Episode 336: Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier: Why the Lake Chad Basin Matters for Global Security with Cedric de Coning and Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dominic Bowen speaks with Cedric de Coning and Andrew E. Yaw Tchie about the complex relationship between climate change, conflict, and human security in the Lake Chad Basin. Once a vital lifeline for millions of people across Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, the region has become a powerful example of how environmental pressure, weak governance, displacement, and violent extremism can intersect to create a complex and evolving security challenge.
The discussion explores why climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier.” Rather than directly causing conflict, environmental change is intensifying existing pressures on livelihoods, food security, and water access. The conversation highlights how droughts, floods, and rising temperatures affect farmers, pastoralists, and fishing communities, while also interacting with long-standing governance challenges and the ongoing insurgency involving groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province.
Drawing on their recent research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Cedric and Andrew explain how climate pressures are reshaping social dynamics in the region, contributing to new forms of inter-community tension while undermining fragile recovery efforts. The episode also examines why international responses have struggled to match the scale of the challenge, and why adaptive peacebuilding, stronger local governance, and long-term resilience strategies are essential for managing climate-related security risks.
The research is undertaken by an international consortium of researchers in Norway, Belgium and in the region, led by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). The project is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) through the Cross-border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research fund.
Cedric de Coning is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) whose work focuses on adaptive peacebuilding and the climate–peace nexus.
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie is a Senior Research Fellow at NUPI and Manager of the Training for Peace Programme, with research focusing on peace operations, stabilisation, and security cooperation across Africa.
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Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.
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Transcript
00:00
Cedric de Coning
People report a significant effect on their livelihoods as a result of climate change, affecting their food security, water security, and this puts a stress on the society which then reduces their ability to also manage and adapt to conflict. Climate change doesn’t go to war, people go to war. Climate change is an enabling, shaping factor.
00:22
Elisa Garbil
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
00:31
Dominic Bowen
Today’s episode is sponsored by Conducttr. They’re a crisis exercising software that’s built for corporates, consultants, humanitarian teams, and defence and security organisations. It lets you build exercises fast using its intuitive scenario editor and ready-made content. I’ve used Conducttr and I can testify that if you use PowerPoint or Excel still, well it’s time to start looking at Conducttr. If you want your teams to be genuinely ready for the next crisis, then Conducttr is certainly worth a look. And before we start today, I have a quick favour to ask you. If you listen to The International Risk Podcast and you find it useful, please follow and subscribe wherever you are watching and listening today. In return, my commitment to you is simple that every week we will keep raising the bar with better guests, sharper questions and more practical takeaways for you that you can use to make better decisions. And if there is someone you want on the show, tell me. We read all of your comments, and we act on them. Let’s get onto the show.
01:35
Dominic Bowen
The Lake Chad Basin is one of the clearest examples of how climate pressure, weak governance, violent extremism and human insecurity can all come together. Once a vital lifeline for millions of people, the region now sits at the centre of a really complex crisis shaped by environmental decline, displacement, fragility and conflict. I’m Dominic Bowen, I’m host of The International Risk Podcast, and in this episode, we’re joined by Cedric de Coning and Andrew E. Yaw Tchie. They’re from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and they examine what happens when climate change becomes a threat multiplier. They’ll help us understand why simplistic narratives about climate change and conflict often fall short. But also, and really importantly, they’ll help us understand what policy makers and international actors are still getting wrong about peace and security in the Lake Chad region. Andrew and Cedric, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.
02:30
Cedric de Coning
Thank you very much. Nice to meet you.
02:32
Dominic Bowen
And how is life in Oslo today?
02:35
Cedric de Coning
It’s good. We had a bit of a rough start with a commute problem. Otherwise, pretty nice. Spring is coming. So all good.
02:42
Dominic Bowen
Spring in Scandinavia is always a nice place.
Andrew, I wonder, many of our listeners will have heard about Lake Chad Basin but might not fully understand why is it so frequently discussed in conversations about climate, about security? So perhaps to set the scene, can you tell us what’s happening in the Lake Chad Basin today and why is it such an important situation to understand?
03:02
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
The Lake Chad Basin is a remarkable area that has undergone so many changes over the last few decades, in particular since the late 1960s.
