Africa in general, and the Sahel in particular, is often identified as the region where climate change is most likely to undermine security and trigger violent conflict. This is a function of the region’s history of violent conflict and its perceived vulnerability to climate change.This paper endeavours to provide a concise overview of peer-reviewed literature on the links between climate change and conflict in the Sahel, Sahara and North Africa.

The author, Oli Brown, analyses the most important climate fragility risks in the region, including resource conflicts, climate-induced migration, conflicts over water distribution, and terrorist groups. The risk brief provides a balanced presentation of the current state of knowledge and thus contributes to the ongoing debate on climate and security. For a quick overview of North Africa and Sahel's climate-fragility risks, take a look at the two-pager factsheet (the risk brief is also available in French).

Africa has been identified as the regionwhere climate change is most likely to undermine security and trigger violent conflict(Scheffran, et al. 2019). This effect maybe most pronounced in the Sahel, an area with ahistory of violent conflict and climate vulnerability, itself a result of the region’s poverty, low levels of development and reliance on livelihoods,such as rainfed agriculture and migratory livestock herding,that arehighlysensitive to droughts and floods.

This risk brief aims to provide a concise overview of peer-reviewed literature on the links between climate change and violent conflictin the Sahel, Sahara and North Africa (see section 8for a list of references used). It makes no claim to be comprehensive but endeavourstoprovide a balanced view ofthe current state of knowledge as a way of triggering further debate.1

The area under discussion is a huge swathe of land comprising all or part of 17 countries2: roughly 6,000 kilometres from west to east and 3,000 kilometres from north to south –from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east to the Mediterranean in the north. It is politically, ethnically, linguistically, economically and climatologically highly diverse. Whereas Sahelian countries all rank lowon UNDP’s 2018 Human Development Index, North African countries have generally higher levels of development.

Levels of hunger and malnutrition reflect this distribution: all the Sahelian countries, with the exception of Senegal, are listed asbeingof serious concern on the 2017 Global Hunger Index, which is produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute. By contrast, hunger in most of the North African countries is of either low or moderate concern, with the exception of Libya, wheredata were insufficient (IFPRI, 2017). Meanwhile, an estimated 345 million people acrossthe region lackaccess to electricity. Chad, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger all have rural electrification rates of 5% or less (IEA, 2016).

The countries also havewildly different water ‘budgets’ in terms of the quantity of renewable freshwater resources found within their borders –from just 20 cubic metres per person in Egypt (where the vast majority of the country’s water flows down the Nile from upstream countries) to more than 12,000 cubic metres of internal water resources per capita in Cameroon (World Bank, 2014). However, what manycountries in the region dohave in common is the experience of violence and fragility, either within their own borders or among their direct neighbours. According to the Heidelberg Conflict Barometer (2018),every country in the region with the exception of Eritrea wasexperiencinga violent crisis of one sort or anotherin 2018.

Five countries (Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Nigeria) met the threshold for full war,and another three met the threshold for limited war (South Sudan, Cameroon and Mali). The OECD lists every Sahelian country, with the exception of Senegal, as either fragile or extremely fragile, and categorises Libya and Tunisia as fragile (2018). But the Sahel hasn’t always been known for its poverty, regular famines and political instability. Until the twentieth century,the Sahel was largely self-sufficient in terms of food security and even exported part of its harvest (Descroix and Lambert, 2018).

Part of the explanation for this precipitous fall in regional fortunes has been the intertwined impactsof a fluctuating climateand land degradation.3As Descroix and Lambert (2016) argue, the devastating 25-year drought in the Sahel between 1968-1993 contributed to the partial destruction of essentially rural Sahelian societies. The reconstruction ofthese societies continues today.