What Climate Change Means for the Horn of Africa, With Michelle Gavin

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is what climate change means for the Horn of Africa.

Today's episode is the third in a series of episodes on The President's Inbox that examine how climate change is affecting life, society and conflict in different regions around the world. The Carnegie Corporation of New York has made this special series possible.

With me to discuss the impact that climate change is having on the Horn of Africa is Michelle Gavin. Michelle is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at CFR. She served as the U.S. Ambassador to Botswana and served concurrently as the U.S. Representative to the Southern African Development Community from 2011 to 2014. She was also a special assistant to President Barack Obama and the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council. 

The Council's Center for Preventive Action recently published a paper that Michelle wrote titled Climate Change in Regional Instability in the Horn of Africa. You can find a copy of the paper at cfr.org.

Michelle, thank you for joining me.

GAVIN:
Well, thank you so much for having me.

LINDSAY:
Michelle. I'd like to begin with a bit of context, if we may. I imagine many people listening to this episode may not be sure of what countries make up the Horn of Africa. So perhaps if you could tell us what you have in mind when you speak of the Horn of Africa and tell us a little bit about those countries.

GAVIN:
Sure. When I'm thinking about the Horn of Africa, I'm thinking about the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and South Sudan. It's a diverse mix of countries. They all have unique histories, cultures, characteristics, political dynamics, but they have some things in common. The vast majority of these countries, you have very rapid population growth just as you see across much of the continent.

These are countries where governments often strain to deliver adequate social services and infrastructure to citizens, including in many cases, access to power. They are economies that depend heavily on agriculture, which of course is relevant in the context of a conversation about climate change.

And some of them are coping with conflict, in some cases decades of conflict, internal conflict in a case like Ethiopia or Somalia. Very, very fragile peace with periodic episodes of conflict in South Sudan, an uncertain transition in Sudan itself. And so it's a volatile region politically and a fragile one.

LINDSAY:
I want to draw you out in some elements of the points you just made, Michelle. Maybe we could begin with the issue of how young the region is. If you look at the median age in the countries in the Horn of Africa, you see that the median age is roughly around twenty years or so. That means half the population is younger than twenty years of age. Half the population is older than twenty years of age compared to let's say the United States where the median age is roughly thirty-nine. So these are very young populations. They're also urbanizing populations. What's significant about that? How should that affect how we think about these countries?

GAVIN:
Well, it means that the burden on government to deliver services like healthcare and education is growing exponentially and the job creation imperative is an incredibly difficult challenge for these governments. Every year, more and more people entering the labor force, trying to generate the kind of economic growth that can absorb them and create economic opportunity for them is hugely challenging. And as these places urbanize in the context of these pressures and climate change does help to drive some of that urbanization, you have more opportunities for conflict around resource scarcity.

LINDSAY:
Now, you talked about the economic aspect of these countries and you talked about the heavy dependence on agriculture as a way of life. I often hear the word pastoral tossed around. Maybe you could explain a bit for us what agriculture looks like in countries in the Horn of Africa. Is there anything analogous to it in the United States or is it a different kind of farming?

GAVIN:
Well, it really depends. So there are agricultural enterprises in parts of Kenya that would look, I think, very familiar to Americans, highly sophisticated, innovative techniques with clear value chains that get products to market. But you also have, for example, even in parts of Kenya, something that looks closer to subsistence agriculture.

In Ethiopia, for example, the vast majority of agriculture is rain fed. It's responsible for 80 percent of the country's exports and three quarters of the country's labor force, but it's not ... Again, there are parts that will look familiar, but a lot of it is smaller scale, much more dependent on meteorological conditions with few backups and insurance policies. And in some cases, we're talking about subsistence agriculture.

LINDSAY:
And so the flip side of having agriculture that is rain fed is that these are farms and agricultural production that don't rely on irrigation. There aren't big irrigation systems or networks built up in case the rain stops falling.

