Sahel means “border” in Arabic. The Sahel region in Africa is the border between the Sahara Desert in the north and the savannah and tropics further south. In the east, Sudan, a nation of 50 million people, has experienced fifteen military coups since independence in 1956 and is in a constant state of civil war for at least two decades. Wars over water between largely Islamic herders and largely Christian agriculturalists are ongoing and the Sahel has surpassed the Middle East and South Asia to become the global epicenter of jihadist violence. Repeated crises in the region could lead to terrorist activities being exported to other parts of the world. At least six of the countries in the region, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan, and Guinea have recently undergone military take-overs.
Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, warns European nations that refugees from Sahel region will be moving north to escape violence, climate crises like droughts and floods, and food shortages.
A recent article in the New York Times, “From Coast to Coast, a Corridor of Coups Creates Chaos in Africa,” largely blames the political instability of the region on the people who live there. Missing from the article is that the borders for these countries and their economies were established by European colonial powers and that they remain in constant debt and the under the financial domination of the industrial world including the United States, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
Also missing from the article is a discussion of the impact of climate change on the Sahel region
where increasing temperatures and more frequent weather extremes hit the population harder than other parts of the world. A 2022 study by the Brookings Institute concluded “Without downplaying the effects of poor governance in fueling conflict in the Sahel, we argue that climate change plays an amplifying role, by drying out livelihoods for the majority of people with a high dependence on natural resources, and therefore, triggering fighting over increasingly scarcer resources.” Mali and Burkina Faso are already two of the hottest countries in the world.
According to the United Nations, average temperature in the Sahel is projected to rise between 3.5°F (2.0°C) and 8°F (4.3°C) over the next 50 years and future dry and wet periods are expected to become more extreme. Coastal communities will battle rising seas that salinate their water supply. Yields of major crops are projected to decline. About one in five people will be impacted by severe heat and mortality from heat waves is expected to increase by four-fold. Meanwhile, countries in the Sahel region have among the smallest carbon footprints per capita in the world which means they have the least responsibility for climate change. Americans produces 150 times as much carbon dioxide per person as people in Burkina Faso.
We already suffer from record heat and extreme weather in the United States. It is frightening if what is taking place in the Sahel region of Africa is the future of the planet and humanity.