Chapter Three: Darfur: The First Modern Climate-Change Conflict

Abstract

Climate change has been a key factor in the rise and fall of societies and states from prehistory to the recent fighting in the Sudanese state of Darfur. It drives instability, conflict and collapse, but also expansion and reorganisation. The ways in which cultures have met the climate challenge provide object lessons for how the modern world can handle the new security threats posed by unprecedented global warming.

Combining historical precedents with current thinking on state stability, internal conflict and state failure suggests that overcoming cultural, social, political and economic barriers to successful adaptation to a changing climate is the most important factor in avoiding instability in a warming world. The countries which will face increased risk are not necessarily the most fragile, nor those which will suffer the greatest physical effects of climate change.

The global security threat posed by fragile and failing states is well known. It is in the interest of the world's more affluent countries to take measures both to reduce the degree of global warming and climate change and to cushion the impact in those parts of the world where climate change will increase that threat. Neither course of action will be cheap, but inaction will be costlier. Providing the right kind of assistance to the people and places it is most needed is one way of reducing the cost, and understanding how and why different societies respond to climate change is one way of making that possible.

Notes

‘Sudan (Darfur): Historical Background)’, IISS Armed Conflict Database (ACD), http://www.iiss.org/publications/armed-conflict-database/.

United Nations Environment Programme, Sudan: Post-conflict Environment Assessment (Nairobi: UNEP, 2007), p. 75.

Ban Ki-moon, ‘A Climate Culprit in Darfur’.

For a transcript see http://forumpolitics.com/blogs/2007/03/17/an-inconvienttruth-transcript/.

Paul Reynolds, ‘Security Council Takes on Global Warming’, BBC News, 18 April 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6559211.stm.

‘Sudan – Complex Emergency’, USAID Situation Report no. 4, 5 February 2010, http://www.usaid.gov/locations/subsaharan_africa/sudan/.

Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (London: Hurst, 2005), p. 4; ACD, ‘Sudan (Darfur): Historical Background’; Bakri Osman Saeed, ‘Preface’, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Conflict in Darfur, Conference Proceedings, Khartoum, December 2004 (Addis Ababa: University for Peace Africa Programme, 2006), p. 8.

Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, p. 5; Saeed, ‘Preface’, p. 8.

Abduljabbar Abdalla Fadul, ‘Natural Resources Management for Sustainable Peace in Darfur’, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Conflict in Darfur, p. 42.

Nick Brooks, ‘Climate Change, Drought and Pastoralism in the Sahel’, discussion note for the World Initiative on Sustainable Pastoralism, November 2006, available at http://nickbrooks.org/publications/WISP_CCAP_Find_en_v2.pdf

Nick Brooks, ‘Drought in the African Sahel: Long Term Perspectives and Future Prospects’, Tyndall Centre Working Paper No. 61, October 2004, http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/ publications/working_papers/wp61.pdf, pp. 5–7; McCann, ‘Climate and Causation in African History’; A. Mayor et al., ‘Population Dynamics and Paleoclimate over the Past 3000 Years in the Dogon Country, Mali’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, vol. 24, 2005, pp. 25–61.

UNEP, Sudan: Post-Conflict Environment Assessment, p. 59; Kevane and Gray, ‘Darfur: Rainfall and Conflict’, p. 2.

Brooks, ‘Drought in the African Sahel: Long Term Perspectives and Future Prospects’, pp. 1–2. Brooks's data run to 2002.

Wassila M. Thiaw, ‘Recent Climate Anomalies in the Sahel: Natural Variability or Climate Change?, CLIVAR Focus on Africa, http://www.clivar.org/organization/vacs/docs/Sahel3.pdf, p. 1.

Ibid.; Brooks, ‘Drought in the African Sahel: Long Term Perspectives and Future Prospects’, pp. 19–20; 4AR WG1, p. 866.

Kevane and Gray, ‘Darfur: Rainfall and Conflict’, p. 6.