GAVIN:
Exactly. That's exactly right.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Now when we talk about the politics, you mentioned that there has been a fair amount of conflict and strife in the region. So maybe you could just do a scene setter for us. Obviously we've just seen a recent truce in Ethiopia with its civil war, but Ethiopia's not the only country in the Horn of Africa that has been going through protracted civil conflict or civil strife.

GAVIN:
Well, that's right. And while you're absolutely right, things appear to be proceeding apace with the truce and the peace in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, there's significant conflict in other parts of that country, particularly in Oromia. So there is a very significant and serious civil conflict that persists in Ethiopia. 

There have been border clashes between Ethiopia and Sudan in recent years. In South Sudan, you had a peace agreement in 2018 that is incredibly fragile. Fighting has broken out periodically, and there are very few prognoses for South Sudan right now that predict a smooth pathway towards sustainable peace.

And Sudan itself had a longstanding authoritarian government overthrown by a combination of popular protests and military seizure of power leading to a kind of uneasy transitional period that is still very much a subject of contestation. It's unclear whether or not the military will really ever hand over power to civilians. Civilians continue to go out on the street to protest against military power. There is a sense of tenuousness and unresolved set of questions about the political dispensation there.

And of course there's Eritrea, which was involved in the conflict in Ethiopia, in Tigray, that is one of the world's most authoritarian and most closed states. It's very difficult to get reliable information from Eritrea around anything from climate conditions to just how much of the population continues to be forcibly conscripted in the military. And so eventually one imagines that Eritrea is unlikely to be a stable state for a long period of time. It's difficult to say.

LINDSAY:
So if we may, I'd like to talk more specifically about climate change. When people have conversations about a changing climate, the conversation is often phrased as climate change being a challenge for the future. But as I've been having these conversations as part of this series, what I've found is that in places like Central America, like in the Sahel, that the evidence shows that climate change is already happening. Is something similar taking place in the Horn of Africa?

GAVIN:
It absolutely is. Right now in particular, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are in the midst of one of the worst droughts on the historical record. Five failed rainy seasons leaving 25 million people experiencing acute food insecurity. So the relationship between drought and food security is a very close one in this region.

At the same time that there's been this historic drought, you've had really intense storms and flooding in South Sudan, displacing populations because of that flavor of natural disaster. So it is absolutely the case that the Horn of Africa is experiencing right now, conditions that are far outside what was considered to be the norm, are incredibly costly and are significant factors in displacing populations.

LINDSAY:
I mean, this issue of getting excess rainfall is an interesting one because oftentimes people think of it as if it rains, then you're okay. But obviously if you're in an economy that relies on agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture without any capacity for irrigation, if you get rain at the wrong time of the year or you get too much rain in any short period of time, that can be incredibly destructive for your crops.

GAVIN:
Well, that's right. And it's this inconsistency, it's things that used to be predictable becoming utterly unpredictable that is what a lot of African populations have seized on. I find it interesting if you look at polling data in the region and just look at responses when people are asked to list priorities or weigh in on climate change, it looks like people aren't that concerned about it. But if you ask people if they're concerned about changes in weather patterns, unreliable crops associated with those changes, concerned about food security, concerned about flooding, the numbers really spike.

So African populations, populations in the Horn, absolutely are concerned about these issues, but sometimes the language that we use, the way we talk about them is different. For many families in the region, these are what an American would call kitchen table issues, and they're not necessarily calling it climate change.

LINDSAY:
Understood. We can't expect everyone to talk about issues the way they would if they were at a faculty seminar, but I want to talk about this issue that has driven the work that you and others at the Center for Preventive Action have done on trying to tease out the links between climate change and conflict. Are we seeing links in the Horn of Africa between a changing climate, a more erratic climate, and conflict?

GAVIN:
Yes, we are. And it's very, very difficult to isolate the different causal factors around any conflict, of course, and say that this happened because of climactic conditions alone.

LINDSAY:
All the more so in an area that has a lot of conflict.