Now the lake is interesting because it straddles between Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, but also you have nomads and pastoralists and all these various different communities that inherently have lived there for centuries and so it has been a meeting point for many of these communities and a lifeline that has, since the Boko Haram insurgency, impacted on communities but also intervened with the lake’s decline as well. Over the years, what you have seen is the displacement of communities, being displaced several times, you’ve seen the intensity of conflict, particularly in Borno State, but also in the wider areas as well. But you’ve also seen a surge of civilian capacity to respond to these issues more broadly, but also through the Lake Chad Basin Commission, which with the support of the African Union and the Multinational Joint Task Force revitalize not just the force but also this broader approach to how to respond to climate peace and security. So that’s why it’s so interesting because you have a strategy, but also it links to the wider aspects of what communities are going through and it’s trying to adapt and adjust to the context as well.
04:16
Dominic Bowen
No, that’s really interesting and your recent paper, the Managing Climate, Peace and Security Risk in the Lake Chad region, the policy brief came out in January and you’ll have some research coming out really soon, highlights how climate shocks, like droughts, like floods, like degradation, really compounds violent conflict, food insecurity and even displacement across, as you said, many countries, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria.
Your findings around risk amplification and food and water as security pathways, I thought was really interesting. But to sort of take it back, if we start looking at the causal relationships, is it climate change that’s driving the conflict in the Lake Chad region? Or is climate change just worsening what’s already fragile political, economic and security conditions?
04:59
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
In general, the conclusions are that it exacerbates or worsens, in this case, the conflict situation. So I wouldn’t say that it intervenes per se to create the conflict, but it certainly does give it more momentum and we use the phrase climate, peace and security because there’s that intersect between all three of them. How it can impact on conflict, impact on the peace situation, but also more generally the security aspect. And so that’s what we are seeing in this case.
05:25
Cedric de Coning
And if I could add to that, I would say it’s also when there’s kindling, when there’s certain conditions, you know, then a fire can start or a fire is larger than otherwise if there’s lots of undergrowth and so on, so I do think the climatic conditions is also shaping and enabling.
So, it’s not really a chicken and egg. They’re both present at the same time and they both influence each other, but what is important for us is to make the distinction between agency, in the sense that climate change and environmental degradation is a shaping factor, but choices that people make, whether they’re going to cooperate or whether they’re going to turn to violence to achieve their interests, that’s not a choice of climate change. That’s a human choice, and a human choice made in a particular political economic context.
Climate change doesn’t go to war, people go to war, but climate change is an enabling shaping factor.
06:15
Dominic Bowen
It’s really interesting, your point about agency and the importance of that. As you said, I think it’s a great point, climate change doesn’t go to war, it’s people that go to war. And of course, some people you know still argue today that you know climate change is just this convenient explanation for everything.
But from what you’ve seen and the dialogues you’re having with people across the region, what evidence exists about the climate change and the causes of that in Lake Chad Basin? And what also studies and research has been done about the weak institutions or the extreme violence and the governance and then how those things all come together to affect agency? Because, of course, how we employ our agency and the education and the motives are probably different from what you’ve got in Oslo, to what you’ve got when you’re surrounded by very different environmental factors.
06:59
Cedric de Coning
Climate change affects all of us and we can see certain regions, certain areas are more affected than others, and that’s precisely because of governance, because of resilience, because of capacity that those communities have to adapt to climate change versus others. So certainly governance and broader resilience is a major factor in how we adapt and manage climate change.
But if we look particular at the Lake Chad region, so as part of this research we’ve undertaken, we had eight local researchers that really focused on doing interviews around the four countries and the eight what we call territories or sub-national governorships around the Lake Chad region and they did about 313 interviews, local communities, NGO leaders, traditional leaders, local authorities.
It’s very clear from that evidence and the data that people report a significant effect on their livelihoods as a result of climate change significantly affecting their food security, their water security, how they make a living and this puts a stress on the society which then reduces their ability to adapt to climate change reduces their ability to also manage and adapt to conflict where people have to become displaced or become more mobile in terms of the choices they make in terms of you know moving their livestock, for instance, to areas where there’s more grazing or some family members moving to cities to get employment and so on. All of that breaks up the social network, the social support system that communities have and then weakens the resilience of those communities in terms of responding to climate.
