Managing Climate, Peace and Security Risks from the Borderlands of the West African Sahel Belt

The CPS-WASahel project examines locally driven regional stabilization efforts in the contexts of the Lake Chad (LC) and Liptako-Gourma (LG) regions of the Sahel by scrutinizing whether and how such efforts have contributed to preventing and managing climate change-related peace and security risks. The two-year research project is funded by The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) through the Cross-border Conflict Evidence, Policy, and Trends (XCEPT) research program.

Background

The Lake Chad (LC) and Liptako-Gourma (LG) regions are both hotspots of violent conflicts, prominence of violent extremism and armed organisations, large scale population displacement, vulnerability to climate change, and severe gender inequality.

Women and children are disproportionately impacted by violence, with women and girls facing greater risk of gender-based violence including domestic violence, forced marriages, exploitation, trafficking, and denial of resources, opportunities and assistance. Climate change also has a disproportional impact on women and girls in the LC and LG regions.

As a way to mitigate some of these compex challenges, local communities, civil society organisations (CSOs), national authorities, regional bodies and international organisations are implementing several initiatives and programmes to address the complex and multifaceted climate change-related conflict dynamics in the region.

One particularly multifaceted such effort has been the development of the Regional Stabilization Strategy (RSS), now known as the Regional Strategy for the Stabilization, Recovery and Resilience (RS-SRR), which was implemented in the Lake Chad Basin in 2018. The strategy is addressing some of the complex security, humanitarian and development challenges in the region and also touches on the role of climate change as a contextual element crucial to the conflict and security dynamic in the region. Related efforts have been made in the LG regions.

Goals and Objectives

The CPS-WASahel research project sets out to examine the effects and implications of the Regional Stabilisation Strategy (RSS) response framework adopted in the Lake Chad Basin in 2018 and its equivalent policies in the Liptako-Gourma area. By so doing the overarching goal of the project is to extract insights into the factors that influence effectiveness, and to identify elements that could be used to help guide future similar response initiatives also beyond the contexts of Lake Chad Basin and the Liptako-Gourma area.

In order to achieve these goals and objectives, the project seeks to answer the following main research question: has the implementation of the RSS+ been effective (or not) in contributing to preventing and managing climate change-related peace and security risks in both the LC and LG contexts, if so how and in what ways?

The CPS-WASahel project is led by researchers at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) including Research Professor Cedric de Coning (PI) as well as the Senior Researchers, Minoo Koefoed, Andrew E. Yaw Tchie, and Thor Olav Iversen. Junior researcher Ingvild Brox Brodtkorb will also work on the project.

The consortium furthermore includes the collaborating partners Professor Freedom Onuoha from the University of Nigeria and Professor Saibou Issa from the University of Yaounde (Cameroon), Dr. Thomas Gonzales and Dr. Dirk Bruin from the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at Vrije University Brussels, in addition to Dr. Nataliia Gerasymenko, Msc. Louise Lieberknecht, and MA. Natalia Skripnikova from GRID-Arendal.

The project will also work closely with ten researchers from the LC and the LG regions with granular expert insights concerning conflict dynamics on the ground, in addition to proficiency in local languages, cultural sensitivity, and other contextual dynamics essential to capture the actual local effects of the regional stabilization strategies and policies implemented in these regions.