From 30 November to 12 December, the eyes of the world were on Paris as international leaders negotiated a strategy to address climate change. The resulting agreement, signed by all the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was widely hailed as a success. Tim Palmer, Royal Society research professor in climate physics, was quoted as saying ‘Paris has shown all countries of the world taking the climate threat seriously, and this is to be applauded.’ CNN’s John D. Sutter said that the agreement was a turning point ‘in historic ways that are almost impossible to overstate.’ President Obama himself was no less pleased with the agreement, saying ‘the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis.’
The agreement attempts to limit the overall increase in temperatures to under 2 degrees Celsius via a bottom-up approach using voluntary ‘nationally determined contributions.’ This approach makes it difficult to punish states who renege on their commitments, but it also provides the flexibility for states to gradually increase their commitment over time. So, problem solved, right?
Image courtesy of Max R – ooyooy, © 2006, some rights reserved.
Climate Security for Whom?
4,000 kilometres south of the Parisian meeting rooms where the agreement was finalised, in the Malian capital of Bamako, climate change looks a little different. The problem in Mali, and more broadly across the African Sahel, is not steadily rising temperatures: instead, increased climate variability has proven the greatest challenge. Deviations from the average rainfall have steadily increased across the region, simultaneously threatening both longer droughts and more widespread flooding. This puts strain on traditional farming methods and land usage, and making it more difficult to provide simple goods: water, food, and electricity.
These areas highlight the very real impact that climate change has already had on human security. And yet, the narrative following the Paris talks was one of triumphalism: according to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, ‘Paris delivered for the planet and for the poor.’ But while President Obama may argue that ‘full implementation of this agreement will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change,’ climate change is already making itself felt in the African Sahel.
As the next sections will demonstrate, climate change has had dire consequences for human security both in the Niger River basin and the neighbouring Lake Chad River Basin. The contrast between this reality and the triumphant narrative of the Paris agreement forces us to ask the question: for whom are we securing the climate?
Increasing Variability in the Niger River Basin
The Niger is the third longest river in Africa, draining over 2.2 million square kilometres and flowing through ten different countries. Its source is near the humid African coast near Guinea, but it then flows through the arid Malian Sahel before ending its journey in a delta in Nigeria. The river waters over 100 million people, and over 30 million live in its delta alone. Because its rainfall depends heavily on the West African Monsoon system, its rainfall is highly seasonal, with almost all of its rainfall occurring in only a few months of the year. The physical characteristics mean that the river is highly susceptible to climatic variability, and that this vulnerability is passed on to the people who live by it, up to 80 per cent of whom rely on subsistence agriculture or traditional fishing, depending on the location.
Climatic variability has translated to extreme weather in the Niger River Basin. Precipitation has trended downwards since 1900, but it has not done so consistently. According to the United Nations, there were 20 years of severe drought between 1970 and 1993, leading to widespread famine. On the other hand, rising flood waters in some years have smothered both farmland and crops, leading to insufficient food stocks. While it is unclear whether the region will become wetter or drier, future climate change is almost certain to lead to more extreme weather.
Climactic insecurity in the Niger River Basin is compounded by other factors. Mali, for instance, already imports large amounts of rice and wheat, while population is expected to grow by 75 per cent by 2030 across the five main riparian states. This growth, combined with diminishing water resources, has led to terse relations between farmers and pastoralists, with isolated conflict between the two groups becoming a more regular phenomenon. Chronic pollution downstream, caused by heavy water usage upstream, is often a grievance listed by rebel groups in the Niger Delta. The voluntary contributions of the Paris agreement do not do enough to alleviate the severe human security consequences of climate change in the Niger River Basin.
Climate and Violence by Lake Chad
The Lake Chad Basin stretches across seven countries, from the Algerian desert to Nigerian wetlands, and is home to over 30 million people. The lake covered 25,000km2 in 1963; now it covers less than 2,500km2, a reduction in area of over 90 per cent. A number of rivers feed the lake, which has no natural outlet to the sea. While the size of the lake does fluctuate during the year, its size has been trending consistently downwards. To resolve disputes, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria created the Lake Chad Basin Commission in 1964, but the organisation has been unable to halt the drop in water levels. The main economic activities in the area are subsidence farming and herding, which renders food production in the area highly susceptible to droughts. Combined with insufficient irrigation, the result of this shrinkage has been increasingly tenuous supplies of food.