So these communities and different people that have been interviewed clearly report from their own lived experience how climate change is affecting their lives and then making them more vulnerable also to both inter-community conflicts, where there’s tensions over resource scarcity and so on, but also to armed groups, for instance armed group recruitment becomes you know an option especially for some young people who on the one hand need income, where they don’t can’t get the income from agriculture anymore, but also in terms of a loss of meaning and purpose when your livelihoods are disrupted and armed groups offer an alternative value system and some dignity.
09:15
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
Historically, these communities were very interlinked into marriages. But, as Cedric rightly points out, as people have been displaced, have moved on to different areas, the impact of climate change means those structures that were in place have slowly eroded over time. What you have is more fragmented communities that in essence would have had an agreement between the pastoralists and the farmers about the routes they would have taken and signed an agreement. I mean, we see this in South Sudan and Sudan, but those routes, because of the displacement over time, have meant that those structures are now more fragmented than ever.
So maybe 30, 40 years ago, there was famine, but you’d have negotiations, you would share with each other’s resources, you go to a borehole, and that was fine. Now it’s, well, the resources and there’s an increase in population, we can’t share this. And so that pressure is more acute now, and it’s more on the doorstep where people are now struggling. In certain situations, particularly where we were, when we went to Maiduguri, you would hear cases where women would set out from six o’clock in the morning to wait almost eight, nine hours before the local community had taken their water from the borehole, before then she would take her water. Where maybe 15, 20 years ago, she could have just mingled with the local community, had the conversation and taken that water. That constraint is much more pressing now than it was before.
10:31
Dominic Bowen
Thanks for giving us that illustration, I think that’s really important. Perhaps that contributes because we know that there’s been lots of attention, funding and policy dialogue around resilience and around stabilisation and we know that many of the big donors, the UK government, many European governments, are still particularly interested in the Lake Chad region. But the responses, the impact of foreign aid has perhaps been fragmented and, maybe you could even say, underperforming other responses.
The World Bank alone, I think it’s spent you know close to 200 million on different projects, but there’s still these persistent security threats. There’s the continued weak governance and institutions that are perhaps not being as transparent or as effective as we might like to see. I understand, and please correct me, the lake has shrunk by about 90% since 1970, which is obviously huge and created significant insecurity for millions of people.
So people would ask, and no doubt donors have asked this question, why has the response, why have the attempts to improve the situation in Lake Chad region been so fragmented and perhaps underperformed?
11:34
Cedric de Coning
Actually, that’s a very interesting question because our study is precisely about the response. We looked into a very specific strategy that was developed by the different countries in the region. Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon came together with the help of the African Union and the Lake Chad Basin Commission and they adopted a regional strategy for stabilization, resilience and recovery.
We looked specifically at the first phase of that strategy from 2019 to 2024 to understand better to what degree has that strategy actually influenced preventing and managing climate related insecurity.
It’s funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office of the United Kingdom under this cross-border conflict evidence policy and trends the accept research fund. What we found overall I would say is that this strategy and related implementation initiatives, have certainly contributed to some degree to containing the conflict. We can see much less violence today than it was, let’s say, in 2014, 2015.
But an important point I want to make here, which is very interesting and why we’ve looked at the strategy, is that it’s not we’re not only looking at development assistance. These are the four governments of that region coming together and using their own resources, their own budgets, their own security forces, largely funded by themselves, to support the strategy.
But our overall finding is that, although the strategy is doing all the right things, the scale and the scope of the problem is so significant that even although the strategy is making good inroads in certain areas, it’s not able to transform the drivers of the conflict at the scale necessary to really change the situation. Part of that is precisely the climate change and the environmental degradation aspect. I will come back to that and explain that more.
13:13
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
Just to also add, if I may, I think the other thing that we find is that as much as there has been this strategy and this approach to responding to climate change or in this case, the regional insecurity issues, the cross-border aspect is, I think, one of the biggest dynamics. You have communities who are, who maybe once upon a time, interconnected. These borders weren’t as arbitrary as they are now, but the flow of communities, the flow of goods, all of these interconnections. And again, once climate change and the impact of conflict has impacted on these communities, they start to shift.
