Until recently, impressive economic growth, stable leadership and its attractiveness as a foreign investment hub put Ethiopia in a positive spotlight. However, the country still ranks low in human development and is highly dependent on rainfed agriculture, making it particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Combined with existing tensions and inequalities, climate vulnerability can exacerbate security risks. To mitigate these linkages, Ethiopia’s leadership should support implementation of conflict-sensitive climate change adaptation policies and include climate security in its conflict mitigation strategy.
The Lake Chad Basin is currently suffering one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises with approximately 10.7 million people in need of immediate humanitarian assistance. Over the past two years a team of experts led by adelphi has been conducting an assesment of the climate and fragility risks affecting the region in order to identify responses which can address the linked causes and drivers of the crisis.
In “Africa’s smallest war,” both Kenya and Uganda lay claim to Migingo Island, a tiny island in the waters of Lake Victoria. While the claims are over the island, the conflict is about something else entirely: Lates niloticus, also known as Nile perch, a tasty white fish that swims in the waters surrounding the island. The fish forms the backbone of the Lake Victoria economy but is increasingly hard to come by along the lakeshore. Catches are in decline, incomes are dropping, and the Ugandan government is taking increasingly harsh, militarized steps to help revive the fishery. Who is to blame?
A new USAID report focuses on the intersection of climate exposure and state fragility worldwide. It finds that the factors that make a country vulberable to large-scale conflict are similar to those that make it vulnerable to climate change. The report thus offers a way for global audiences with an interest in climate and security to identify places of high concern.
Peat areas have played a pivotal role in conflicts globally, and have also been a point of contention during post-conflict recovery. Communities in Southeast Asia as well as in the countries of the Congo are facing challenges as finding political solutions for this problem.
Liberia’s largest palm oil producer, Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) pulls out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) – how can rural communities cope with the impacts? The forests near GVL’s Liberian plantations are not only sacred sites of the region's people but also heavily populated with chimpanzees, leopards, pygmy hippopotamus and forest elephants which are significant not only to the local ecosystem but globally.
The High Level Conference on the Lake Chad Region will be held in Berlin at the German Federal Foreign Office from 3 to 4 September 2018. Germany will be co-hosting the event with Nigeria, Norway and the United Nations.
Lake Chad is a geophysical and ecological miracle. Situated in the arid Sahel region, two large rivers create an oasis in an otherwise water scarce region. But today, the Lake Chad region is best known for armed conflict, Boko Haram and one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. According to Janani Vivekananda, Senior Adviser for Climate Change and Peacebuilding at adelphi, climate change plays a very real role in exacerbating and prolonging the crisis.
In this report, the Expert Working Group on Climate-Related Security Risks provides a climate-related security risk assessment and options for climate risk management strategies in the Lake Chad region.