GAVIN:
Well, exactly. There are so many different interacting dynamics, driving conflict in the region. But there's no question that this is amplifying some of those dynamics, that it's among the mix of causes and threats. And this has long been recognized in the region.

Back in 1986 when they formed what is now the main sub-regional organization for the Horn, which is the Intergovernmental Authority on Development known as IGAD, IGAD was formed in part to address concerns around drought and desertification from a regional perspective and the peace and security implications of those phenomena. So the link between these kinds of conditions that can be really catastrophic for food security, that can create the impetus for migration and regional security as something that's been top of mind for people concerned about preventing conflict and creating predictability and order in that part of the world for decades.

LINDSAY:
Now, when we talk about climate change leading to conflict, the story tends to go in a couple of ways. One is to emphasize that people begin to move, to migrate because their way of life is no longer sustainable, and that that act of migration then triggers conflict because they're moving on to other people's lands, upsetting communities. Another story about the link between climate change in conflict emphasizes fighting over scarce resources. It could be water, maybe something else. And so communities fight. Are we seeing evidence of that in the Horn of Africa?

GAVIN:
Well, certainly you can find evidence of one of the classic examples of this, which is farmer-herder tensions and clashes where communities that graze livestock have to go further and further afield to find grass and water for what is their main source of livelihood, their main financial security, and end up encroaching on areas where agricultural communities are relying on that same land and you find tension. And there certainly is, Northern Kenya springs to mind as there are regular episodes of these kinds of tensions.

Similarly, in Somalia where the dynamics are complicated and there are layers of reasons why areas become undesirable for civilian communities to stay in, but certainly climate is one of them. And when people move, move into a city, move even into a camp, there is a redistribution of the available resources, natural and otherwise, that can lead to a lot of tension, really exacerbate in-group, out-group dynamics, and that can drive conflict as well. These are issues that we see in the Horn.

And then there's a big issue that has captured the attention of policy makers around the world, a potential dispute over resources around the Nile waters, which flow from Ethiopia and from those highlands, and eventually end up in Egypt. And there's a great deal of tension around a massive hydrological project, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam being built in Ethiopia because there is a massive deficit of access to power in Ethiopia as there is across much of the continent and much of the Horn.

So here it gets to all of these issues we started with. Here you have a growing population, you need to create jobs. To do that, people need access to power. Here's an infrastructure project intended to do that, but it's calling into question the flow of Nile waters that other countries depend upon. There has been very intense saber-rattling rhetoric sometimes from Egypt around this issue. It's not at all difficult to spin out a hypothetical scenario where there's a very costly conflict springing from this. And as rainfall becomes less predictable, that becomes more likely, not less.

LINDSAY:
My understanding is that the Egyptians are concerned that the annual flow of water, particularly in the spring that comes down the Nile will cease. Well, this has been for millennia, a factor that has driven agriculture in Egypt, much of which takes place within a couple of miles of the banks of the Nile.

GAVIN:
Right. And the way rights and access to Nile waters have been governed for a long time, has depended on this 1959 agreement that did not take into account Ethiopia at all or Uganda for that matter, where there's also the source of the Nile there. And so there's a legacy of how water rights are distributed, and then there's a sense that this is unjust from countries that were not considered in that agreement at all. And it is an existential issue for Egypt, but Ethiopians will tell you it's the same for them.

LINDSAY:
I will just note longer term for the Ethiopians, they will have a concern about whether drought prevents them from keeping the reservoir to a sufficient height to be able to generate the kind of electricity that their growing economy is going to need.

We've seen around the world over the course of the last year, a number of countries that have depended upon using water to generate electricity, finding that the dams, the reservoirs simply aren't high enough to drive the turbines that generate electricity. We're seeing that potentially in the American Southwest. We've seen it in a number of countries in Europe.

