How Climate Change Helps Fuel Nigeria’s Instability

As Nigerian army officials ramp up their search for the hundreds of children kidnapped by terrorist group Boko Haram, a tragic spotlight has been placed on Nigeria as a hub for unprecedented, unspeakable violence.

But while Boko Haram’s actions have mostly been attributed to terrorism and extreme jihadist ideology, the reasons behind why those ideologies have been allowed to thrive in Nigeria have been largely overlooked. According to many experts, one of those reasons may be the increasing physical effects of climate change, which have driven poverty, hunger, and infuriating inequality in the country.

“Instability in Nigeria … has been growing steadily over the last decade — and one reason is climate change,” Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, wrote in the Guardian on Friday, citing a 2009 study from the UK Department for International Development warning of climate change’s contribution to desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures.

Some speculate that Boko Haram’s presence in Northern Nigeria was driven by an agricultural crisis in other African countries in 2004 and 2005, which caused a number of people to migrate to the less-affected Nigeria.  In the 2012 book Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict, author Jon Barnett writes the “climate shock”-caused crisis fueled the emergence of a “religion messiah” that served to “promise the poor, down-trodden masses an El Dorado.

“The Boko Haram uprising occurred at this time and from the same notorious cause,” Barnett wrote, adding that the crisis forced competition for scarce resources that ultimately played a major role in conflict dynamics because it engendered inequality, “a major source of conflict in countries such as Nigeria.”

The fact that anthropogenic global warming increases violence, especially in already conflict-prone and hunger-stricken countries, is no secret.  Indeed, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report said climate change would “prolong existing, and create new, poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” thereby “increas[ing] risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence.”  Experts have pointed to climate change as a factor in the violent conflict in Syria, for example.

How Climate Change Helps Fuel Nigeria’s Instability