A general taxonomy for environmental contrasts in resource uses

The main objective of the present study is to provide a taxonomy of all possible rela- tionships among environmental hazards, environmental resources, environmental stresses, socio-economic characteristics and contrasts in resource uses. We aim to provide a clas- sication tool able to disentangle environmental contrasts according to their key-features related to environment, population and their interactions. It identies the possible types of con icts observed in the real world through their specic causes, evolution and out- comes. This research requires the identication of all possible forms of contrasts, concern- ing the relationship between the environment and the use of natural resources, such as land, rivers, sea. Therefore, the analysis here has the ambition to classify real-world re- source uses related contrasts into universal typologies. Quantitative methods based on multivariate statistics were applied with the aim of identifying a universal taxonomy of con icts. The steps followed in the proposed methodology are the selection of the appro- priate database of international contrasts related to resource uses and the classication of those contrasts by means of clustering technique (universal classication). For each database of world con icts, both advantages and inconveniences are examined. The dataset chosen is ICOW (Issue Correlates of War) which is the most suitable to represent all types of contrasts relevant for the purposes of this study. The ICOW database contains 244 world con icts, observed between the years 1816-2001.