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The Importance of Political Factors in Reducing Conflict and Upholding Security

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Climate Change, Security Risks and Conflict Reduction in Africa

Part of the book series: Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace ((HSHES,volume 12))

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Abstract

Climate change is a threat multiplier that can, under a set of socio-economic and political conditions, destabilize the security of vulnerable communities. Building on the findings of the previous chapter (Chap. 3), Chap. 4 shows that political factors are determinant in the destabilization of security and escalation to violence. The stages of the causal pathway to conflict are modelled using prisms from the human, sustainable livelihoods and environmental security theory and with a focus on farmer–herder conflicts. This model highlights how different policies and institutional structures can influence the causal chain between environmental change and violence. With reference to the PEISOR model, the argument is advanced that political factors can play a fundamental role not only in provoking and fuelling but also in reducing climate-change-induced or -aggravated conflicts. A range of policy levers, from mitigation and adaptation to development and reform of institutional structures, can reduce conflict.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Positive peace goes beyond the absence of violence and includes a dimension of active cooperation leading to mutual benefits for the parties who interact as equals (Galtung 2013: 12).

  2. 2.

    The term ‘capabilities’ refers to the concept developed by Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom (1999). His understanding is that people are free and likely to access well-being when they are capable of making decisions between different options (and corresponding lifestyles) and of achieving outcomes that they value.

  3. 3.

    This approach was formalized by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) in 1999 in the form of the “Sustainable Livelihoods Framework”.

  4. 4.

    Achieving environmental security necessitates actions to be taken to protect natural resources or to utilize them in a sustainable manner (Westing 2013: 32).

  5. 5.

    The food security score is calculated from data gathered for nine indicators covering five key dimensions of food (in)security: food consumption, food production, food imports, food distribution, and agricultural potential (IFPRI 2010: 5).

  6. 6.

    This excludes the potential effects of sea-level rise in coastal region, since these are not relevant to the geographical focus adopted.

  7. 7.

    See Fig. 2.9 for a map of the projected impacts of climate change on the whole African continent (IPCC 2007c: 451).

  8. 8.

    See Fig. 2.8 for projections for cereal production for 2060 under circumstances of climate change.

  9. 9.

    Access to food might be impeded if prices increase when the availability of food globally diminishes and households might be unable to afford it. Moreover, since the agricultural sector is one of the main employment sectors and is highly dependent on precipitation, people might lose sources of income and thus see their economic access to food (or purchasing power) further reduced (IPCC 2007c: 454, 2014d: 1042). The impacts of climate changes are expected to contribute to an increase in the price of basic cereals (IPCC 2014f: 1221). Moreover, mitigation measures taken in some areas of the world, such as the growth of crops for biofuels, can impact the food security of other areas (IPCC 2014f: 1222).

  10. 10.

    Climate change is likely to increase diseases which limit the human body’s availability to absorb nutrients (IPCC 2014f: 1221).

  11. 11.

    Climate change contributes to a decrease in food production and to correlating high food prices and it has been observed that these factors have regularly fuelled protests in recent years, such as in 2011 during the demonstrations and civil unrest of the Arab Spring. In 2008, a time correlation between a peak in rice (and more general cereals and food commodities) prices and a steep increase in the number of food price riots was also observable (See graph in Brinkman/Hendrix 2011: 6; IPCC 2014b: 763).

  12. 12.

    For details of the likely degradation of environmental conditions due to climate change, see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2 and Annexes 5, 6, 8, 10 and 12. They include less productive and more drought-prone land, reduced and more variable rainfall, reduction of freshwater resources, reduced biodiversity, etc.

  13. 13.

    See Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2.2.

  14. 14.

    See Chap. 3 for more detail on the various determining factors.

  15. 15.

    The WBGU focuses more specifically on the Sahel region as a hot spot of climate change (WBGU 2008: 136–138). This focus has also been adopted in the 2011 UNEP report introduced in Chap. 3, which identifies climate–conflict hot spots within the region of the Sahel.

  16. 16.

    Migrations are always motivated by a combination of multiple “push” and “pull” factors (push factors motivate departure from a region while pull factors attract people to another one). Cultural attachment can explain why people persist in living in areas with difficult environmental conditions. Nevertheless, climate change might become an increasingly important driver because environmental risks impact a community’s perceptions of well-being (IPCC 2014b: 770).

  17. 17.

    This process of marginalization is a vicious circle in another aspect. The fragility of some communities prevents them from influencing the policies that could play in their favour and they thus become even more vulnerable (DFID 1999).

  18. 18.

    Brauch/Oswald Spring (2011b: 816): “Between 1974 and 2003, thus, drought has become the most deadly and least noted hazard killing some 909,160 people and affecting 1,827,538,000 persons in thirty years, where nearly all ‘silent’ casualties occurred in developing countries”.

  19. 19.

    Political actors but also socio-economic stakeholders play a role in the definition of these policy responses (Brauch/Oswald Spring 2009).

  20. 20.

    In addition, climate mitigation and adaptation measures should also be designed to ensure that they do not have detrimental side effects on the development objectives of the targeted community. In a best-case scenario, they should contribute to development or at least be neutral (IPCC 2014c: 813). Such policies would act on the three parameters of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity) at the same time.

  21. 21.

    Headcount poverty and poverty gap indexes were used to account for both absolute and relative economic deprivation.

  22. 22.

    Under 5-years child mortality rate was used as the indicator for health deprivation.

  23. 23.

    The nutrition status is reflected by the undernutrition and child malnutrition rates.

  24. 24.

    The dataset includes Burkina Faso and Ghana.

  25. 25.

    The CDCM project was launched in 2010 at the Robert R. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas (Austin). Information can be found at: https://strausscenter.org/ccaps/research/about-constitutional-design.html (8 December 2013).

  26. 26.

    On the other hand, the analysis in this research is limited to climate-change-related shocks, and migrations are considered to be rather a social outcome of an environmental shock (cf. Sect. 4.2.2.2 above on the PEISOR model; Brauch/Oswald Spring 2011b: 818), one step farther on the causal pathway towards conflict.

  27. 27.

    Facts on Nobel laureates; at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom-facts.html.

  28. 28.

    This takes us back to the importance of social capital since the concept of collective action can also broadly be understood as ‘the ability to act collectively’ (Adger et al. 2004: 76). In other words, if institutions are conducive to the formation of a high level of social capital, they encourage peaceful cooperative behaviours.

  29. 29.

    The German Development Service (merged with the Germany Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) in 2011) is an example of a development agency that began to reflect on these issues many years ago. See: http://www.giz.de/Entwicklungsdienst/de/html/1414.html (GIZ 2014). The French Agency for Development (AFD) also carries out projects for transhumant herders in the Sahel who are living under difficult environmental conditions and are often involved in conflicts over resources. For more information, see: http://www.afd.fr/Jahia/site/afd/Accompagner-la-transhumance-et-prevenir-les-conflits-au-Tchad (AFD 2014).

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    Charlène Cabot

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Cabot, C. (2017). The Importance of Political Factors in Reducing Conflict and Upholding Security. In: Climate Change, Security Risks and Conflict Reduction in Africa. Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, vol 12. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29237-8_4

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