Lagos to Mombasa: How Does Climate Impact Conflict?

GYUDE MOORE:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Lagos to Mombasa: The Trans-Africa Podcast from the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. My name is Gyude Moore. I'm a Senior Policy Fellow here at the Center for Global Development. And this podcast, Lagos to Mombasa is focused exclusively on Africa. We examine the continent's challenges and the opportunities and the policies that connect those as we attempt to create an Africa that is more economically viable, an Africa that is safe, an Africa in which Africans can continue to pursue their dreams, aspiring and achieve all of the things that they try to do. And so this season of Lagos to Mombasa has been focused on climate and the impact that climate has on lives and livelihoods. The existential problem in Africa is the one of extreme poverty. Everything else, including climate, worsen that problem. And so the goal was to examine the different things about the climate that have significant impact on lives and livelihoods in Africa.

There are few people more qualified to discuss this topic with us than our guest today. Ted Miguel is one of the world's foremost researchers when it comes to this question of the climate, political economy, and conflict. He's done research spanning the impact of changing climate on conflict, whether is at an interpersonal level or at the intergroup level. So it is such a great pleasure to have him here. I'll give him an opportunity to introduce himself. Ted, welcome to Lagos to Mombasa.

TED MIGUEL:
Thanks so much. I'm a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and I'm also the faculty co-director of the Center for Effective Global Action, which is a research and policy center that tries to bring the best evidence to bear on key international development challenges, including on these issues. I've been working on issues of climate, poverty, and conflict for a couple of decades now in my research. It's great to be here and get to talk about these important issues.

GYUDE MOORE:
In the episodes preceding this one, we talked about agriculture and how 50% of the continent's labor force is involved in some form of agriculture, which exposes them to the impact of climate. We talked about how space-based assets could be used to resolve some of these issues. We also talked about energy and Africa's energy transition. So, today, there is a bit of controversy around this question that there is a causal link between, say, climate or changing climate and conflict. What do you say to this?

TED MIGUEL:
Yeah, when the research started on this issue, there was a lot of debate and people were trying to understand why there could be that kind of relationship. You just mentioned the importance of agriculture. And that's actually, I think, a big part of the story that has emerged through the research in the last couple of decades, that there really is a lot of evidence now that extremes in climate are all associated with declines in agricultural productivity. And since such a large share of the workforce in most sub-Saharan African countries are in agriculture, that just has like a direct big impact on the economy. So I think the evidence has really come through now again and again in multiple studies on that link. And then in parallel to understanding all those economic links, there's just been more and more evidence about the links between extreme climate and different forms of conflict and violence. And I think for those of us who do research in the area, it's been really striking to see how that relationship holds at many different levels.

So if you look at things like certain forms of violent crime in sub-Saharan Africa, but also globally, I mean, it holds also in the US that in a hot period, there tends to be more violent crime. And at the other extreme, it holds in sub-Saharan Africa that after, say, a drought or a period of extended high temperatures, there's more likely to be national political instability and even civil war.

GYUDE MOORE:
This is interesting. I think this is where we should start that most times, when people think climate, the first thing that comes to mind isn't conflict, right? I mean, when people think of climate, you're thinking extreme weather events and how to respond, how to build all those canals to evacuate water from floods, or we need more energy use for air conditioning because it's going to be really, really hard. Can we have drought-resistant crops? Those are the kinds of things that people think about. And for most people, do not make the connections between, say, the climate, a changing climate, and conflict. And so this is where I would like you to start. You touched on that a little bit, but why is it important for us to study conflict when we're thinking and talking about climate, especially in Africa, south of the Sahara?

TED MIGUEL:
Yeah, I mean, I think the effects of climate on society will come in many forms. And you touched on a lot of them. And I think a lot of people will think about, like you said, air conditioning and drought-resistant crops, and all those things are just going to be so critical as we think about how we adapt to a changing climate when there are the kind of economic and social changes that are caused by climate. It can also have a real effect on social stability and political stability. When people, let's say their crops fail, when there is a drought and they don't have enough to eat, that may change how they think about their political leaders and may change how desperate they are in terms of their own actions and their own behaviors. And so it kind of starts changing the behaviors and the decisions, maybe, of millions of people. And in societies where resources are limited, all those stresses caused by climate change can then translate into big political changes. So I think for me, this work started actually when I was working in Tanzania a little bit over 20 years ago, and I was working in an area in western Tanzania, Meatu District.

