By David Njagi
Nairobi — Former UK foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, linked climate change to the growing conflicts in Africa, during his five-day visit to the continent. Hunt stopped in Nigeria and raised concern about worsening poverty driven by climate change, and how this is becoming a significant contributor to instability in some countries.
He is not the first to highlight how the climate crisis is affecting peacebuilding efforts and he won’t be the last – in 2019 The Economist published a piece that said “as global average temperatures rise, dry regions will get drier and wet regions wetter, with more extremes and greater variability”. How this affects Africa, it further argued, was because it worsens poverty where, for instance, food crop growers struggling to adopt may find themselves locked in conflict with pastoralists when they herd their livestock into village farms or water sources.
And when such climate driven conflicts flare up, food insecurity balloons too, according to Joy Ada Onyesoh, the International Board President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Read more…
