Climate change can heat up conflicts

Climate change poses serious challenges to current and future peacebuilding efforts and could amplify conflicts, according to a report.

Climate change poses serious challenges to current and future peacebuilding efforts and could amplify conflicts, according to a report on years of violence and drought in Somalia.

Researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) looked at how conflicts and the peacebuilding efforts of the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (Unsom) have been affected by climate change, and found it “amplifies existing challenges and strengthens radical groups”.

“What it shows is that the security landscape is changing with climate change,” Florian Krampe, senior researcher at Sipri’s climate change programme, said, adding that many of the findings are applicable to other conflicts.

According to the report, released on Wednesday, decades of conflict in Somalia described as “among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world have been magnified by a series of droughts, making Unsom’s work more challenging.

For instance, the frequency and severity of conflicts between herders and farmers in rural regions has increased as changing seasons and weather means herding nomads have to adjust their routes.

Droughts and floods also displace more people, who seek shelter in camps which then serve as recruitment grounds for groups such as Al-Shabaab.

The displacement of large groups into new areas can also undermine the governance of those areas, as existing powersharing agreements no longer represent the “demographic composition” on the ground.

While Krampe was hesitant to say climate change by itself could cause conflict, he thought the evidence was clear that “climate change increases the probability of conflict”.

Karolina Eklow, co-author of the report, noted that unlike many other reports on climate change, they were not looking at forecasts about how climate effects may shape the future but what could already be observed.

THEY UNDERSTOOD THE VASTNESS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND HOW IT IS ALTERING PATTERNS THAT WOULD USUALLY HAPPEN

“This is not a future issue any more,” Eklow said, adding this had already become evident to the people working for Unsom.

“They fully understood the vastness of climate change and how it is altering any patterns that would usually happen,” Eklow said.

On a positive note, the growing effect of climate change has meant that Unsom has had to adapt its peacebuilding efforts by thinking outside the box and adopting new approaches, which may prove useful in future peacebuilding operations.

These include the establishment of co-ordination centres for drought operations and the appointment of an environmental security adviser.

The report, however, stressed that some of these novel approaches are difficult to implement under the current funding structure, since much of the money is in silos and earmarked for specific and isolated approaches, “thereby inhibiting integrated responses”.

Krampe said that since climate change can alter the context of a conflict, efforts to solve or prevent violence need to look beyond military means.

“We need to put much more emphasis on pre-emptive or preventive work to build up the resilience of countries.”