That's semi-arid. It's pretty dry there. And I was doing a project looking at local public finance. Really, how do communities come together to raise money for their public goods? That was my interest at that time. And one of the things that, when we were doing research in this area, we learned about was just how widespread a particular form of violence was, and that's violence against elderly women accused of being witches. And this part of Tanzania, that's actually very common. So I was doing research there. I wasn't that familiar with that. I tried to learn about what that was coming from and what the issues were. When we collected our data, though, one of the things we decided to collect data on was crime, including these violent crimes against elderly women. And this is really where I started working on the issue. When we looked at the data, there was this very strong relationship between having a drought year locally in that village and the extent of that violence against elderly women.

And at first, it's like, wait, what's going on? How are these things connected? And really, that's where it started with me, very much at like the village level, at the micro level. But there was this strong relationship, and the more I investigated it, the more it made a certain kind of sense, because in years of drought, in a rural part of western Tanzania where resources are scarce, people can become quite desperate in those years.

GYUDE MOORE:
This makes sense, especially when you look at population trends outside of most places, especially in industrialized world. Population has stabilized in some places actually declining. Whereas in sub-Saharan Africa, for many of the countries there, the population continues to grow. We've seen in parts of the Sahel where this constant clash between farmers and herders. And would you say that what we're seeing in parts of Mali, parts of northern Nigeria, parts of Niger, when these two groups of herders and farmers come into contact with each other and the conflict that emerges, that part of it is influenced by the changing climate?

TED MIGUEL:
Yeah, there's actually new research just in the last two years studying in West Africa, the farmer-herder contact point. Multiple studies now have shown that in years of high temperatures and low rain, those kinds of clashes are much more likely to occur. And again, it makes sense when there are herders that need to find grazing land. When it is hotter and drier, it's harder to find that land. They may need to range into new territory, and in a period where there is rapid population growth, there's just kind of less land that's not being cultivated. A lot of the patterns historically that the herding and pastoralist groups use may not work as well anymore when it is getting drier and hotter, when there is more population that's cultivating land. And I think the downside or the risk is that it isn't like these problems are going to go away. With warming, probably they're just going to accelerate. And with rapid population growth in the Sahel, they're just going to accelerate. And I think there's always actually been high levels of conflict in Sahel countries.

If we look at Chad, Sudan, and Somalia across that belt, but it's actually spread. It's been a period in the last five or six years with a lot of instability, coups, growing insurgency. And I think the fear is that climate is playing a role in generating that kind of cycle of climate conflict and poverty. I'm very concerned about that. That may be the region of the world that I'd be most concerned about the trends.

GYUDE MOORE:
Without question. I was on a working group for looking at West Africa and threats from the Sahel pushing down toward the coast of West African states. It's hard not to make the connections between the two, and this is why some of your research is important. In one of your papers, you mentioned that warmer temperatures during like an El Nino showed more civil wars globally. But during cold temperatures, there were less civil wars. Could you talk a little bit about this?

TED MIGUEL:
Yeah, that's research that we definitely discuss in our survey articles. And it's very important research. Actually, we're in an El Nino cycle right now. I'm sitting here in California and we're having like crazy amounts of rain. We lost power the other day. Hundreds of thousands of people have as well. So these climate stresses are affecting our lives very directly. In tropical regions of the world, effects are stronger, and there's also fewer resources in a lot of countries to deal with the damage to infrastructure. So I think that combination is really dangerous. And in the research study that you mentioned, which was led by my colleague Sol Hsiang at Berkeley, they show this as a global phenomenon. It affects sub-Saharan African countries. It also affects some Asian countries that the risk of organized violence, civil conflict goes up a lot in these warm El Nino years. There are over 100 studies documenting that association between elevated temperatures and violence at different levels.

So I think it's gone from being something that was kind of an early bit of research to being a much more established scientific fact. So many studies in sub-Saharan Africa, in Asia, there are studies in Latin America, there are studies on crime in the US and Australia. So it really does feel like human societies become more unstable and violent when we're really outside of our long-term climate norm in terms of temperatures. Again, that's what's so worrying about the next 30, 40 years is all the projections are we're going to continue to warm. So how are we going to deal with those stresses? In some of the poorer regions of the world, including parts of sub-Saharan Africa, societies will be under a lot of pressure.

