Africa is characterised by widespread and deeply entrenched poverty, armed conflict, slow economic development until recently, and agricultural systems proven to failure during frequent and persistent drought. With its tremendous natural resources and remarkable social and ecological diversity, the continent reflects a close dependency of people on natural resources. This background report illustrates that it is this dependency that will present Africa with potentially severe adaptive problems in dealing with the twin effects of climate change and population growth in future years. More than ever, Africa and its partners need to work together to turn deforestation around, to save its green lungs, to manage its cities and to grow food for its hungry millions.
Recent research sheds new light on the relationships among climatic shocks, conflict, household and community resilience, and policy interventions that can break the vicious climate?conflict cycle. This brief reviews this research and outlines its implications for regional development strategies, with special attention to pastoralist populations, who appear to be increasingly vulnerable.
Why do larger countries have more armed conflict? This paper surveys three sets of hypotheses forwarded in the conflict literature regarding the relationship between the size and location of population groups: Hypotheses based on pure population mass, on distances, on population concentrations, and some residual state-level characteristics. The hypotheses are tested on a new dataset-ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset)-which disaggregates internal conflicts into individual events. The analysis covers 14 countries in Central Africa. The conflict event data are juxtaposed with geographically disaggregated data on populations, distance to capitals, borders, and road networks. The paper develops a statistical method to analyze this type of data. The analysis confirms several of the hypotheses.
"In preparation for COP17 (17th Conference of the Parties) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC), the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) in Durban, held a two- day expert seminar to identify issues and recommendations for ensuring that adaptation to climate change is conflict-sensitive ...papers presented during the meeting were peer-reviewed and compiled for this pertinent book." -- ACCORD.
Climate change and climate-induced migration in the Horn of Africa could seriously exacerbate security risks in the region. The sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reiterates the grim facts of climate change in Africa. The continent has contributed little (less than 4 percent) to total greenhouse gas emissions but has already suffered serious consequences, from biodiversity loss to reduced food production. In East Africa particularly, drought frequency has doubled. Yet, between 2010 and 2018, most Horn countries received less than the average amount of climate adaptation funding per capita for lower-income countries, despite ranking at the top of climate vulnerability indices. Not only is financing for adaptation measures insufficient, but climate research in the region is also under-resourced. The Horn of Africa is extremely vulnerable to climate change, as it encompasses vast drylands, numerous pastoralist communities, multiple border disputes, unresolved trans-boundary water-rights issues, and porous land borders. The region also has a traumatic and politically contentious history with natural disaster, famine, and conflict, including the 1983-85 Ethiopian famine and the controversial 1992-93 humanitarian intervention in Somalia. In fact, the impetus for forming the Intergovernmental Authority on Development in 1986 was to address drought and desertification from a regional perspective, with peace and security issues added to the organization's mandate in 1996 due to the obvious interconnection of those issues. The Horn's history informs and sometimes politically distorts perceptions of current climate-related threats. Ongoing conflicts in the region add complexity to any effort to envision future scenarios. The Horn is not just at risk for conflict and instability-conflict and instability are its current reality. In Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan, multiple ongoing conflicts involve violent clashes between military and militia forces. The region already hosts nearly 2.9 million refugees and asylum seekers and over 12 million internally displaced persons. The Horn is currently the site of one of the world's worst food insecurity crises; in August of 2022 the number of highly food-insecure people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia reached twenty-two million, and some already face famine conditions. Although conflict and crisis prevention is at the heart of efforts to identify interconnected climate and migration risks, for many in the region, the present is already characterized by insecurity, and the future by uncertainty. Demographic, economic, political, and environmental pressures all intersect in the Horn of Africa, driving popular unrest and resource competition and destabilizing migration patterns that exacerbate tensions within and between states. Regional disorder will have implications far beyond the Horn, affecting the politics, security, and relative power of external actors and constraining the prospects for effective global governance. The United States and others should act now to mitigate those risks.
Pastoralism and Climate Change in East Africa provides systematic and robust empirical investigations on the impact of climate change on pastoral production systems, as well as participating in the ongoing debate over the efficacy of traditional pastoralism. This book is an initial product of the Project Building Knowledge to Support Climate Change Adaptation for Pastoralist Communities in East Africa implemented by the Centre for Climate Change Studies of the University of Dar es Salaam with support from the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa. Traditional pastoralism has proved to be a resilient and unique system of adaptations in a dynamic process of unpredictable climatic variability and continuous human interactions with the natural environment in dryland ecosystems. Pastoral adaptations and climate-induced innovative coping mechanisms have strategically been embedded in the indigenous social structures and resource management value systems. Pastoral livelihoods have, nevertheless, become increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts as a result of prolonged marginalization and harmful external interventions. The negative effect of global climate change has been an added dimension to the already prevailing crisis in the pastoral livelihood system, which is substantially driven by non-climatic factors of internal and external pressures of change such as population growth, bad governance and shrinking rangelands lost to competing activities.
In the context of growing global concerns about climate change, this book presents a regional and sub-continental synthesis of pastoralists' responses to past environmental changes and reflects on the lessons for current and future environmental challenges. Drawing from rock art, archaeology, paleoecological data, trade, ancient hydrological technology, vegetation, social memory and historical documentation, this book creates detailed reconstructions of past climate change adaptations across Sahelian Africa. It evaluates the present and future challenges to climate change adaptation in the region in terms of social memory, rainfall variability, environmental change and armed conflicts and examines the ways in which governance and policy drivers may undermine pastoralists’ adaptive strategies. The book’s scope covers the Red Sea coast, Somaliland, Somalia, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and northern Kenya, part of the Ethiopian highlands and Eritrea, areas where past climate change has been extreme and future change makes it vital to understand the dynamics of adaptation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental history, human ecology, geography, climate change, environment studies, development studies, pastoralism, anthropology and African studies.
A major objective of this volume is to create and share knowledge about the socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions of climate change. The authors analyze the effects of climate change on the social and environmental determinants of the health and well-being of communities (i.e. poverty, clean air, safe drinking water, food supplies) and on extreme events such as floods and hurricanes. The book covers topics such as the social and political dimensions of the ebola response, inequalities in urban migrant communities, as well as water-related health effects of climate change. The contributors recommend political and social-cultural strategies for mitigate, adapt and prevent the impacts of climate change to human and environmental health. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in new methods and tools to reduce risks and to increase health resilience to climate change.
At the height of the Cold War, Soviet ideologues, policymakers, diplomats, and military officers perceived the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the future reserve of socialism, holding the key to victory over Western forces. The zero-sum nature of East-West global competition induced the United States to try to thwart Soviet ambitions. The result was predictable: the two superpowers engaged in proxy struggles against each other in faraway, little-understood lands, often ending up entangled in protracted and highly destructive local fights that did little to serve their own agendas. Using a wealth of recently declassified sources, this book tells the complex story of Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa, a narrowly defined geographic entity torn by the rivalry of two large countries (Ethiopia and Somalia), from the beginning of the Cold War until the demise of the Soviet Union. At different points in the twentieth century, this region—arguably one of the poorest in the world—attracted broad international interest and large quantities of advanced weaponry, making it a Cold War flashpoint. The external actors ultimately failed to achieve what they wanted from the local conflicts—a lesson relevant for U.S. policymakers today as they ponder whether to use force abroad in the wake of the unhappy experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.
