Will global warming increase the severity and number of civil wars in Africa? This paper analyses the links and correlation between climate change, climate shocks and intrastate violence in Africa. It finds that, while environmental conditions may not be irrelevant to conflict risk, scientific claims about a robust correlation between climate change and the risk of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa do not hold up. The primary causes of civil wars are political, not environmental. Environmental conditions may change with future warming, but general correlates of conflicts and wars are likely to prevail.
Vocal actors within policy and practice contend that climate-related shocks such as drought and prolonged heatwaves drive civil wars in Africa. A recent influential article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, appears to substantiate this claim. It concludes that adverse impacts in global warming will outweigh any likely positive effects of economic growth and decentralisation in the region. It predicts a 54 per cent increase in civil war incidence by 2030.
However, the study was limited to major civil wars and failed to take into account violence with less than 1000 annual casualties. This excludes a number of violent uprisings in the Sahel, a classic region of scarcity-induced violence. It focused on prevalence rather than outbreak of conflict, and included civil wars only up to 2002. This ignores the fact that warming and drying of the continent have persisted, while civil war has decreased in severity and incidence since 2002.
A more comprehensive evaluation by the Centre for the Study of Civil War, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) offers a number of improvements on earlier research:
- It departs from a fixed narrow definition of civil war by applying multiple complementary measures of intrastate conflict based on a threshold of 25 battle deaths per year. This corresponds better with narratives of violence within contexts of environmental marginalisation
- The analysis models the outbreak and incidence of civil war as distinct processes and pays particular attention to climactic conditions before the initiation of violence
- It goes beyond simply looking at temperature and precipitation, considering the proportional change in climate since the previous year and climate anomaly as two alternative sets of climate parameters.
PRIO’s study concludes that climate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict. Instead, African civil wars can be explained by generic structural and contextual conditions: prevalent ethno-political exclusion, poor national economy, and the collapse of the Cold War system. However, this does not mean that environmental conditions are irrelevant to conflict risk. Caveats are that:
- Existing empirical research applies to country-level analyses that cannot assess sub-national variations in climate and conflict. Systematic investigation of local level climate-conflict links is a priority, and should use advanced Geographic Information Systems with high resolution conflict and environmental data
- Little research has been done on how climate change is likely to affect political and economic development in the long term, and what the implications will be for conflict risk
- Contemporary global warming has been modest and slow. Analysis of societal responses to present and past climate variability may be of limited value if more extreme future predictions such as the collapse of the Asian monsoon system become realities.
Targeted climate adaptation initiatives such as National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs) can have significant impacts on social well-being and human security. They cannot replace traditional peacebuilding strategies, however.
