Over the last three decades, Zambia has experienced adverse climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, increased dry spells, higher temperatures, flash floods and changes in the growing season. Although Zambia does not experience violent conflict, the negative effects of the impact of climate change, compounded with other risk factors, can pose a challenge to human security, including for social cohesion, resilience and in some cases social stability. Documenting these experiences is essential to develop strategies to prevent and mitigate the erosion of social capital and relationships, as well as associated grievances that can lead to conflict and fragility as the climate crisis intensifies. This can also offer opportunities to leverage policies and programming for climate action in ways that help prevent conflict and maintain and sustain peace.
The context
Climate trends show that annual temperatures have increased by 1.3°C since 1960, and by 2050, Zambia is expected to face a rise of 2.2°C, with the southern provinces being the most affected. Heat stress is not the only climate-related factor posing significant risks to people’s and communities’ lives and wellbeing. Drought and water scarcity decrease the access to clean and safe water, exposing rural populations and livestock to disease outbreaks and intensifying competition over waterpoints, particularly in the southern and western provinces. Moreover, these phenomena are disrupting economic activities and causing losses and damage to the agriculture sector, which remains the largest source of income for rural households.
For instance, in 2018-2019 Zambia faced one of its worst droughts in decades, which reduced agriculture production and harvest, leading to a sharp increase in food prices and pushing approximately 2 million people into food insecurity.
Climate-induced loss of income and livelihoods exacerbate poverty, marginalisation and other vulnerabilities and further hinder the coping capacities of smallholder farmers and producers, thereby incentivising maladaptive behaviours and negative coping mechanisms to earn money that pose a risk to human security and social cohesion. Examples include early marriages among adolescent girls and sexual exploitation of women and girls for access to basic commodities, and deforestation for agriculture, grazing land and charcoal production.
Climate-induced loss of income and livelihoods exacerbate poverty, marginalisation and other vulnerabilities and further hinder the coping capacities of smallholder farmers and producers, thereby incentivising maladaptive behaviours and negative coping mechanisms to earn money that pose a risk to human security and social cohesion
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Although all people affected by these impacts of climate change are vulnerable to the compounded effects of climate change, not everyone experiences it in the same way because different social groups, such as the elderly, women, youth and minorities, are likely to be affected in different ways. These differential vulnerabilities to climate change risks result from varying degrees of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of the different groups. For example, women and girls suffer more as cultural roles, beliefs and their triple role concurrently put them on the frontline of managing climate risk at the household level. In the southern provinces, where women and young girls are responsible for water collection, reduced viability of this resource increases the burden of work, ill health, and the risk of gender-based violence when travelling longer distances to fetch it.
Internal displacement and mobility patterns had, for a long time, been driven by loss of soil fertility due to poor farming practices and methods in the south. However, in the recent past, this mobility has also been exacerbated by climate variability and extremes, with extreme flooding events, for example, generating new displacement trends. These displacement trends have had dire implications for human security and social stability more broadly. In these displacement contexts, the limited livelihood opportunities and poor infrastructure in internally displaced and refugee settlements, coupled with environmental degradation and high exposure to climate-related shocks are further shaping vulnerabilities and protection risks for forcibly displaced people, particularly women and girls.
At the same time, rural-to-urban and rural-to-rural migration from the south to the central and northern provinces is frequently used to adapt to slow-onset climatic events. However, in receiving areas where socio-ecological systems are already under stress due to population growth and other urbanisation trends, social tensions are arising between migrants and host communities over access to limited economic and livelihood opportunities, as well as natural resources. Host communities and migrants also clash over cultivation systems, for example, some migrants bring with them the traditional chitemene cultivation systems in which trees are cut and the wood piled and burnt, and crops planted in the ash-covered area, which is not appreciated by other host communities.
Rural-to-urban and rural-to-rural migration from the south to the central and northern provinces is frequently used to adapt to slow-onset climatic events
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Integrating climate, peace and security into climate and related strategies and plans
In a country where climatic stressors and shocks are shaping millions of lives and driving important unfavourable societal transformations, with gendered impacts, understanding the possible peace and security implications of such changes is essential to develop strategies to prevent and mitigate the erosion of social capital and relationships, as well as associated grievances that can lead to conflict and fragility. This is particularly true when considering that climate-security connections can mainly emerge through disruptions to water, land and food systems; all phenomena that are experienced in several parts of Zambia, and that are at risk of intensifying if the climate crisis is left unaddressed. At the same time, the centrality of agriculture and food in influencing the interactions between the environmental and human systems opens opportunities for leveraging climate action in ways that can have positive effects on peace and security.
However, this requires actionable evidence, cross-sectoral expertise, collaboration, and partnership to promote a substantial shift in how climate change strategies and measures are designed and implemented. With the aim of bringing key stakeholders together to consider the current, and potential future effects of climate change on social cohesion and stability in Zambia, and what to do about it, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, ACCORD, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), and the Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), in cooperation with the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, and the Ministry of Agriculture, convened a workshop in Lusaka on 11 and 12 July. The workshop, supported by the OneCGIAR Initiatives on Climate Resilience (ClimBer) and Fragility, Conflict and Migration (FCM), brought together experts and representatives from the ministries of green economy and environment, the ministry of agriculture, civil society, academia and international organisations.
At the workshop, the participants analysed and reflected on how climate, peace and security manifest in Zambia. The participants discussed that in the country, to date, the compounded effects of climate change have seldom resulted in violent conflict. However, it does negatively affect human security, including food, land and water security, and in some cases, it has had a negative impact on social cohesion and resilience, which may also affect social stability. The participants also noted that as the effects of climate change are expected to increase in the future, its potential negative impact on social stability and peace more broadly is also likely to increase. This made it clear that moving away from purely technical climate change solutions is of foremost importance to prevent conflict and maintain and sustain peace in the country.
For these reasons, the workshop identified a number of forums and networks in Zambia that could help in facilitating dialogue and cross-fertilisation of expertise among different ministries, as well as other relevant entities, to develop a common agenda for preventing and managing the negative effects of climate change on human security. The workshop also identified a number of potential policy and legal entry points, where such an agenda can be articulated and captured in government and civil society action plans and strategies, reflected in relevant laws, and integrated in international assistance frameworks. Workshop participants also agreed to work together to gather and further develop evidence that can help and improve understanding of current and foreseen conditions under which climate-related risks to human security and social cohesion can emerge, with a particular focus on gender and intersectional social issues.
Whilst the compounded effects of climate change have not yet, and hopefully will not, reach the point where it contributes to violent conflict, as is the case in some contexts in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and even in some parts of Southern Africa, the workshop participants agreed that it is important to prevent such potential negative impacts in future by acting now. A clear priority is to ensure that climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives that are undertaken to transform water, land and food systems to be more sustainable and resilient, are carried out in such a way that they are both conflict-sensitive and peace positive, in other words, that they do not contribute to conflict but rather enhance social cohesion and resilience.
Cedric de Coning is senior advisor for ACCORD and a research professor for the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Giulia Caroli is a climate, peace and security specialist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, one of the research institutes at CGIAR. Gracsious Maviza is a gender, migration and climate security scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, one of the research institutes at CGIAR. Joram Tarusarira is a climate security research associate at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, one of the research institutes at CGIAR, and an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Leonardo Medina is an environmental peacebuilding specialist currently completing his PhD under the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research.
This work was carried out with support from the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) and the CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Migration (FCM). We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/
