Africa’s Sahel region includes parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Sudan and Eritrea. A conflict which began in Mali in 2012 has now spilled over into neighboring countries, splintered into many factions and is deeply entrenched in a regional crisis that has displaced more than 3.5 million across the region, and 24 million people are humanitarian aid dependent.
In this context, severe floods have affected 760,000 people in parts of West and Central Africa since heavy rainfall began in August, bursting the river banks in Niger impacting people across Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Niger, Mali, Nigeria, Congo Republic and Senegal among the worst hit.
UNHCR reports six sites hosting internally displaced people have been hit by the floods, and Burkina Faso, which has been impacted by both conflict and natural disasters this year, hosts more than one million IDPs, half of the Sahel’s internally displaced.
Numbers are shifting, but flooding across landlocked Niger alone has so far impacted 330,000 people, while in neighboring Chad OCHA’s latest estimates suggest 388,000 are affected, warning that potential food shortages are possible due to flooded land.
Floods are common during the rainy season but reporting has suggested new harsh realities that accompany the usual flooding when climate change, land degradation and poor urban planning meet rapid urbanization in cities experiencing extreme rainfall.
Communities who have withstood years of violence, instability, food shortages and mass displacement must now also face natural disasters.
All this is happening in the shadow of conflict, compounding the humanitarian crisis borne of war, but some say climate change as well.
But is it?
A few months ago I spoke with Dr. Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, Professor of Economics and Public Policies at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal and Director of the West Africa regional graduate program in climate change economics, covering 11 countries, about the role of climate change on migration in the Sahel.
I had met Dr. Mbaye or Aly at a climate change panel at Columbia University in January, pre-pandemic, and we got to talking about the similarities in our work - he studying climate change impacts on conflict and migration in West Africa and my recent report examining climate change impacts on forced migration in the Lake Chad basin.
I’d hoped to conduct another trip to the Sahel shortly after but when that wasn’t possible, we spoke by Zoom. Aly told me more about his project with a group of African universities called the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use or WASCAL. A German-funded initiative established in 2010 to increase the capacity to document the effects of climate change in Africa and identify adaptation strategies as solutions.
Aly told me that in the past, African perspectives were biased towards mitigation, perhaps even clouded by the fact that Africa is not a big carbon dioxide emitter and thus were not very concerned about climate change initially.
He said, initially, debate was focused on mitigation but through the WASCAL project, a dawning followed that adaptation was missing and what was actually needed.
He said in Africa, “we feel climate change. Our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is tiny but most temperature rises and rainfall change effects have happened in Africa. Africa is at least one of the regions feeling the impacts the most.”
I asked Aly where climate change had played a role in West Africa?
Right away he said, “almost everywhere.” He reminded me that the economy is based on natural resources, so environmental changes meant economic changes.
He added, it was becoming very difficult to “disentangle development challenges from climate change challenges.”
He said climate change impacts were clearly evident in many industries such as agriculture and livestock to fishing and mining. The manufacturing sector is backed against these natural resource sectors. In urban areas, you see its impacts on tourism.
Climate change is affecting all sources of livelihood and in essence, people’s livelihoods are under threat.
“He said in Africa, “we feel climate change. Our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is tiny but most temperature rises and rainfall change effects have happened in Africa. Africa is at least one of the regions feeling the impacts the most.””
Climate and Security
This past June, foreign ministers met at the Berlin Climate and Security Conference to discuss climate change impacts, including food and water scarcity, increasingly becoming drivers of global conflict.
Ministers pointed to the Sahel as example of worsening drought that has driven pastoral-farmer conflicts and helped fuel the current insurgency.
This same point has been echoed by the head of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), describing it as “increasingly a major security threat in the region.”
France’s minister for Europe and foreign affairs says addressing these root causes could mean asking the UN Security Council for reporting on climate change impacts or the creation of an early warning mechanism for climate security risks.
Some countries, like Kenya, which will take up a seat on the Security Council in 2021, feel the Security Council should take action on emerging climate-security threats, even utilizing early warning systems that can pinpoint conflict risks, currently utilized in Mali where water scarcity is contributing to violence between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders.
The UN Security Council has increasingly examined climate-security threats within its mandate, including in the Sahel.
In 2016 and just this past July, Indigenous rights and climate activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Coordinator of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad briefed the Security Council on the situation in the Lake Chad basin.
On 9 July, Ms. Ibrahim called climate change in the Sahel a “nightmare” for millions, that whether floods or drought, causes communal conflict over access to land or water.
Ms. Ibrahim shared how Lake Chad has shrunk 90 percent in the past 50+ years, causing conflict over water and resources and forced migration.
