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?
This is an interesting first post and you delve straight in to a thorny question about the relationship between water shortages and violent conflict. It's good to do so and you might well spend the rest of your blog interrogating this key question. You have done well to recognise early that it may act as a contributing factor but water scarcity alone may not necessarily prompt violent conflict. Often there are a multitude of other historical, cultural, and economic influences and disentangling the relative contributions can be tricky. Be good to see you explore this in future posts.
ReplyDeleteWhat does the other literature on this topic say about water scarcity and conflict? Do you think the relationship was definitely proven by the geospatial analysis, or the statistics were interpolated to find that relationship?
ReplyDeleteHi Jake, thank you for your question!
ReplyDeleteThe literature on this topic is (of course) divided. The author of this article also presents previous research and many other scientists argue that there is no relationship between water scarcity and conflict. Many other authors also argue that it is very difficult to prove the correlation.
But Nina von Uexkull used different statistical models and control variables to check her results. For example, she took into consideration that economic, political, and ethnic reasons are also important and created models to show the correlation between these variables and conflicts.
She also checked temporal and spatial patterns. If there is a region with an ongoing conflict and there is for example one single drought in this time, her research will not assume that there is a correlation between water scarcity and conflicts.
I hope my response is useful for you!