By Jean-Pierre A.
More frequent droughts, floods, and prolonged water stress are intensifying patterns of instability and conflict across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, underscoring serious implications for international peace and security.
This was revealed in a report launched by the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) and Bodhi, a global research firm; on the sidelines of the just-concluded Munich Security Conference, a high-level global forum on security matters. The report’s findings underscore that climate adaptation in fragile and conflict-affected regions is no longer a peripheral development issue but a core requirement for global peace, stability, and resilience, GCA noted in a news release.
The study titled , Climate Adaptation and Security in the Sahel and Horn of Africa, offers a data-driven analysis of how climate hazards intersect with conflict and governance challenges.
“Across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, climate change has become one of the most destabilizing forces of our time,” said Macky Sall, former Senegal’s president and Chair of GCA and Professor Patrick V. Verkooijen, President & CEO of GCA in the report’s foreword.
The paper analyses statistical evidence and qualitative insights to better understand how adaptation contributes to peace and stability. The analysis covers 18 countries across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, combining quantitative, spatial and qualitative methods to identify where and how adaptation can be positioned as a security investment.
According the GCA report, the climate-security nexus across both regions, floods and droughts are the climate hazards most consistently associated with conflict incidents, whereas storms show a negative correlation. “This suggests that prolonged drought and flood stress, rather than short- lived events, drive instability,”
“Areas with higher numbers of people in need, larger rural populations and weaker coping capacity are more prone to conflict,” explains, GCA in a news release.
Conflict-climate hotspots identified through GIS analysis include Conflict-Flood: Centre-Nord (Burkina Faso), Afar and Oromia (Ethiopia), Garissa (Kenya), Tillaberi (Niger), Borno (Nigeria), and South Darfur (Sudan). Conflict-Drought:Boucle du Mouhoun (BurkinaFaso), Afar (Ethiopia),Mandera (Kenya),Gao(Mali).
The qualitative analysis also revealed that community-led initiatives across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa further illustrated how adaptation generates peace dividends.
For instance, water management programs in Mauritania, Niger, and Chad consistently show reductions in local conflict reports when communities jointly manage water points and grazing access.
Equally, the Jowhar Off-Stream Storage Program in Somalia demonstrates how pairing flood control infrastructure with strengthened local governance and women’s cooperatives has turned irrigation canals into locally recognized “peace corridors.”
According to the report, ecosystem and rangeland restoration in Kenya’s Laikipia and Somalia’s Afgoye corridor combine reforestation and solar-powered irrigation with shared resource management systems, helping reduce tensions between herders and farmers.
Furthermore, women and youth-led initiatives in Mali, Mauritania, and Lake Chad show how “linking market gardening, microfinance groups, and land-restoration efforts contributes to conflict prevention and supports community-level mediation.”
These examples the new report states: Strongly indicate that adaptation can yield dividends for peace and stability when designed in a participatory way with due consideration to equity for beneficiaries, and rooted in local governance systems. Conversely, the research found evidence that adaptation projects that overlook inclusion and local power dynamics risk reinforcing tensions, especially around water and land access.
Locally led adaptation is crucial
“The findings confirm that climate-security links are clear but context-specific. Floods and droughts are consistently associated with higher conflict incidence across the Sahel and Horn of Africa,” noted the report. “Where vulnerability is high and coping or adaptive capacity is weak, climate shocks are more likely to translate into security risks.”
The report concludes that locally led adaptation plays a critical role in strengthening community resilience and social cohesion, enabling local institutions to manage these shocks before they escalate into instability. The nature of the impact depends less on the hazard itself than on the governance and preparedness systems in place.
The adaptation report recommends five priority actions: integrate governance and stability into adaptation planning and measurement; finance local coordination and governance systems alongside infrastructure; scale up locally led adaptation that strengthens social cohesion; invest in regional early warning systems and cross-border resilience corridors; and develop new tools to track the peace and governance benefits of adaptation.
