Shoring Up Stability: Addressing Climate & Fragility Risks in the Lake Chad Region
Publisher: adelphi
Author(s): Janani Vivekananda, Martin Wall, Florence Sylvestre, and Chitra Nagarajan
Date: 2020
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Gender, Humanitarian Assistance, Livelihoods
The people of Lake Chad are caught in a conflict trap. Violent conflict between state security forces and armed opposition groups, poor governance, endemic corruption, serious environmental mismanagement and poverty have ruined the lives of local people. Some 2.5 million people have fled their homes, leaving vast areas insecure and tens of millions of people lack adequate services. Currently, an estimated 10.7 million people need humanitarian assistance: 5 million of them are acutely food insecure. Climate change is compounding these challenges.
This crisis is not simply collateral damage from harsh conditions in the Sahel. In fact, as a unique fresh water lake in the middle of the arid Sahara, Lake Chad is an ecological miracle. For millennia, it has been a source of life, resilience and even prosperity for the surrounding area. But since 2009, the parts of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon bordering Lake Chad—which are home to more than 17.4 million people—have been locked into multiple and overlapping crises. Whether it will be possible for people to break out of this conflict trap will depend on a nuanced understanding of how climate change and conflict interact in this specific context. Through the joint analysis of climate change and conflict risks, the present assessment takes an evidence-based approach to understand the different and connected dimensions of risk and inform appropriate responses.