Africa Up Close

The Lake Chad Basin humanitarian crisis has caused huge population displacement and left hundreds of thousands of children trapped behind conflict lines. Photo courtesy of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Flickr Commons.

Climate change and its impact on conflict has gained prominent attention in recent global security discourse. Although there is no mono-causal correlation between climate change and conflict, the impact of environmental change on population displacement and regional conflict cannot be underestimated. In the case of the Lake Chad Basin, decades of depletion of the lake due to climate variabilities have largely contributed to fueling insecurity in riparian communities whose livelihoods depend on the lake. In the 1960s, Lake Chad had an area of more than 26,000km. However, it had shrunk to less than 1,500 km by 1997, and dwindled further to 1,350 km by 2014. Agriculture is the mainstay of the local economy of communities across the Lake Chad Basin, but the drastic depletion of the region’s water has affected crop, livestock, and fish production. The impact of this is evident in the rise of environmental migration, population displacement, poverty, and food insecurity within the region’s communities. This has heightened competition over resources such as water, land, and food, resulting in tension, conflict and intercommunal violence. Beyond this, terrorist groups, especially Boko Haram and the Islamic State West African Province, are exploiting these fault lines to recruit vulnerable youth and strengthen their insurgencies in communities across the countries of the Lake Chad Basin.

 A Nigerian citizen using his iPhone to connect with the internet. Photo courtesy of ARipstra (WMF) via Wikimedia Commons. 

Social media has emerged as an indispensable tool for accelerated globalization and development in the 21st century. It has created spaces for more interconnectedness among individuals and states. Like other regions in the world, in West Africa, increased internet penetration, mobile services, laptops, and other technological gadgets, have increased interactions and amplified people’s voices in the governance landscape. While social media has become an instrument for social, political, and economic development, it also provides an avenue for potential threats to regional security. Social media has become a channel for terrorist groups and transnational criminal networks to scale-up their operations in the region. However, key stakeholders from within the states and regional security apparatuses have paid little attention to social media threats and their impact on regional stability, focusing only on traditional military response strategies. This missing link continues to undermine the effectiveness of resilience strategies to mitigate threats to security in the region.