GYUDE MOORE:
Yeah. So this brings us to the new projections. It appears that keeping global temperatures under 1.5, it seems like we've blown that. It looks now like it's going to be fighting to keep it under two degrees Celsius. But your research, the two-degree Celsius rise in temperature by 2050, it could be related to a 40% increase in violence in the continent. And can you talk us through this?

TED MIGUEL:
That research is important and we've gotten some attention for it, even from the UN, IPCC, and others. The way we came up with those estimates is we look at historical estimates of the relationship between extreme temperature or temperature anomalies and violence. And when you do that, you do find that strong relationship I talked about. So then if you take those existing historical relationships and you project them forward to the next 30 years or so with the projected temperature changes, then you get some sort of estimate about how much more violent the world could be, under the assumption that those historical relationships stay more or less the same. It's still possible there could be new forms of adaptation. There could be drought-resistant crops. There could be new policies or institutions that emerge that really help us adapt to a warming climate. So we want to be optimistic and hope there can be those changes. But if the historical relationships from the last few decades continue for the next few decades, a warming of about two degrees Celsius could be associated with a very large increase in conflict risk in that range of, say, 30 to 40%, which is very substantial, especially in regions of the world.

We were just talking about the Sahel, for instance, where the rate of conflict in countries in the Sahel and in some other sub-Saharan African countries are already pretty high, among the highest in the world. So climate is putting stress on economies that are already short on resources. These are already countries in the Sahel, for instance, that start at very high temperatures. Every additional degree Celsius is getting them even warmer, even drier. And so the risk could really accelerate. And again, the last five, six years in the Sahel could be part of that trend, which is very worrying.

GYUDE MOORE:
Yeah, I think some of the countries there, your Mali, your Burkina Faso, your Chad, they're pretty large in terms of area with vast expanses over which the state has to provide basic resources. Sometimes even in the best of times, the government in the capital lacks the resources to provide those kinds of services to people across the country. Imagine now, with things getting worse at the moment, the population continues to grow. And has there been a similar connection between flooding and violence, especially intergroup violence?

TED MIGUEL:
There have been studies globally looking at, not drought, but excess rainfall. And there's some from Brazil. I think most of the research has focused more on high temperatures, drying, and drought. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, southern Africa, Malawi, Mozambique, countries there have been hit in the last few years by huge storms and flooding. You can imagine how destructive those are for the economy. So I think there could be a similar dynamic, but in a lot of countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the starting point is relatively low levels of rainfall and relatively high temperatures. The acceleration of temperature increases and less rainfall and more aridity. That's the concern most people focus on. But for certain subregions, I think flooding is very important. We've seen that.

GYUDE MOORE:
I haven't been in government myself and just know how under-resourced most of the governments are. We were talking about, say, increase in temperature that caused crop failures, increase in temperature that encourages the rise of pests. We saw the locust infestations. We've talked an increase in temperature that pit groups against each other to compete for diminishing and reducing resources. And because of this, it means that the continent is really exposed. But under-resourced governments mean the ability to adapt and respond is also significantly diminished. What is the connection between the two of, one, the direct impact of rising temperatures, but also the low resources available to governments to respond? How is the interaction of these two contributing to this phenomenon that you observe in your research?

TED MIGUEL:
I think it's hugely important. There's now several studies. There's one study using data from Mexico, one from India, one from Indonesia that show that large-scale social protection programs, and in some cases, those are cash transfers, in some cases, those are employment programs, greatly weaken the association between extreme climate and forms of violence. For instance, one of the most famous ones is in India that found that in parts of eastern India where there's what's called the Naxalite insurgency, it's a kind of Maoist-inspired insurgency. Those insurgent attacks and violence respond very closely to temperature and rainfall, similar to what we see in a lot of sub-Saharan African countries. But when the government of India a couple of decades ago rolled out the world's largest employment protection program that guaranteed a certain number of days of unskilled labor for workers in rural areas, it's a huge program called NREGA, that association went to almost zero. When the government could step in with the resources to say, hey, even in these desperate times, poor people are going to have a job.

