Thread by @ThreshedThought

There is an absolute disaster waiting to happen over the next twenty years. A thread on climate change and conflict.

I say waiting to happen ... I actually mean already happening, and going to get much much worse.

Let's look at the Sahel - it's the most obvious example of this dynamic, but there are others.

By Sahel, I mean all of it - basically the furthest western point to the furthers eastern on the continent of Africa, so from Senegal to Somalia.

This band passes through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea to Somalia.

(Yes we can argue about which countries are in or out of the Sahel but this is a good starter for ten)

This is the region of Africa where the desert meets the jungle (via savannah), Islam meets Christianity, and herders meet settled farmers. It is a zone of transition.

And it is an area that has always been poor; and the governments have been pretty rubbish.

By some counts the countries along that band have had an average of 6 or 7 military coups/takeovers EACH since independence in the (roughly) 1960's

And so this hasn't always been the most peaceful place in the world, but it has been relatively stable.

But this has now changed.

Now - EVERY SINGLE one of the Sahel countries - from west to east - is engaged in some sort of conflict. And every single one of them is being exacerbated by desertification, water use, land use, agricultural collapse, flash flooding:

Basically the effects of Climate Change

(Some of these conflicts include: the Sahel conflict involving multiple countries, Boko Haram/ISWAP, Dafur, Sudan, Ethiopian civil war, Ethiopia/Sudan/Egypt Nile Crisis, various Somali conflicts, etc.)

Partly this is because of the aforementioned stuff - being poor with a rubbish government makes it hard to adapt to the tidal wave of changes that climate change brings

But there is another much simpler reason: the Sahel is warming at 1.5-2x the rate of the rest of the planet.

So a two-degree average rise (really this seems to be the best case scenario if we pull lots of rabbits out of lots of hats) means 3-4 degrees in the Sahel.

3-4 degrees is enough to collapse the already-fragile ecosystems.

To take the most extreme example, probably the worst ecological crisis in Africa is Lake Chad:

It has disappeared by over 90% since the 1960s. 30 million people rely on it for water.

And this kind of leads us to a/the conclusion ...

There are millions of people already fleeing these conflicts - 4 million from the Sahel, another 2 million from Lake Chad/Boko Haram, Dafur/Sudan, several million from Somalia. I dunno - let's say 10 million from the region.

What does this look like after twice the amount of warming that we have had now?

We are currently at 1.2 degrees of warming. What does it look like at 2 degrees of warming?

The Sahara is already expanding southwards into this zone by 500m PER YEAR. Does this rate increase?

Will Lake Chad exist in 2040? Where will those 40m go to feed themselves?

I have to say - I don't see the wholescale policy effort required for a crisis of this magnitude.

I mean finally we are slowly getting our act together on net zero, decarbonisation etc.

But Climate Change is already causing/exacerbating conflicts, and this will get much much worse, in just a few short years (say twenty or thirty).

What's the plan?

And as you cast your eye along the Sahel land, you do see lots of western countries involved - either through the UN, or on their own. But they seem to be doing one of two things - fighting Islamists (which seems to me to be like treating the symptoms rather than the causes) ...

... and stopping migrants from getting to Europe. This also seems a bit symptoms focussed if you ask me.

At the moment, the Sahel countries make up about 6% of world pop. By 2050, they will be about 10% of world pop (about 950m).

Where is the grand strategic plan when 10% of the world's population can't live in their own countries?