Where we are today is that the context has also changed as well. And so that the RSS has to try and keep up with that existing situation, and that becomes quite difficult then you need sustained support into this aspect. And if you look at the amount of money that was put into, let’s say, Afghanistan, the Lake Chad Basin doesn’t even have a drop of that same amount of funding. And so, again, it does show that once you include communities and more understanding of, the more regional dynamic, that you can have some success. But again, the sustained amount of funding is what is key here and the ability for the strategy to continuously adapt to those new contexts, not just going forward, but also going backwards, because it needs to deal with the root causes of the conflict as well.
14:27
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, unquestionably, and I think that’d be interesting to unpack. I really like the example you gave before, Andrew, about how different communities might have to wait for other communities to access their water first and one of the most widely cited facts is the massive shrinkage of Lake Chad over the last few decades. I’d be keen to understand a bit more how this this environmental change has really reshaped livelihoods for individuals, not just for communities, but actual people. There’s been some really interesting studies about fisher folk, not just the dwindling fish stocks, but also what that means to where they live and how they access the stocks that are still available, but also the changes on daily life.
What does that mean to households about how they trade, how they conduct commerce, what that means for labour, but also just living, things like access to drinking and water and irrigation? What does this mean? What do our listeners need to understand if they really want to understand what’s life like in the Lake Chad region?
15:18
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
I think one thing that I take from my time there was in particular that it’s been hard for communities. It’s been hard in part because the environment of, for example, maybe wanting to go out to farm different types of crops and those crops now due to flooding don’t necessarily grow because again because everything is flooded. The other thing is that communities are having to go further out to field to not have farmlands and that increase of insecurity in part because of terrorist groups like Boko Haram has also meant that the proximity of what they go is a challenge.
But the challenge now, particularly when we went to the market in Maiduguri and beyond, was that now you have an issue where the rejuvenation is happening, but in certain areas, Boko Haram is now placing attacks on those fishermen. So let’s say, for example, a year ago, a bunch of catfish, which is the sort of swampy fish that you have there, was going for 100 Naira. Now you’re looking at 10,000 Naira because they have to add that tax that they would be taxed on from Boko Haram all the way to bring in. So what you see is this constant layer upon layer of communities having to respond and deal with these situations. So more broadly, it’s either flooding that tends to be the biggest thing, heat waves, we’ve seen more of that where the crops now are totalled, and you see this when you land and see bleached land where once upon a time it was green.
And so all of these situations means that people are having to go further afield, which means they’re now encroaching on other communities’ land and so people are on their own pretty much, unless there are food aid. And again, with cuts, you start to see most of the international organizations like aid organizations are now pulling out from these areas. So communities are left and they’re on their own.
16:58
Cedric de Coning
Maybe just to add also that you mentioned the shrinking of the lake a couple of times, and I think what we see rather is the weather variability, the unpredictability of climate in that context as a result of climate change. So, yes, the lake has generally shrunk overall over this period for a number of reasons, including population growth and governance, how the natural resources have been used in the catchment area and so on. But we also see in the last two years or so part of the lake growing again. And this also has displaced people who have been planting crops on the lake shore, which are now flooded again as the lake is growing. So it’s not just the lake shrinking, as Andrew says, there’s also flooding, in this increased unpredictability. And what you see, especially in the dry season, is then various low-lying areas where the water remains, as people congregate in those areas, is because that’s where the water is and where there’s grazing. So fishermen, farmers, herders, all then start to concentrate on these few low-lying ponds and areas where there’s water. And of course, that proximity can create all kinds of tensions so if it’s not very well managed, and that’s again where the traditional leaders, of course, are very important in terms of how they try to resolve the disputes that emerge as a result of that.
18:11
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, thanks for explaining that. And I’ll just take the opportunity to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcast, The International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. So please do go to YouTube and search for The International Risk Podcast. And if you like our content, please do subscribe and like. It really is critical for our success.
Now, Cedric, you’ve been leading with Andrew a lot of the Climate, Peace and Security risk research across the Lake Chad region. So the work that you’ve been doing, I’m keen to hear about what some of the most important findings are, because it’s very easy to say that this is just a narrative about climate change leads to conflict. But I think it is a lot more than that. Based on your research and based on what you’re seeing right now, what are some of the most important findings and insights that you’ve come across?
