On 9 August 2016, India’s Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Anil Madhav Dave, informed the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian Parliament) that, according to an Oxford University study, approximately 136,000 climate change-related deaths are projected in India. This is primarily due to decreased food production. He went on to quote figures from a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, published in 2014, which pins the principle causes of death between 2030 and 2050 on malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
„The water crisis and climate change are closely interlinked and the impact of global climate change is clearly visible in the water resources and poses a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts.”
The Nile River is shared by 11 countries, for which it is vital for food and energy production, freshwater, and as a means of transportation. Sharing the resources of the Nile has, however, been politically difficult. Recently, the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has caused a major dispute with downstream Egypt which fears the dam will affect water flow in its own territory.
Approaches developed in Mali, Senegal, Kenya and Tanzania offer insights for building resilience in areas facing risks of climate change, disasters and conflict.
A paper published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tests the hypothesis that climate related natural disasters may be part of the cause of conflict in countries with high ethnic fractionalization.
Earlier this month, armed clashes between competing factions of South Sudan’s government broke out in the capital Juba, a day after the nation’s fifth anniversary of its independence. The conflict dates back to political events and factional fighting that first emerged in 2013.
“No single SDG or the SDGs as a whole will be successfully implemented if we do it within silos.
Extreme weather increases the risk of armed conflict in ethnically-diverse countries, a new study suggests.