Climate Change: The threat multiplier in pastoral conflicts : A case study on the pastoral conflicts in Nigeria

Abstract: Agricultural communities in Nigeria have faced years of conflict between pastoralists and farmers. These conflicts have caused the lost of human life as well as affected resources such as crops and cattle negatively. Nigeria is also facing new challenges in the form of climate change that is affecting the pattern of these agricultural communities, possibly aggravating the current tensions between the actors. Pastoral conflicts have often been considered religious or ethnic conflicts however it is important to explore the possibility of other causes that can affect these conflicts such as climate change. Therefore will this study focus on pastoral conflicts in Nigeria and how climate change acts as a threat multiplier in this case. It is valuable to explore the possibility of climate change being an actor in conflict as it can help to further understand similar cases. The pastoral conflicts in Nigeria will be studied in order to identify climate change as a threat multiplier. In addition, the identification will be done by exploring different categories such as worsening livelihood conditions, worsening relationship between actors and the distribution of local resources. These categories are based on different approaches of the theory of relative deprivation and will together create an analytical framework. That will help structure the data and to create an abductive text analysis where the case of Nigeria is placed in relations with this framework. In particular, the findings of the study suggest that climate change can act as a threat multiplier in the case of the pastoral conflicts in Nigeria. The issues that can both be related to climate change and the pastoral conflict is that of land resources. Land resources is suggested by the findings to have significant role in the conflict between the farmers and pastoralists. It is also directly affected by the increased temperature that Nigeria have been experiencing the past couple years. Further research should focus on exploring and comparing cases that have has similar issues.