18:54
Cedric de Coning
Yeah, I think our core finding is really that, although the strategy that I mentioned that we’ve looked at has contributed to reducing violent conflict and contributed to recovery and so on, the climate stresses that the people we interviewed report are so significant that they continue to undermine the sustainability of the gains that have been recorded so far. What we are seeing now that people are reporting is more community tensions, inter-community conflict as a result of the pressure of climate change. So, at least the communities we’ve interviewed, which many of them may have been outside areas controlled by Boko Haram, they are also reporting this additional element of inter-community conflict and I think we can summarize our findings to say you know three main implementation gaps.
The first is a security adaptation imbalance. What we mean by that is that the stabilization efforts have, in a sense, outpaced the climate security risk reduction efforts. In other words, there has been a gradual reduction of armed group related violence and partial resettlement. But the underlying drivers of climate change-related conflicts including the resource scarcity we mentioned before and the pressure on livelihoods, remain largely unaddressed and contribute to this kind of new rise of inter-community conflicts such as farmer herder clashes.
And the second main implementation gap that we’ve identified is something we can call a design localization disconnect. Although the strategy has been influential, especially at the macro policy level, bringing the governments together, bringing traditional leaders together and so on, the communities that we’ve interviewed at the local level for them the implementation of the strategy is very uneven very limited and not sustainable in the sense that it hasn’t transformed these drivers the kind of livelihood pressure that they experience.
And that also leads to our final implementation gap that we’ve identified, which we can call an ambition capacity mismatch. That really speaks to the fact that, although the strategy addresses in various ways, some of the key drivers behind the conflict, it just simply is not able to do it at the scale necessary to transform the everyday experience, the everyday pressure that communities in this region experience. There’s 40 to 50 million people living in this region. And although there’s various efforts underway by the governments in the region, by international actors, still it’s not at a scale that can really significantly address these challenges.
21:21
Dominic Bowen
And I think you mentioned that intercommunal violence and, of course, there’s Boko Haram, which is which has been around in Nigeria since I think about 2002. Then now there’s a splinter group, Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), and these remain active groups throughout the region. And they’re, as you mentioned, fueling attacks, abductions, territorial fights, but then exacerbating these intercommunal tensions. I’d be keen to understand that in a little bit more detail. You’ve got farmers, you’ve got herders, you’ve got fisher folk. They’re grazing and then it’s causing village burnings and there’s ongoing recruitment by insurgents. There’s the taxes that you mentioned, which, again, hard to really fathom how communities can survive with this sort of pressure on them. Now, we know that the security services and the Nigerian forces killed about 438 fighters a couple of months ago but, as we’ve seen in all conflicts, just killing the bad guys doesn’t solve the problem.
What does the conflict look like today? And is there a path forward? Is there some sort of reconciliation where we can achieve peace in the current environment where the climate pressures, the governance pressures are also present at the same time?
22:21
Cedric de Coning
I think one of the reasons why we studied the strategy is precisely because it is trying to not just deal with Boko Haram and the other armed groups, but it is actually trying to address the drivers of the conflict across a kind of a holistic set of pillars that the strategy contains
It really involves from the local traditional leaders right then through national to the African Union and these international partners so it’s a very interesting multi-stakeholder, multi-scale approach.
I would say that maybe it’s unrealistic to think that a particular project, a particular strategy over three years or five years can bring the conflict to an end. What we see in this region is more normal context that has been there for a very long time, now impacted also by the insurgency, now impacted also by climate change. Whilst we can see that the government efforts, the international efforts, can contain these armed groups to the extent of safeguarding the major cities, safeguarding certain IDP camps, and so on, the idea that they can completely eradicate both the armed groups and completely somehow deal with the needs of the communities affected by climate change, I think, is unrealistic.
Then if you’re the governments, if you’re international partners, you have to think about, OK, we’ve got limited resources in terms of dealing with the scale of the problem, so, we need to identify priorities. What is the absolute worst things that we should avoid? Major armed conflict, or major tax on communities is maybe where you can focus your efforts as opposed to think that you can somehow you know completely eradicate or completely deal with the problem.
