Climate security

What Will Climate Change Mean for Security in Africa?


If you ask the Pentagon’s top policy official on Africa to list the biggest challenges the U.S. military faces in West Africa, she is quick to name the changing climate.

Michelle Lenihan isn’t talking about the damage that ever-more intense storms, floods, and wildfires are doing to U.S. facilitiessuch as Offutt and Tyndall Air Bases. In Africa, the United States operates only one permanent base, and its troop presence is generally limited to highly mobile special operations forces. Instead, the acting deputy assistant defense secretary of defense for African affairs is talking about the damage to regional stability itself.

“The Lake Chad Basin — it’s barely a lake at this point,” said Lenihan in an interview. “You’ve seen the recession of the lake, you see desertification across the Sahel.”

That creates problems not only with water availability but also with the availability of arable land, fueling increasing conflict between herders and farmers already at odds. “Underlying that is also ethnic tensions, because you have certain ethnic groups that tend to farm versus certain ethnic groups that tend to herd,” she said.