GAVIN:
We're seeing it in Southern Africa right now. You're absolutely right. And with the case of the Nile waters, one thing that I find really interesting is in exploring this topic, I learned that the hydrological cycle that drives the rainfall in the Ethiopian Highlands, it's driven in part by the Congo Basin, another hot topic for people who care about the future of the climate, the survivability of our world. And if the Congo Basin Forest is significantly reduced in size and its ability to drive this cycle, then you will unquestionably have less rain in the highlands and there'll be even less water for these countries to be struggling over.

LINDSAY:
And the depressing fact is that the deforestation of the Amazon may actually exacerbate that problem because hydrological flows are global and not limited to a country or even a region. 

But I want to talk a bit about what to do about the situation we find ourselves in. We begin, Michelle, with the question of what are local governments doing to handle this issue, and are they even in a position to be able to make significant progress on this score? Because these are all countries that are among the poorest in the world. And as you pointed out, they have a lot of internal division, civil strife, a lot of other challenges the government has to place, and climate change is another in a long list and in many ways aggravates all the other problems.

GAVIN:
Right. Well, there are a lot of plans, plans that have been developed, expertise being trained. But you're absolutely right, the real issue is the capacity and the bandwidth to implement some of these plans, to bolster the resilience of urban communities, to make agriculture more efficient and conserve water resources.

All of that requires financing and manpower that can be devoted to it, and that's why states from the Horn join others from the continent in these regular cycles of climate talks and demanding more resources from particularly countries that historically have been the largest emitters.

I would also say that the capacity to address this is really impaired by the conflict that currently exists. So this was also something I found very interesting in exploring this topic is it's not just that climate change is helping to drive and exacerbate conflict, but existing conflicts are making it very, very difficult to move out on agendas, programs, and policies that could help mitigate the impact of climate change, help communities become more resilient. And so in the context of conflict, be it interstate or intrastate, it's very hard to make meaningful progress on resilience and adaptation. And so for me, recommendation number one is to really double down on conflict resolution.

LINDSAY:
Well, here, let me draw you out on this question of what to do and go back to the fact that this podcast is called The President's Inbox. So what exactly is the American interest in this issue in the Horn of Africa? Is this simply something we should do as part of our portfolio of trying to do good things in the world?

Is it driven by the fact that we have a debt to the people in the Horn of Africa because they've generated maybe in total 4 percent of the heat trapping gases that are causing climate change and we produced a lot more? Is it that we see tangible American interest being affected and it's better to do something now when the cost of getting a good result are a lot less than they will be later on? Some other driver?

GAVIN:
It's a combination of things. So certainly if we play out worst case scenarios in the Horn where you have something like state collapse in Ethiopia, it's a country of about 110 million people, the notion that the effects of that would be contained within the subregion is fanciful. There would be massive flows of refugees that could be destabilizing other parts of the world.

A chaotic Horn absolutely provides opportunities for malign actors that are antithetical to U.S. interests. There are violent extremist organizations that operate in the region. You have an amazing array of foreign military forces with a presence in Djibouti for a very good reason, in part because of the importance of the Red Sea and freedom of navigation through the Red Sea.

So you have global competition and concern about freedom of navigation, about overall stability. You have concern about the potential for some kind of catastrophic conflict to generate massive refugee flows. You have a lot of different interests in the region. Actors from the Gulf are very, very active in diplomacy, be it in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, for their own reasons. And so the relative balance of influence becomes important.

So yes, there's this historic overhang of this is a problem not of this region's making that we bear some significant responsibility for, and it is not lost on African leaders or populations that there seems something unjust about being left to their own devices to sort it out. But there are also good reasons why the U.S. doesn't want to see this region become more chaotic, less rule governed, less hospitable and welcoming to U.S. partnerships in our mutual interest.

LINDSAY:
So what should the United States be doing? You've already mentioned that it would behoove the United States to be active on the diplomatic front to try to use its good offices to get reconciliation to end conflicts, to find ways to bring communities together. But what other steps should be taken and is the current administration doing enough?