Then in those bad years, you didn't see the uptick in insurgent violence. Maybe because people weren't as desperate, their economic circumstances were improved. This is research by Thiemo Fetzer. And that kind of example is inspiring. And then there's related examples in Mexico and Indonesia, to the extent that sub-Saharan African countries can kind of copy those approaches and say, look, in difficult years or desperate years, we need more of a social safety net. Maybe this is a place for donors who have more resources to say, look, in the kind of partnership we have with African governments, this could be very effectively targeted. You could also objectively define which years are the bad years in terms of drought, in terms of temperature. Those are scientifically objective criteria. You could even imagine something formulaic. We've written about what we call rapid conflict prevention support, RCPS. The idea is if there's this formula where we know in difficult years, governments shouldn't wait until after the conflict starts.

They shouldn't wait until after the famine happens. It's much harder to solve it. Then when those climatic conditions are worsening, that is the time to come in with assistance for programs that provide a safety net. The research evidence is consistent that that would be a very good way forward. A lot of African governments may be under-resourced. They're struggling with priorities, trying to provide education, health. They're working against almost impossible odds sometimes. But donors could actually target assistance in that way.

GYUDE MOORE:
This is an important point, stability in the economic situation. That itself might be part of what triggers that, what reduces the association between the increase in violence and that. That you're not responding to it as it is happening. People know in advance that it's going to be bad, but there's going to be some sort of respite. Government is going to come in or partners are going to come in.

TED MIGUEL:
People think about their futures in a sophisticated way. And if they know the safety net is there, it could really change their choices. There are a couple of examples, but I think the most famous one in sub-Saharan Africa is Botswana, which since the 80s has had very effective drought response programs. Now, we know Botswana is a relatively wealthy country. They've used their resources in part to build that kind of safety net. Botswana has had a lot of stability, even though they are in a very arid part of the world. And they are hit by a lot of extreme climate, but they've kind of used their resources in terms of drought response programs I think very effectively. The other approach to this is based on new research on Sahel and the herder-farmer conflicts. In that analysis, they find two key findings. One was that in extreme weather years, you do see more violence. But there was a second finding, which is across the Sahel and across the regions where we see a lot of this farmer-herder conflict, there's actually been a lot of variation in how democratic those governments have been in the last 30 years.

If we think about even a country like Mali or Niger, etc, there's been more and less democratic periods. I think, sadly, is one of the least democratic periods. After the coups, people came to power claiming they were going to deal with the violence effectively. But in the data, what comes through is in periods that are more democratic, those climate shocks are less likely to translate into violence. The idea there is if there is a more representative government, there may be more room for deals, compromise, negotiation. Political parties can get involved. Some people claim if there's a strong man or the military, they're going to be so tough on violence. They really lack the mechanisms and the information to craft effective policy. That's a finding on that particular type of conflict. But it does speak to the possibility that democratic representation and voice could be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

GYUDE MOORE:
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things we haven't spoken about is how all of this has an impact on migration and movements of large numbers of people. As resources dry up, we cannot expect people to remain in the places where the resources no longer exist and starve. So people are going to move looking for resources. And sometimes these movements, especially of large numbers of people, create conflict in the new places they're moving to because, again, as I noted, this is a continent where the population has continued to grow. Has your research seen some of this?

TED MIGUEL:
Yeah, there's a growing body of research highlighting how important climate conditions can be for that. There's some interesting findings, some of which are a little counterintuitive. In the very short run, extreme climate events do precipitate migration, but more moderate drying, more moderate drops in temperature sometimes lead to less migration, because people may not even have the money or resources to move. So the relationship is complicated. And there's a difference between extreme crisis versus the kind of like every year is getting a little worse. And then sometimes people are stuck in a place that may not have a great economic future if agriculture is going to get a lot less productive in the next ten years. Conflict also has a feedback effect, because once there is conflict, that really changes where people can move. Going back to the West African Sahel, for places in Burkina, Mali, Niger now, rising insurgency and conflict really affects the decisions a lot of people are making in rural areas where it's safe to go work.

In many parts of West Africa, of course, as you know, long-standing movements to the capital or to countries closer to the coast for labor migration and conflict can make it more dangerous to make those moves over time. So there's a lot of discussion about how climate change and economic distress may affect migration out of Africa into Europe, the US, other regions. But the vast majority of migrants are internal to their country and their region. That's where most people are moving. And those are the most important issues for Africans.

