Assessing the security implications of climate change for West Africa

The security implications of climate change have become the subject of unprecedented international attention; in 2007 the focus of a Security Council debate and the Nobel Peace prize. [...] In 2007, it was the focus of a dedicat- ed UN Security Council debate and the grounds for the Nobel Peace Prize shared between Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [...] The UNEP report warned of a suc- cession of new wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage of climate change, concluding that “Darfur… holds grim lessons for other countries at risk.” In short, the security implications of climate change have caught the political imagination, generating a perceptible shift in the way decision-makers discuss the subject. [...] A second reason for the “securitization” of the climate change debate is more political; it is part of a clear move by some campaigners to invest the climate negotiations with a greater sense of urgency, to raise climate change to the realm of high politics and to create the political space for serious concessions on greenhouse gas emissions. [...] Page 5 Section 2 Testing the links: The research methodology The purpose of this research, which was financially supported by the Foreign Ministry of Denmark, was to investigate the links between climate change and security in the case of two countries in West Africa: Ghana and Burkina Faso.