Unsurprisingly, such environmental change has led to problems. According to the International Crisis Group, ‘[a]s living conditions continue to worsen, security challenges, ranging from theft and robbery to abduction and terror have increased, both within the affected countries and across their borders.’ Human security in the region is most threatened by the growing Boko Haram insurgency, based in Nigeria’s Borno State, which borders the lake.
Both United Nations officials (including Assistant Secretary General Toby Lanzer) and the states which border Lake Chad recognise that the Boko Haram insurgency has deeper social causes than the spread of radical Islamic extremism. Widespread poverty, famine, and lack of social opportunity are also factors. As the lake shrinks, it reduces the amount of arable land and renders irrigation infeasible for many small scale farmers. The drying-up of the area means that Nigeria’s decade of stable economic growth has had little effect on day-to-day lives in Borno State, feeding the marginalisation felt by the inhabitants of the area. Similar to the Niger River Basin, climate change has had a dramatic effect on human insecurity in the Lake Chad Basin, and is little addressed in the Paris talks.
Danger of Oversimplification
In all fairness, these narratives are oversimplifications: there is not a one to one correlation between climate change and social upheaval. Nor is climate change the only relevant factor. According to climate researchers Marisa Goulden and Roger Few, ‘dissociating the climate-related variables causing change in environmental, social, economic and political realities from other multiple variables which shape and influence local life remains a challenge… initiatives to support [climate] adaptation cannot afford to address climate-related problems alone.’ Even a singular outcome, such as food security, is tied to a huge number of inputs, of which climatic variability is only one. Water management, farmer-pastoralist dispute mechanisms, effective irrigation systems, and education initiatives, just to name a few variables, also play a role.
However, claims of oversimplification can go too far, as David Livingstone demonstrates in Foreign Policy. He argues that ‘the impulse to reduce conflict simply to matters of the weather, carries with it its own kind of moral danger.’ While it is true that conflict cannot just be reduced to a function of climate, it is not true that climate is unrelated to security. Livingstone argues against treating climate as a security issue, but he is only concerned with the the security of states. Climate has already had, and continues to have, a demonstrably harmful effect to the human security of populations living in the African Sahel. Moreover, political instability in the Sahel cannot simply be decoupled from climate change without the risk of decontextualizing conflict. Ignoring his other arguments, Livingstone’s claim that climate isn’t a security issue reinforces the need to ask the question: climate security for whom?
What Is the Paris Agreement Good For?
It would be unfair to criticise the Paris Agreement without placing it in its proper context. It is certainly better than nothing. Anything stricter than the voluntary contributions included in the agreement would have been unpalatable to several negotiating states, most notably the United States. A Republican congress has made clear its implacable opposition to any climate treaty: the chairman of the Senate committee responsible for environmental matters, Jim Inhofe (R-Ok.), argued that ‘the United States is not legally bound to any agreement setting emissions targets or any financial commitment to it without approval by Congress.’ In other words, the agreement requires his committee’s approval—which would be inconceivable, considering his record of climate change scepticism, virally demonstrated by the CSPAN video of the Senator in question attempting to disprove climate change by bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor.
The point is that this agreement was as strict as possible. Anything stricter would have been unable to pass through the American Congress, and without the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the deal would have been entirely ineffective. So while dependence on voluntary contributions might not be the most stringent way to structure a climate agreement, it is the best that could be done, given the circumstances. Joshua Busby, associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas—Austin argues that ‘the Paris agreement is based on a pragmatic appreciation of how the world works. In the absence of a world government, powerful states cannot be forced to take actions that they do not see as being in their interest.’
To criticise the Paris agreement for depending on voluntary contributions is unfair: given Republican opposition in the American Congress, it is the best that could be negotiated. However, a much more valid criticism is that it ignores the plight of those already affected by climate change. While the effects of climate insecurity may be most visibly observed in the African Sahel, it is by no means the only area where climate has become a threat. Small island states, such as Tuvalu, risk sinking beneath the rising waves. The agreement did include guarantees of funding to developing states struggling to address the impact of climate change, but such funding also depended on voluntary contributions and is likely to be insufficient.
By focusing on the climate concerns of the advanced economies, rather than the effects of climate variability on millions of people already threatened by climate, the Paris agreement forces us to consider for whom are we saving the planet? Certainly the agreement helps prevent the worst effects of climate change from impacting the advanced industrialised states, but it does little to help those in the Global South who already feel its effects.