GYUDE MOORE:
A third of the continent's population living in landlocked countries, people are moving into countries that may not have significantly higher resources than the ones they left. And so that itself creates room for policy responses at different levels at the global level, regional, subregional, national, and even at the very local level. Though the Council of Parties, when it comes to climate, this is the global forum for us to be able to solve this. Have we seen, your research, this element of climate, especially in conflict, begin to make its way into COP and the discussions and how to respond? Because here we're responding to sea level rise. We're responding to rising temperature. Are we also included in the COP responses, what we do with the impact on conflict and violence?

TED MIGUEL:
I know that the issue has been discussed. There's a lot more awareness of that connection than there was 10 or 20 years ago. The big concern with the COP responses and the kind of response of the global community, in general, is just the limited resources that are dedicated to solving these problems. For instance, even this notion of anticipatory assistance or rapid conflict prevention support, that would require serious resources. It's not enough to have the idea. There need to be billions of dollars put behind it. And those resources aren't there. It's been a challenging time with the pandemic first changing priorities and spending. And then global conflicts in some other regions getting a lot of attention and funding. You were mentioning the importance of migration before. A big problem with conflict in sub-Saharan Africa is just the number of displaced people. It takes resources to help those people live their lives and get either integrated into new societies or go back home. The resources for refugees and displaced people have really suffered in the last two years with the conflict in Ukraine, now with the conflict in Gaza.

Recently, I've been doing some work with partners, UNHCR, the World Bank, and the Government of Kenya and Kenyan partners working on the issue of how to help refugees who are living in Kenya and integrate them into Kenyan society and improve their lives. It's a huge issue in Kenya because they're hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from South Sudan, from Somalia, elsewhere. Even the most basic thing, like food rations for refugees, have been cut a lot in the last couple of years. So when we think about conflict and climate and conflict, those are the front-line victims of a lot of conflicts. And the global community isn't doing enough to provide food for them, let alone all these more sophisticated responses. So back to COP and IPCC, that would be the most basic thing for the international community to do. There are committed actors, but it's just not enough. The resources are not enough from the international community right now.

GYUDE MOORE:
This is a fair point. I mean, one of the things that I say is that the international community can focus its attention on one or two things at the same time, not more than that. And sometimes these slow-burning problems move down the line. Like, for example, the conflict in Gaza, more people are paying attention to that globally now than the conflict in Ukraine. We've spoken a lot about this as well. But the Democratic Republic of Congo has been riven by conflict itself, is subject to pressures from climate. There are the Great Lakes region as far as Madagascar. They too have had issues with climate. And then in East Africa, parts of Ethiopia, parts of Kenya, almost five years of successive failures of the rain that sort of converted farmlands into desolate places where people could no longer make a living. I spoke again about the locusts and infestation. There are all of these things, and the interaction of these things on dynamics between people and movements could then lead to conflict.

And so I think your research is really important. One of the things that we do here at Lagos to Mombasa is to highlight this research, especially if it has implications for Africa. So one last thing is, if you had a wand that you could wave and there's a policy thing that just something that would go away, some big change that will happen simply by the waving of your wand, what would that be, Ted Miguel?

TED MIGUEL:
Well, I'm going to rule out waving the wand and saying, I wish the world were two or three degrees cooler. I mean, I think for me, we just haven't had enough creativity in policy responses on conflict, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. So for me, the wand would be to really get the high-level policy makers from sub-Saharan African countries, their leadership together with donors, to dedicate resources to put policies together, just getting people to put the resources behind new policies. We just haven't seen enough creativity in this area. There is a lot of new research and thinking about particular types of social safety nets, institutional responses. I want to close the loop between those ideas and the government and donor resources. We need to try new approaches now, and it's just going to get worse.

GYUDE MOORE:
Thank you, Ted Miguel, again for joining us today. Thanks again for listening to Lagos to Mombasa: The Trans-Africa podcast from the Center for Global Development. Very special thanks to the CGD podcast team Kia Muleta, Stephanie Donahue, Jubilee Ahazie, and (UNKNOWN) for making it happen. Lagos to Mombasa is available on the CGD Podcast stream, so make sure you subscribe to the CGD Podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Remember, you can check out all of our great research on Africa and more at cgdev.org. That's cgdev.org. See you next time. (MUSIC PLAYS)