Human Security and Climate Change. Vulnerabilities in the Sahel

Human security is a broad and multi-faceted phenomenon that is constantly endangered by protracted crises and conflicts, natural disasters, persistent underdevelopment, epidemic and economic downturns. Most of, if not all, these factors are present and strong across the Sahel, a huge climatic space ranging from the Atlantic ocean to the Red Sea. New threats to human security emerge in a regional context already characterized by exceptional political instability involving a combination of rebellions, jihadist insurgencies, coups d’état, protest movements and illegal trafficking. The Sahel is a laboratory of old and new forms of instability in which the boundaries between what is local and global, domestic and international, military and civilian, political and identitarian are blurred.
The aim of this brief is to analyze the regional impact of climate change on the different components of human security, by clustering them into three macro dimensions: the environmental dimension, the economic dimension and the humanitarian one.
This policy brief was written in the framework of EuroMeSCo Working Package “The Impact of Climate Change in the Sahel on Human Security in the Mediterranean”.