Strategic Implications of Climate change

In my prevous post, I mentioned the crisis in Sahelian countries as what we can expect from climate change. This post enlarges on the first paragraph. The climate change crisis is not about when it will affect us, but which country it will destroy next. Darfur is a prime example.
The carnage in the Sudan continues, even though climate change has pushed it to the back pages. Meanwhile, the neo-climate change news coverage is framed as, “if we don’t act now, then sometime in the future we will be in trouble.” It turns out that climate change and the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan are related.
The trouble in Darfur results from camel-riding nomads, or young men from nomadic cultures, who are mainly Muslim, attacking settled farming peoples of the south and west, who are mainly Christian. Clearly, the nomads have government support and encouragement, making the current phase of this crisis a political and religious crusade.
No one, except, apparently the jinjaweed themselves, can countenance their murderous attacks on the settled (mostly black) farmers, but the nomads from the north are not to blame for this crisis.
We are. The roots of this crisis are in the colonial enslavement in the first half of the last century, and in misguided international aid efforts that began in the 1960s. Prior to these western interventions, the nomads moved their flocks with the seasons in a relationship with their dry environment that had been stable for at least five millennia. Forced settlement by the colonial masters, followed by well-drilling to ease poverty and encourage farming, disrupted the pastoral patterns and caused large-scale desertification and loss of wildlife habitat. This resulted in continuous famine in various parts of the Sahel since 1968. The famines of 1973–1975 and 1984 were especially severe and burned into our minds the plight of starving people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Biafra (now returned to Nigeria) and other Sahelian countries. Climate change that began to be felt in the 1980s made it worse. The connection with climate change has been known for more than two decades and was discovered by Canadian wildlife biologists.
Firs, let’s correct an error that has crept into the new reports. The camel-riding nomads from the Sahel, the vast dry savanna and semi-arid desert that lies between the Sahara desert and the green jungles of tropical Africa, are not ethnic Arabs. Although Arabic has been widely spoken in the region since Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago, many people of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic minority languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.
After forced settlement in the colonial era, desertification intensified with well-intentioned but short-sighted and misinformed development aid projects. Canadian wildlife biologists A. R. E. Sinclair and J. M. Fryxell of the University of British Columbia noted in 1985 (C J. Zool. 63:987-994) that until the mid 1950s, the normal land use in the north of Sudan and indeed throughout the southern fringe of the Sahel—the semi-arid rangeland that is drier than the grasslands to the south but moister than the arid Sahara to the north—was pastoralism with migration following the rain. Human movements mimicked wildlife movements.
In the southern part of the region, the migration was annual and regular. This was the pattern, or example, of some 800,000 white-eared kob, an antelope of southeastern Sudan. Human migration mirrored that of wildlife: pastoralists in the southern fringe of the Sahel took their livestock, mostly cattle, south to the grasslands and fringes of flood plains of Lake Chad and the Senegal, Niger and Chari river basins where vegetation was dominated by perennial grasses.
In the north, however, closer to the Sahara where rainfall was less, the vegetation was dominated by annual grasses, forbs, desert shrubs, and acacia trees. The large wild ungulates of this region, such as the red-fronted and dorcas gazelles, fringe-eared and scimitar-horned oryx, and addax, did not follow annual north-south migrations, and neither did the people. Cattle cannot survive in this dry country, and cannot be driven far enough to reach grasslands and water in summer. Instead, people raised sheep and goats, which can subsist on dry brush and need less water. They and their flocks, like the wildlife, moved nomadically within the region in search of forage. They camped where they found water and forage, and when it was gone they covered large distances in search of rainfall and grass.
After the Second World War, western countries increased their food and development aid to Africa. That encouraged the pastoralists and others to settle around dug and drilled wells. With the wells, farmers and settled pastoralists could increase their flock and herd sizes, but this caused severe overgrazing around the new wells. The famine of 1973–1975 followed periods of below-average rainfall, but the pastoral grazing system had withstood such droughts before. Those droughts were well within the naturally high variability of rainfall in the Sahel. The human tragedies were caused by massive starvation of livestock because of overgrazing, not lack of rainfall. What Sinclair and Fryxell, the wildlife biologists, discovered was that the climate had changed, rainfall was declining over time, and this had exacerbated desertification. Later famines, such as the one of 1984, were climate-related.
