Relationship between water scarcity and conflicts
My blog is about water and development in Sub-Saharan Africa and I will focus on conflicts which are about water scarcity in Sub-Saharan Africa in general. For my blog entries it does not matter if the conflict is a small-scale (local conflicts in a village) or a large-scale (international) one. It also does not matter if they are caused by natural phenomenons, the nation state policy or local conditions.
In my first blog entry, I want to clarify the relationship between water scarcity and conflicts. Is there actually any relationship? Why and how do conflicts develop out of water scarcity?
For answering these questions, I read an article written by Nina von Uexkull which was published in 2014. It is called 'Sustained drought, vulnerability and civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa' and it is about the question, if there is any relationship between sustained droughts and civil conflicts in the mentioned area in the time from 1989 to 2008 (VON UEXKULL 2014: 15).
Approximately one third of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa lives in drought-prone areas and due to climate change, stress on water resources will increase and population will face new challenges. So far, most of the households in Sub-Saharan Africa developed different strategies to prepare for and cope with droughts. Lots of people migrate during droughts or you support each other in your community with the help of social networks. But especially during longer droughts these strategies often fail and people are forced to sell their key productive assets. Once someone reached this point, even a period of normal rainy seasons may not be enough for recovering (VON UEXKULL 2014: 16).
But where is the connection between water scarcity, or in this certain case sustained droughts, and civil conflicts?
So far, there has not been scientific evidence for a link between climate variability and civil conflicts. But the author of the article tries to show that there is one. As already mentioned, there are lots of problems with which a person in Sub-Saharan Africa has to struggle during sustained droughts (loss of key productive essets, mental problems, reduced crop productivity). All of these problems, of course, change the way of thinking of a person. The consequences of a drought can therefore, for example, lead to increasing grievances. This kind of anger can be a very fertile ground for a civil conflict, especially when there are already local tensions or communal rivalry a conflict can develop very fast.
The author of the article tried to demonstrate the link between droughts and conflicts with geospatial analysis. For this demonstration she analysed annual observations of grid cells. So she included all intrastate armed conflicts from 1989 to 2008 and all droughts in this time in her analysis and compared the relationship between time and space. The result is that droughts substantially increase the risk that a subnational region experiences a civil conflict. In most cases civil conflict events did not take place only because of droughts but droughts mostly added fuel to already existing conflicts and tensions. These results are especially significant in agricultural regions (VON UEXKULL 2014: 21).
In conclusion, the article showed that there is a relationship between droughts and civil conflicts, especially in agricultural regions.
But what does that mean for the future? How can we resolve such conflicts and how do they develop in detail?
Please feel free to ask any questions or criticize! What do you think about the relationship between water scarcity and (civil) conflicts?
