Dataset and Screening code for Reviewing Water Conflicts in a Changing Climate

A scoping review was performed to quantify concepts covered in the scientific literature relating to water conflict in a changing climate. The uploaded files consists of:

A list of all studies found using the search terms ("Included studies and categories")

All meta categories and concept categories, with all search strings used, ("Included studies and categories") and 

The MATLAB code used to screen and remove irrelevant studies after the queries. ("Screening_review")

An example Excel sheet on how to structure papers for screening using the MATLAB code. ("Example_screening")

All searches were using Scopus and performed 9 Jan 2024. Search terms used were:

(“climate change” OR “global warming” OR “environmental change”) AND (conflict OR dispute) AND (water OR hydrology)

(conflict OR dispute) AND hydroclimat*

(“water conflict” OR “water dispute”) AND (precipitation OR temperature OR drought)

(conflict OR dispute) AND “climate change”

hydropolitic*

“water conflict” OR “water dispute”

The final publication selection for the scoping review was made based on four criteria, all of which needed to be fulfilled for each selected study:i) the study is considering water-related conflicts (conflicts directly or indirectly related to freshwater aspects, such as water scarcity or lack of access to water); ii) the study considers the water-related conflict(s) in a climate change context (directly or indirectly related to climate change, including direct impact of climate change adaptation measures); iii) the study addresses factors relating to a previous or ongoing act of conflict (violent or non-violent) and not just potential conflicts or conflict mitigation measures, for example for future water resource decline. Relevance based on these criteria was first evaluated by reading the abstracts and the full text was examined only when further clarification on the relevance of a study was needed.

For our analysis, we created categories that bring together several similar words around the same broader concepts. For example, the category ‘governance’ includes the words policy, politic\w*, polici\w*, democra\w*, govern\w*, supreme court, minist\w*, and federal (for all concept categories, see the uploaded file). The different categories were further grouped together into category groups: political, livelihoods and industry, climate change, conflict, cooperation, and scale.

Results will be found in the open-source article after publication and then the DOI and reference to that article will be added here.