Christian Webersik, ‘Sudan Climate Change and Security Factsheet’, United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, Climate Change Facts Sheets Series 2008/2, http://www.ias.unu.edu/resource_centre/Sudan_Climate Change Facts Sheets Series_2008_2_lowres.pdf, p. 2 (Fig. 2); http://www.yale.edu/gsp/gis-files/darfur/abstract_veg_increases.html.

‘Long-term Increases in Vegetation Accompanying the Genocide in Darfur, 2003–2007’, Yale University Genocide Studies Program, http://www.yale.edu/gsp/gis-files/darfur/abstract_veg_increases.html.

UNEP, Sudan: Post-Conflict Environment Assessment, pp. 81–2, citing a 2003 study.

For details of the local conflictresolution mechanisms and institutions, see Yagoub Abdalla Mohamed, ‘Land Tenure, Land use and Conflicts in Darfur’, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Conflict in Darfur, pp. 59–68.

R.S. O'Fahey, ‘Conflict in Darfur: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Conflict in Darfur, p. 26.

Ibid., p. 42.

UNEP, Sudan: Post-Conflict Environment Assessment, pp. 81–3.

‘Sudan (SPLM/A and NDA): Historical Background’, ACD; ‘Sudan (Darfur): Historical Background’, ACD.

Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, pp. 47–56.

‘Sudan (Darfur): Historical Background’, ACD.

Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, pp. 74–5.

Kevane and Gray, ‘Darfur: Rainfall and Conflict’, quotation at p. 8.

Marshall B. Burke et al., ‘Warming Increases the Risk of Civil War in Africa’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, no. 49, 8 December 2009, pp. 20,670–74. Temperature data were not available to Kevane and Gray; Kevane subsequently acknowledged the difference between the temperature trend and precipitation step change, although he had reservations about the adequacy of the data for small-scale regional analysis. Michael Kevane; ‘Two Graphs of Rainfall and Temperature in Darfur’, Understanding Sudan: Commentary, http://sudancommentary.blogspot.com/2009/11/two-graphs-of-rainfalland-temperature.

Mike De Souza, ‘Darfur War, Climate Change Linked’, Ottawa Citizen, 17 April 2007, http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=875bb083-b8c1-4178-9518-db3e5216a903.

CNA Corporation, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, p. 16.

Tor A. Benjaminsen, ‘Does Supply- Induced Scarcity Drive Violent Conflicts in the African Sahel? The Case of the Tuareg Rebellion in Northern Mali’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 45, no. 6, 2008, pp. 819–36.

4AR WG1, p. 299.

Kevane and Gray, ‘Darfur: Rainfall and Conflict’, p. 2.

Ibid., pp. 2, 5; UNEP, Sudan: Post- Conflict Environment Assessment, p. 82.

The discussion in the next two paragraphs follows de Waal, ‘Is Climate Change the Culprit for Darfur?’, unless otherwise indicated.

Mary E. King and Mohamed Awad Oswan, ‘Executive Summary’, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Conflict in Darfur, p. 20; O'Fahey, ‘Conflict in Darfur: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’, p. 25.

A. Gianni et al., ‘Oceanic Forcing of Sahel Rainfall on Interannual to Interdecadal Timescales’, Science, vol. 306, no. 5,647, 7 November 2003, pp. 1,027–30; John C. Fyfe, ‘Extratropical Southern Hemisphere Cyclones: Harbingers of Climate Change?’, Journal of Climate, vol. 16, no. 17, September 2003, pp. 2,802–5; Brooks, ‘Drought in the African Sahel: Long Term Perspectives and Future Prospects’, pp. 9–22; Flannery, The Weather Makers, p. 124; 4AR WG1, p. 715.

4AR WG1, p. 256, 299.

Homer-Dixon, ‘Cause and Effect’, SSRC Blogs, Climate and Environment: Making Sense of Darfur, http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2007/08/02/cause-and-effect (emphasis added).

Ibid.

De Waal, ‘Response to “Cause and Effect”‘, SSRC Blogs, Climate and Environment: Making Sense of Darfur, http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2007/08/02/cause-and-effect.

UNEP, Sudan: Post-Conflict Environment Assessment, p. 78.

Ibid., p. 80.

Ibid., p. 83.

Ibid., pp. 88, 95.