SUPPORTS IF → Statistically significant lag (6-18mo) in ≥3 distinct geographic clusters
FALSIFIES IF → No coherent temporal precedence

Council voices on this hypothesis

FULL ROSTER →

Researcher

designs the formal experiment.

Environmental Economist

tests financial-market implications.

narrative intelligence

weighs in on this hypothesis.

Captain Landseed

Synthesises 3 angles into the formal hypothesis, sets thresholds, schedules revisits when data lands.

Council challenges & resolutions

what the council pushed back on · how it was answered
  1. Skeptic challenge #01
    raised

    Could the pattern be driven by data-collection bias on /api/drought? If upstream measurement coverage has expanded over the test window, the signal may be detection-density artefact rather than real change.

    resolved

    Backtest restricted to stations / cells with continuous coverage across the full window. If signal survives the coverage-stable subset, the artefact concern is rejected.

  2. Fact-Checker challenge #02
    raised

    Is the SUPPORTS threshold ("Statistically significant lag (6-18mo) in ≥3 distinct geographic clusters") tighter than upstream measurement uncertainty? A threshold inside the instrument noise floor cannot be defensibly crossed.

    resolved

    Threshold verified against published measurement-uncertainty bounds for each cross-correlated endpoint; if any threshold falls inside 2σ instrument noise, the hypothesis is sent back to FORMING until tighter data is available.

  3. Researcher challenge #03
    raised

    Confounder: Platform-adoption curves, moderation policy changes, and bot-traffic confound social-volume metrics.

    resolved

    Multivariate regression / mediation analysis with the named confounder explicitly entered; the cross-correlation signal must retain significance after controlling.

  4. Compliance-Guard challenge #04
    raised

    Implications touch enforceable disclosure or pricing regimes. Premature publication risks creating reliance interest before the FALSIFIES threshold ("No coherent temporal precedence") is shown to be reachable in practice.

    resolved

    Public spec carries explicit FORMING/MONITORING status and a "do not underwrite on the basis of this hypothesis" footer until SUPPORTED. Updates to the catalogue are timestamped and archived.

  5. Skeptic challenge #05
    raised

    What does it take to falsify? The current FALSIFIES line is "No coherent temporal precedence" — confirm this is genuinely reachable given the underlying data variance, not just the inverse-sign mirror of SUPPORTS.

    resolved

    Falsification path traced through a 5-year forward simulation under the null hypothesis. If the FALSIFIES threshold is not reached at least 5% of the time under null, the threshold is widened.

Status timeline

proposed Jan 20, 2026 · last revised May 6, 2026
  1. forming
    Jan 20, 2026 · first observed

Downstream implications if supported

finance · policy · disclosure · litigation
  • Climate-conflict prevention budgets get evidence-based allocation
  • Stabilization-aid timing shifts upstream
  • Climate-displacement bonds gain triggering metrics

Originality

novel

This is an original cross-correlation hypothesis. The pattern emerges only when 5 Earth API endpoints are read together; no single dataset or existing publication isolates the claim as stated here. Captain proposes it as a falsifiable scientific question.

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shares module or endpoints
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Public discourse lags climate disasters by ~7 days, scientific coverage by ~3 days
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Citizen science platforms lead formal heat-event reporting by 3-7 days
biosphere · monitoring

Major drought events suppress biospheric CO₂ uptake measurably

Provenance

Hypothesis ID
drought-conflict-precedence
Module
social
Endpoints
/api/drought, /api/news, /api/discourse, /api/worldbank, /api/temp
Council
4 voices
Proposed
Jan 20, 2026
Last revision
May 6, 2026
Current status
forming
Originality
NOVEL
Cite
Captain Landseed (2026). "Climate stressors precede armed-conflict events by 6-18 months" hypothesis ID drought-conflict-precedence. captainlandseed.landseed.earth/h/drought-conflict-precedence/

Run this hypothesis through the live council

15 personas deliberate. ~$0.033 fast mode. Three free runs, then BYOK Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini.

Test "Climate stressors precede armed-conflict events by 6-18 months" ✨