They did not know then that the climate change that they detected resulted in part from greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Instead, they hypothesized that the human-caused overgrazing itself caused a decline in rainfall by making less moisture from plant transpiration available uptake by air currents and redistribution to the drier environments to the north. This is no doubt part of the story.
In 1988, a biologist writing about wildlife conservation (John E. Newby: Aridland Wildlife in Decline), also connected the deterioration of range conditions in the Sahel with conflict between nomad herders and farmers and began early in the colonial period:
“In the past, permanent use of sub-Saharan grasslands was not only difficult, since water resources were largely ephemeral, but also constrained by tribal warfare that dissuaded the establishment or activities of isolated groups of people. With the subjugation of the powerful nomadic tribes during the early colonial period, large areas of no-mans’ land, previously inhabited by wildlife, became available to man. Farmers were tree to extend their fields...farmers were perhaps for the first time able to extend their activities into the northern Sahel.”
The colonial masters brought large numbers of black slaves and serfs into the nomads’ territory, and with emancipation, they settled there. Newby further wrote that,
“With independence in the early 1960s, the new Sahelian states began to benefit from international aid programmes, foremost of which was the development of the waterless pastoral lands. Boreholes were sunk, deep wells cemented, and pumping stations installed, and for a short time the nomads had access to rich, new pastoral resources. What the developers failed to foresee, however, was the gross overgrazing that was to take place, the subsequent erosion and the desertification. Neither did they take into account the droughts of the late 1960s and 1970s. With changed herding patterns and increased livestock numbers, millions of head of cattle died for want of food, not water.”
The nomads were being hit from both ends: the wildlife that they had hunted for meat and leather was disappearing along with forage for their livestock in the arid north, and farmers were moving into their traditional dry-season territories areas to the south. The loss of wildlife such as oryx, addax, barbary sheep, two species of gazelles, and ostriches, was acute because these animals were important not only for meat, but for their importance in the cultures of these desert nomads. Oryx hide, for example, has particular uses not easily replaced by sheepskin or cowhide. Giraffes, which occur in the southern fringe of the Sahel where the nomads summer, provide another unique product: their tails are valued as wedding gifts (Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma by J. Michael Fay and Michael Nichols, National Geographic, March 2007). The cultural disruption caused by desertification has de-stabilized nomadic societies as much as the loss of livestock.
Since the rangeland and wildlife research in the 1980s, climate research has shown that global warming is playing a large part in desertification of the Sahel, and has done so for a quarter of a century.
In Darfur, the on-going human tragedy, although abetted by the current government for political reasons (albeit with a religious veneer), is fundamentally an ecological crisis caused first by poor land use, and second by climate change. The nomads are not to blame, except for those actually riding the camels and wielding the weapons. They are victims as much as the farmers they are attacking. The fight is not about religion, politics, or even land. It is about forage for livestock and the loss of rangeland productivity that has sustained the nomadic cultures of the Sahel for at least 5000 years. Disputes like these will spread as a consequence of global warming. We cannot sit in our comfortable homes and worry about what will happen to us in 50 or 100 years if we do not deal effectively with climate change. Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and, yes, even wildlife biologists, have already experienced the results of climate change in the Sahel and a good proportion of our international aid goes there. If we consider “us” to be all of us on this planet, the tragedy of climate change has already begun and it will get worse unless we stop it.
References consulted in this essay
Berger, Joel. 2004. The last mile: how to sustain long-distance migration in mammals. Conservation Biology 18:320–331.
Fryxell, J. M. 1987. Food limitation and demography of a migratory antelope, the white-eared kob. Oecologia 72:83-91.
Hulme, Mike, Ruth Doherty, Todd Ngara, Mark New, and David Lister. 2001. African Climate Change: 1900-2100. Climate Research 17:145-168.
Kabii, T. 1996. An Overview of African Wetlands. Ramsar Bureau, Switzerland. 6 pp.
Newby, John E. 1988. Aridland wildlife in decline, Pp 146-166 in A. Dixon, and D. Jones, (eds) Conservation and Biology of Desert Antelopes. London, Christopher Helm Ltd.
Sinclair, A. R. E., and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology 63:987-994.