“They are not going there to be rich,” she said. “They are going there for their dignity.” The women left behind, who raise their children alone, are at risk of being enslaved by Boko Haram. “We do not have a supermarket where we can go buy food,” she insisted. There is only what nature provides from the rainfall.
In a May 2016 briefing to the Security Council she linked the socioeconomic consequences of climate change to stability and security where desertification impacts on agriculture and herding had exacerbated poverty and stirred conflict over resources. Disruptions in livelihood had also helped Boko Haram recruit fighters.
We found exactly the same in our trip to the Lake Chad basin in 2017, documented in this report and just referenced in September by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons report on the slow-onset adverse effects of climate change.
Reflective of some Council members frequently stressing the importance of addressing structural causes of instability in the region, this February when UNOWAS’ mandate was renewed, it included the addition of a reference to climate change, calling on the Office to consider the adverse implications of climate change, energy poverty, ecological changes and natural disasters, among other factors.”
I asked Aly if climate change played a role in the Sahelian conflict?
Aly says it’s very tricky to pinpoint the exact role climate change plays in terms of research because most of the available tools do not address the challenges, let alone permit a conclusive answer.
He says you can observe climate change impacts but observational data will not allow you to “disentangle the very complex nexus between climate change, institutions and the like.”
He says climate change is triggering conflict in the Sahel and climate change is amplifying conflict in the Sahel.
Likewise, climate change has the same effect on migration but there are many other factors like institutional failures, development and the conflict, which have to be taken into account if you want to generate a proper understanding of what is happening in countries.
The challenge, he says, is modeling tools do not allow social scientists to disentangle and address the complexity of this nexus.
Climate Solutions in the Sahel
I asked him what needs to happen to improve situations in West Africa and the crisis in the Sahel specifically and to mitigate climate change impacts in the region?
In a word: Adaptation.
He said droughts are frequent, as is flooding, increases in temperatures are documented, and slow onsets of climate change are seen. As such, adaptation is the right response.
In the aforementioned July 9 Security Council briefing, Ms. Ibrahim also stressed the need for access to finance and adaptation projects, calling for a “green new deal” for the Sahel, which would promote its ecology and its nature-based solutions.
“We have the solutions,” she said. “But they will not work if there is no support from you – and if climate change is not considered a major driver of conflict.”
As for Aly, he says adaption must be in conjunction with ‘big pillars’ that must simultaneously be addressed.
Adaption is costly, he says, and goes beyond what is available in any one African nation’s budget. It’s also underfunded, he says, since most financing goes to mitigation.
He adds, along with increased funding for adaptation, these finance flows need to be separate from development assistance, which is bureaucratic and slow.
Side-by-side with adaptation, there’s an urgent need to improve governance and state presence in many Sahelian locations. Aly says many areas are not incorporated, have no governance whatsoever, which means someone else will fill that vacuum, which is not only a security threat but an impediment to any sustainable development.
“Climate change is triggering conflict in the Sahel and climate change is amplifying conflict in the Sahel.
Likewise, climate change has the same effect on migration but there are many other factors like institutional failures, development and the conflict, which have to be taken into account if you want to generate a proper understanding of what is happening in countries.
The challenge, he says, is modeling tools do not allow social scientists to disentangle and address the complexity of this nexus. ”
He says institutions are failing and this is fueling both conflict and migration. Since the drivers are intertwined, the policy responses can’t be singular - instead you have to design policy packages, including financing, innovation, institutional improvements and military actions.
Up to now, global discourse has been biased towards mitigation - reducing country emissions levels - and Africa doesn’t have much voice in the international debate on climate change, but that’s changing now, he says.
Projects like WASCAL generate information and data, and Africans are starting to be more vocal about the effects of climate change on the continent, and in turn, about the need for adaptation and funding for adaptation, so that Africans can find ways to keep life running despite the effects of climate change.
Climate adaptation estimates in this region are $200-300 billion, a figure Aly says, Sahelian countries can't afford, but aren’t only the scope of Sahelian countries.
“We need richer countries and Sahelian countries to mobilize funding to support adaptation, and African governments playing their part to improve governance and build up institutions.”
The subsequent ICRC report “When Rain Turns to Dust” in July 2020 supports Aly’s exact recommendation. In it, ICRC suggests a greater share of climate finance be spent on climate adaptation, and points to a gap in funding for climate action between stable and fragile countries. They also call out the necessary, but disproportionate funding for reducing carbon emissions, relative to adaptation funding for countries grappling with climate change impacts.
As we conclude our chat, he tells me, issues of conflict and migration in the Sahel should be regarded as a global issue, especially since most of the challenges need global policy coordination.
“And climate change is a global issue that needs global coordination to fix it, and conflict in the Sahel should be regarded as a global issue, because when you have insecurity in the Sahel, you have insecurity almost everywhere else in the world.”