Benue State University, Makurdi

Climate Change, Peace and Security in Africa: An Exploitative Analysis

Kazeem Olayinka Sodik

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review the linkages between climate change and security in Africa and to analyse the role of climate change adaptation policies in future conflict prevention in Africa, using the descriptive cum analytical approach. The paper relied on qualitative data collected from secondary sources. With Africa’s history of ethnic, resource and interstate conflict, is seen by many as particularly vulnerable to this new type of security threat, despite being the continent least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. The main discourse is on Climate Change as a threat to Peace and Security in Africa which revolves around the debates in the public domain that link almost entirely the Africa’s security situation to the effect of climate change and other environmental threats that pervades through the corridors of the Sahel region. Findings in the paper revealed that despite the projected climatic change for Africa which suggest a future of increasingly scarce water, collapsing agricultural yields, encroaching desert, and damaged coastal infrastructure. Such impacts, should they occur, would undermine the carrying capacity of large parts of Africa, causing destabilizing population movements, and raising tensions over dwindling strategic resources, thereby intensifying the level of humanitarian crisis. In such cases, climate change could be a factor that tips fragile states into socio-economic and political collapse. The paper recommended adaptation policies and programmes, that, if implemented, at multiple scales, could help avert climate change and other environmental stresses becoming triggers for conflict.

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