The recent rains that washed through West Africa didn’t fall just on one country. They caused severe flooding and fatalities across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Niger.
The drought that came before this latest disaster didn’t single out one place either. Farmers across the region were faced with destitution from crop losses.
Extreme weather fuelled by climate change does not respect national borders or geographical boundaries. This simple fact has multiple knock-on effects and dictates how we should respond to such crises – including through international coordination.
In September, Nigeria’s Alau Dam collapsed as a result of floods in the country’s northeastern region, killing up to 1,000 people and displacing a million. The rupture of the dam was mainly due to poor maintenance over the years – and a government failure to heed warnings of danger.
A week later, across the border in Cameroon, the government there decided to release water from the Lagdo dam, after the same bout of heavy rainfall had increased levels. This put added pressure on 11 states downstream in the part of Nigeria that was already scrambling to deal with the crisis – although the water releases were regulated, and alerts were issued.
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South Asia is also grappling with cross-border river-related threats. Izabella Koziell, deputy director general of ICIMOD, a Nepal-based research centre working to protect the Hindu Kush Himalaya, said the mountain region is “falling under increasing risk from the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and air pollution”.
“Each of these risks are mobile and not limited by national borders,” she said. The region extends over 3,500 kilometres from Afghanistan to Myanmar, making cooperation between countries essential, she added. “Over two billion people living within the mountains and downstream will be affected by changes that happen here.”
Climate change is fuelling new and complex risks that require countries – and the international community – to look beyond their own borders and siloes. But that is not how governments and their partners have typically responded to the threats.
“Adaptation is still very much seen as a local to national issue. Thinking more broadly and working regionally is challenging. We saw this with the COVID-19 pandemic – just how difficult it was to get coordinated regional and global responses on something which affected everyone,” said Sarah Opitz-Stapleton, a senior research fellow at ODI Global, a London-based think-tank.
Opitz-Stapleton has been working with a research programme called “Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises” (SPARC) to help policymakers better understand and manage transboundary climate risks, including in Africa.
She told Climate Home: “Countries tend to think first about their own sovereignty and protecting their own populations. This is understandable – but when we are facing challenges like this, everyone going in on their own is insufficient.”
People’s livelihoods and future prosperity are dependent on a globalised economy and shared resources, with flows of trade and finance binding countries together across continents. And it is becoming increasingly how clear how climate change – which affects the whole planet – can hijack development efforts in an interconnected world.
A simple example of this is food. In Senegal, changing dietary habits have led to a sudden surge in imports of rice from Southeast Asia. This now makes Senegal’s food security dependent on countries far away that are facing their own severe climate risks – because how they adapt to those risks will influence rice supplies to West Africa.
In 2022, India temporarily banned wheat exports after a severe heatwave jeopardised its own domestic supplies. The move led to a sudden jump in the price of this crucial commodity, impacting countries in Africa, such as Kenya, which rely on imports.
Transboundary climate risks come in many guises – from shared ecosystems to migration patterns, infectious diseases and ocean resources.
Finance is one example where the risks and impacts can be indirect and not always immediately clear. Financial firms are often greatly exposed to climate-related risks through investments in sectors from energy to mining.
When a gold mine is hit by drought or flooding, for example, this can lead to plant shutdowns, lower production and a higher probability of debt default.
Money is as transboundary as the climate. Banks that fail to carry out climate risk assessments across whole supply chains could be creating the conditions for stranded assets in the future.
By focusing solely on how to adapt to issues within borders the problem is pushed into someone else’s backyard – the adaptation equivalent of whack-a-mole.
“The problem is the way we crafted the policy,” said George Wamukoya, team lead at AGNES, a non-profit which advises African governments on climate issues.
“We focused on ‘national’ adaptation plans and commitments which leads people to think inward. There is competition among neighbouring countries who don’t want to share resources or investment. This is despite the need for regional and global support to achieve these plans. We need to be alive to these facts,” he added.
Examples abound of so-called “maladaptation”. This can occur when a country seeks to control coastal erosion and flooding by building protective infrastructure but ends up pushing the problem to shorelines further away where the impacts might be worse. Or switching to climate-resilient crops can reduce harvests – and increase prices – for more mainstream varieties.
On the other hand, done right, adaptation can lead to shared resilience between neighbours and strengthen global supply chains. Instead of redistributing the risk, the idea is to confront it with collaboration.
As the world kicks off two weeks of climate negotiations in Baku next week, campaigners are hoping that transboundary risks are higher on the agenda.
Last year’s UN climate summit, COP28, made only two references to transboundary issues in its final decision text. New work on adaptation did come out of the Dubai talks, including a programme to develop indicators to measure progress on targets under the Global Goal on Adaptation.
So far, the two-year initiative – called the UAE-Belem work programme – has led to over 5,000 indicators being submitted for consideration. Yet only 22 of these are related to transboundary climate risks.
This speaks to a lack of awareness among states of the shared risks they face and the dangers of ignoring them. Both Kenya and Ethiopia – which share a border that is porous especially for pastoralist communities – failed to mention cross-border risks in their national adaptation plans (NAPs) submitted to the UN.
Ensuring that transboundary risks are included in the UAE-Belem work programme is seen as crucial, as its results will dictate how adaptation policy and finance are set in the future. “If we don’t have these indicators, then it becomes very hard to track these particular risks,” said Wamukoya.
Experts agree that national and local governments need to do a better job of assessing cross-border risks and working with their neighbours to understand how to collectively address them. To date, they feel that not enough work has been done to research transboundary risks and work out strategies for tackling them.
“We need to demystify the issue for countries and convince them that, when you include transboundary issues, this will not limit access to resources. We also need to show how and where these risks are occurring within the five subregions of Africa, because some places will be more exposed than others,” adds Wamukoya.
COP29 offers a unique forum to address transboundary risks that are global in nature – and this perspective also needs to be applied to finance for adaptation projects, where multiple countries are involved, Wamukoya said. COP29 is tasked with agreeing a new global goal for climate finance, he noted.
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To date, adaptation financing typically goes to a single country, and there are few mechanisms for allowing funding to be split across states – although the Green Climate Fund has taken a regional approach in some of its projects.
Opitz-Stapleton – who is helping organise several COP29 events on transboundary climate risks at the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Climate Pavilion, the first such COP pavilion – noted that awareness of the issue has grown.
But, she said, “many countries are not adequately assessing these risks and there isn’t capacity to manage them”. “They need to be incorporated within a country’s adaptation plans and actually acted on,” she emphasised.
Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises) through the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29. See our supporters page for what this means.
Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.
The Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29 will host 30 events with world-leading experts, including heads of state and other leading representatives from governments, climate funds, aid agencies, civil society organisations, and more. All events will be livestreamed. For more information visit the Pavilion page here.
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