Conflict in Climate Change and Africa

Young climate change activist and women’s rights advocate Ruth Nyambura is attending the United Nations Climate Conference this year to join the voices of the global south calling for strong action on climate change. Nyambura comes from Nairobi, Kenya and knows only too well the conflict precipitated by climate change.

The connection between climate change and conflict is not a new one. In 2007, the Centre for Naval Analysis’ Military Advisory Board declared climate change as a national security threat in a report produced on the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A more recent report released in February this year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicated that climate change induced water shortages would “likely increase the risk of instability and state failure [and] exacerbate regional tension.”

For Nyambura, climate change is not an impeding crisis that will at some point disrupt our economic system; climate change is a daily, lived experience that is already fracturing social cohesion and exacerbating existing inequalities.

She tells the story of two neighbouring, pastoralist communities Sambure and Turkana that erupted into conflict about three months ago. Oil was discovered in Turkana in earlier this year. Nyambura explains, “this place barely has roads, barely has anything! The government has not discovered a permanent source of water, but they let someone come in and discover oil – you can imagine the irony.”

Cattle rustling has always occurred within the region, with a food and water shortages combined with a lack of infrastructure – heads of cattle are very valuable. But, the situation is aggravated in situations of above normal temperature where the likelihood of violence leaps by an enormous thirty percent; particularly in pastoralist communities where rainfall and water temperature determines the proximity between neighbouring communities.

In this particular instance, the discovery of oil shifted the political dynamic between the communities. Over a series of weeks, political clout was thrown around, fifty police officers were massacred in Sugutu Valley trying to recover the cattle, women were raped and villagers were killed.

“The story is this – that region is resource rich.” In an area of political instability and harsh weather conditions due, at least in part, to the global warming that renders land less arable and food more scarce; resource rich means conflict prone. Nyambura tells similar stories of conflict which echo the trends showing that violence against girls and women, particularly sexual violence increases in times of political upheaval – which are frequently provoked by land, water and food disputes caused by climate change.

Africa is not alone in its vulnerability to conflict contributed to by climate change but it is a good example of the way in which climate change is a “threat multiplier”. It exacerbates any pre-existing factors that could precipitate conflict such as poverty, food and water shortages or political instability. Nairobi is not the only Kenyan region that is already experiencing the impacts on climate change. However, one of the additional complexities faced already under-resourced countries such as Kenya, is that any strategy that attempts to adapt to climate must also appreciate that the degree and way in which climate change impacts differently on different regions.

For example, ability to cope with climate change is likely to vary “across households and villages” depending on the already established adaptation mechanisms, different degrees of food and water scarcity and levels of pre-existing political and social unrest. It remains however, that “many people in Kenya rely on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods as small farmers or as employees in the commercial agricultural sector” and thus are particularly susceptible to changes in rainfall. These changes have dramatic impacts on food security which bring repercussions for land access and utilisation.

“I live in a country where the army is known for excesses and aggresses,” Nyambura told The Verb. About three months ago a dispute broke out between two clans over arable land. The clans fought and militias were brought in to diffuse the conflict but instead killed 140 people over two weeks. The villagers discussed bringing the national army in to stop the bloodshed but decided not to “because even if they came the women would get raped and men would get killed”. The dispute between the clans began as a common-place land dispute but escalated into mass blood-shed because of the increased resource pressure brought by the drier, hotter weather conditions.

Similarly, Nyambura recounts the rape of ten thousand women that occurred in the Kenyan post-election violence. She says that the tightening of resources and changing weather conditions due to climate change has the capacity to re-enliven the inter-ethnic conflicts in a context where political and social stability remains precarious.

She makes a final point about the capacity of corrupt governments and colluding corporations to use climate change as a tool of oppression. Nyambura talks about LAPSET – a massive road and railway network and oil pipeline that stretch from Sudan to Ethiopia. She says that the project is “going to displace a lot of people but the Government isn’t willing to compensate anyone.” So instead they “destabilise a region so that nobody is going to say anything when you steal resources and when you go and mine and pollute the environment”. She uses this as an argument for renewable energy as not only a mitigation strategy to climate change but also as tool of liberation. “Renewable energy should be a big thing for us in Africa because corporations like Shell collude with our governments to oppress us”.

It is clearly established that women bare the brunt of the violence, the poverty and the work that come part and parcel with climate change. And so, it is imperative not to separate climate change from the people whose lives it affects. To use the words of former British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett; climate change “is not a matter of narrow national security; it is about our collective security in a fragile and increasingly interdependent world.”

There is only one week left of the climate talks in Doha, Qatar and the voices of women who are already bearing the brunt of climate change remain underrepresented. The collective security, economic empowerment and equal standing of women all over the globe depends on providing the resources to adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already being experienced as well as reducing our collective emissions to avoid more precarious and volatile conditions in the future.

By Sophie Trevitt, photo by Laura Owsianka. Ruth Nyambura is also a contributor at The Verb.