Global warming is a particularly severe threat to developing countries, especially in Africa. This acute sensitivity is due to economic and political reasons, which make it difficult to deploy the adaptation and mitigation strategies of risks. Environmental factors are also important.
The Horn of Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, as illustrated by the severe drought that has been raging there for several months. But there are also social factors that weigh another threat, beyond famine and forced migrations. That of the increase and worsening of armed conflicts.
Climate warming upset social balances, like the one who prevails between cultivators and breeders. Breeding plays an important economic role in Africa and provides economic needs of 22 % of the population. This breeding is largely transhuming, especially in West Africa, where it alternates between agricultural land and non -cultivable land.
During the rainy season, when agricultural land is harvested, transhumant pastors leave them for less productive lands but where biomass is large enough during the rainy season so that herds can survive. In the dry season, once the harvest is made, the pastors come back to graze their herds in agricultural land, which they naturally fertilize. Thus is perpetuated a symbiotic relationship in which farmers benefit from natural fertilizer, and breeders can nourish their herds when marginal lands are dried up.
But global warming, and in particular prolonged drought periods, destroyed this relationship and led to an increase in conflicts between cultivators and pastors (” transhumant pastoralism, climate change, and conflict in Africa “, Eoin McGuirk and Nathan Nunn, National Bureau of Economic Research, working document n ° 28243, 2020). The authors combine several data sources at a very local level, according to a localization grid of squares of approximately 55 kilometers side: ethnographic data indicating the territories of the different groups (pastoral or cultivators), data on the incidence of different types conflicts between 1989 and 2019 (from the smallest skirmish to the state conflict), climatological data and satellite data measuring the growth of phytomasse.
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