And I ask that because I will note that the United States, as I understand it, does not have an ambassador to Ethiopia, a country of, as you point out, 110 million or more people, a country that is the second most populous country in Africa, and one that has experienced a tremendous amount of conflict, not just the civil war with Tigray, but as you note, there's a lot of other ethnic strife elsewhere in the country.

GAVIN:
Yeah, we had for far too long a vacancy in Kenya as well until right before a very important election that took place last year. So this region is absolutely a part of the story of not having adequate diplomatic representation in place, which blame lies at the feet, not just of the administration, but of Congress, which needs to move out to confirm nominees, or not confirm them so someone else can be nominated and we can move this along.

I think to take the first part of your question, what else should we do? It sounds jargony, but I'll try and give an example. I do think integrating climate sensitivity and priorities into the rest of our foreign assistance efforts makes a lot of sense. And one clear opportunity that I see on the horizon that I'd like to follow and think it will be a good indicator of how assertive the administration is being on these issues, is at the African Leader Summit at the end of last year, the Biden administration signed an MOU with the African Union around food security. Now, this makes good sense. It's not just climate that's disrupted food security, but of course the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the disruption to flows of grain and fertilizer, et cetera. But we've tried for a long time to address food security, to improve agricultural yield and address the value chains that could involve job creation. And we've had, I would say, at best limited success.

There's an interesting set of opportunities here to try and do this in a way that is climate sensitive, to take what we've learned about regenerative agriculture to really tap into some of the ag-tech innovation that's happening, particularly centered in Kenya that is climate sensitive, also economically makes sense, and try and not do exactly what we've done before, but look to the future, pivot a little bit and try and address the food security issues in a way that really takes into account what we're likely to see in terms of climate conditions in this region going forward.

LINDSAY:
I'd like to close, Michelle by going slightly off topic and to talk about this issue of U.S. ambassadors over sea, and I want to ask you, because you served as an ambassador to Botswana. Why is it important for the United States to have ambassadors on the ground in countries? Because I sometimes hear people say, "It's not a big deal because we live in a Zoom era. People can email from Washington, DC, do a video call, so the era of ambassadors has passed us by." What's wrong with that sort of look at international diplomacy?

GAVIN:
Well, I think there's several things wrong with it, but the first thing that springs to mind is in many parts of the world, the Zoom call is not how business gets done, and the letter is not how business gets done. It doesn't mean you have to personalize bilateral relationships, but establishing trust at an individual level, making it clear that you do in fact represent the United States government. The chief of mission is the president's representative on the ground, it's not just the State Department behind them. They should be able to speak for the whole of government.

And if you don't have someone empowered to do that, it's very, very difficult, particularly in some of these sensitive issues around conflict. And it's very, very difficult to suss out even what some of the parties' actual red lines are. How far can they go and how far can't they? These are sensitive conversations, and you need people in place who are interlocutors believe it's worth talking to because they are able to convey that at the highest levels. And when they speak for the USG, you can count on them to be able to follow through.

So it is valued and is important. And this is not to say that the wonderful foreign service officers who man these embassies and keep things going and are reporting back important information aren't doing a good job. But formalities matter in this part of the world, titles matter and the gesture of respect of knowing that the United States government sent a appropriately nominated, Senate confirmed individual to lead the mission is a really important baseline we should be able to achieve in trying to establish more effective partnerships.

LINDSAY:
I would imagine that being seen as giving respect becomes all the more important when other major powers don't have a problem sending their diplomats, their ambassadors to world capitals.

GAVIN:
Oh, absolutely. We suffer by comparison greatly in this respect, and it is not very satisfying to be explaining to our partners our unwieldy processes or that a well-qualified nominee has been sitting forever waiting for a hearing because of some utterly irrelevant issue as a effort by one or more senators to assert some influence. So it's a really unenforced error that we make.

LINDSAY:
On that note of experience, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Michelle Gavin, the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of the recent Center for Preventive Action report, What Climate Change Means for The Horn of Africa. Thank you for joining me, Michelle.

GAVIN:
Thanks so much for the conversation.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this review, as well as a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with the Director of podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.