As part of a special initiative by African and Nordic countries, a subregional meeting, involving the countries from West Africa and the Sahel, will be hosted by Norway and Senegal on 3 and 4 March 2020 in Dakar, on the topic of multilateral cooperation to address climate related security and development risks in Africa.

The purpose of the meeting is to deepen our collective understanding of the impact of climate-related human security and development risks, and how multilateral cooperation can contribute to preventing, mitigating and adapting to its effects. The aim of the meeting is to generate policy recommendations for enhanced multilateral cooperation in the area of climate-related security and development risks. These recommendations will be considered by the UN75 partner countries when they draft their joint declaration for the 75th United Nations (UN) General Assembly.

The aim of this background paper is to provide a synthesis of the existing research literature, policy guidance and recent developments related to multilateral cooperation in the area of conflict-related human security and development risks on the African continent, in order to inform and frame the discussion at the meeting in Dakar.

The paper also offers a number of recommendations for strengthening and further enhancing the role of multilateral cooperation in the context of climaterelated security and development risks, that can serve as an input for the discussions in Dakar.
The framing of climate change in the security and development discourse is undergoing an important change. In some spaces it is moving away from seeing climate change as a security ‘threat,’ and instead frames it as climate-related security and development ‘risks’.