Main page content

adelphi workshop on Lake Chad climate fragility

The video was produced by Paul Müller-Hahl (Lichtbilder Filmproduktion) and directed by Stella Schaller (adelphi), with kind support by the Planetary Security Initiative and the German Federal Foreign Office.

"We are here as adelphi having received support from the Climate Diplomacy project to organize an expert meeting on the region to really explore the links between climate change and peace and security and fragility in the Lake Chad region to bring together the donors that are interested in supporting this issue through humanitarian or development interventions alongside local experts, experts from the Lake Chad basin, experts from the hydrological perspective, those that are engaged with civil society within the humanitarian community, those that are part of the community and speaking on behalf of women and youth who are often neglected from these conversations.
 
What we have been able to do, with some success I think, is really get a 360° insight into some of the compound complex challenges because they are not just environmental challenges, it is not just about the water table shrinking. Actually, from a climate change perspective it is more complex than that and bringing a climate change expert on the table helps us understand what that means from the climate perspective. But also having civil society and institutional representatives helps us understand what this means from a human perspective, what this means from a social and governance perspective. So we have had a really successful conversation today and it really helped us understand some of these complexities what it means for addressing the root causes of the vulnerability to really build resilience, addressing livelihoods, the lack of education that actually underlines some of the climate-related vulnerability that is pushing people into unsustainable or unsuitable avenues such as joining terrorist groups such as Boko Haram.

So this has been incredibly insightful and from here we will be working with some of the local institutions as well as the donors to take this and feed it into the policy programming responses on the Lake Chad basin and our aspiration at adelphi is to ensure that the energy, the time, money and resources that are going into Lake Chad are aware of these complex climate and fragility risks, that they are sensitive to these compound risks and they do no harm to make them worse but actually address them and constructively build resilience to these risks."