Land Is Now the Biggest Gun: Climate Change and Conflict in Karamoja, Uganda
Publisher: Climate and Development
Author(s): Daniel Abrahams
Date: 2020
Topics: Climate Change
Countries: Uganda
Places that are both recovering from violent conflict and dependent on natural recourses face the overlapping challenges of reducing the risk of recurring conflict, promoting economic recovery, and ensuring sustainable environmental management: all challenges exacerbated by climate change. This article examines how climate change alters conflict outcomes and vulnerability in Karamoja, Uganda, a region recovering from decades of intense violence. Drawing upon structured interviews with local government officials, direct observation, semi-structured interviews, and a document review, I demonstrate that while Karamoja has stabilized following a region-wide disarmament, the impacts of climate change, when taken in combination with region-wide changes in land use, have contributed to new forms of localized conflicts including resource-related conflict, theft, and intrahousehold violence. This case, therefore, demonstrates how the cycle of increased vulnerability to climate change due to conflict and increased conflict risk due to low adaptive capacity represents a dangerous and reinforcing feedback loop. Moreover, though climate change is affecting conflict outcomes in Karamoja, those outcomes are far less severe than the region’s past, non-climate-related conflicts. That raises complex questions about how to conceptualize the significance of climate change as a driver of conflict and underscores the need to reconceptualize climate-conflict beyond simply questions of causality.