23:54
Dominic Bowen
And I think identifying priorities is going to be key. And Andrew, your work on peace building and governance, especially in these complex conflicts environments is really insightful. So when you look at those pressures, as well as the climate pressures, what are the priorities? Not just for the Lake Chad region, but more broadly, what are the priorities that that governments should be looking at and donors should be looking at as part of their priority planning for the next really decade or two ahead?
24:19
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
I think there are a few things, I think we need to go back to understanding why these conflicts emerge. What is at the heart of these conflicts? Why do communities choose to take up arms? Why do rebel groups exist? Unless we do that, then we can’t then provide the right solutions to these issues. So I think more broadly, that’s the first thing.
The second thing I think is important is, and these are words and phrases that we’ve used well, but going back to things like peace building. How do we build peace with communities? How do we build peace between communities? How do we build peace between the state and the communities and its constituents? We’ve lost some of that. Over the last decade and a half, we’ve seen a surge of militarized approaches. Instead of actually thinking more holistically, what is that the whole entire community needs? What are the challenges of the whole entire community? How do we deal with the issues of the center versus peripheries?
And then I think going down further, which would be the third thing, and again, it’s not necessarily that it’s three things, but I think priorities would be how do we then continuously adapt peacebuilding peace peacemaking, all of these other aspects, resilience building to the context in which communities are because I think the challenge with a lot of aid in the past has been we’re responding to this aspect but the reality is this aspect, if you think about a chain of events, will continuously adapt and evolve and we need to be able to respond to that, but more broadly, we need to take a more holistic approach to say, what do communities need? How do we empower communities to do it for themselves and be able to sustain those gains? And I think that’s where the RSRR has been really good, because in essence, while it has its challenges, it’s been able to allow communities to also do it themselves. I think that’s what we need to do, aggregate power back to these communities to be able to do it themselves, but more broadly, continuously think about how we adapt and change our mindsets to where we are today, to where we are what will we be in the future.
26:13
Dominic Bowen
And one question that we ask all guests on the International Risk Podcast, Cedric and Andrew, is when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?
26:22
Cedric de Coning
Well, I think, the reason why we focused on Lake Chad is precisely because climate change we see as one of those drivers of instability, impacting on social cohesion and social resilience, that is going to increase as a factor in the future, certainly for regions like Lake region, but also across the world, across Norway. So part of our research is looking at the situation in Europe, at the situation in Norway, how climate change will affect security, social cohesion, societal resilience. I would highlight climate change as one factor that is affecting, and already affecting and increasingly going to affect, all of our societies.
27:02
Dominic Bowen
And what about you, Andrew? What are the risks that that you monitor and concern you the most?
27:07
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
I think my sort of top three would be at the moment, the heavy use of military for responses to everything. I think the use of AI in particular, given what we’re seeing in Iran. A lot of this stuff that we have been researching on is on land and there’s a whole entire aspect when it comes to sea, maritime security, blue economy, that I think particularly for the African continent, which is my focus of research, particularly how do we govern seas, how do we govern all of this space, particularly if you have insurgents, terrorist groups? We’re seeing more boundary issues between states, Ghana and Togo now more recently. It was Kenya and Somalia a few years back. So more of these issues that I think could bring together states into conflict. And so those the things I think for me the next three to four years that I see as challenges or risks going forward.
27:55
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, that’s incredibly interesting and I think a great list you’ve put forward. So thanks very much for that, Andrew and Cedric. And thank you very much for coming on The International Risk Podcast.
28:03
Cedric de Coning
Thank you. It was great talking to you about our research. Thanks.
28:06
Andrew E. Yaw Tchie
Thanks for having us as well.
28:08
Dominic Bowen
Well, that was a really insightful conversation with Cedric de Coning and Andrew E. Yaw Tchie. I really appreciated hearing their thoughts on climate conflict in the Lake Chad Basin and we’ll link to their work in the show notes below so please do have a look at that. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Ella Burden. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.
28:29
Elisa Garbil
Thank you for listening to this episode of The International Risk Podcast. For more interviews and articles visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, BlueSky and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host Dominic Bowen. See you next time.
