The UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Mark Lowcock, said that the Sahel region in Africa is at the center of the accelerating climate change and described it as the canary in the coalmine of the warming Earth.
In The Guardian's report, Lowcock said that the alarming deterioration in the Sahel region in recent years had caused problems that displaced tens of millions of people, as well as bred extremist violence, human rights violation, and political instability.
Furthermore, the threat of the erratic weather due to climate change affects the lives and livelihoods of around 13.4 million people in the Sahel region. These people in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have been asking for humanitarian assistance across borders as they were forced to leave their homes because of the unprecedented floods across the west and central Africa.
Sahel Region Is Less Resilient to Climate Change
Unlike most regions across the globe, the Sahel region is less resilient to the changes brought by climate change. Lowcock told The Guardian that this problem is even reinforced by traditional lifestyles and the population's rapid growth.
"It is very striking how bad the climate problem is. There is a totally inadequate level of an international effort in helping these countries adapt to climate change," Lowcock said, criticizing the efforts in helping the Sahel region.
Some experts predicted that the daytime temperature of the Sahel region would rise by eight degrees at the end of the century, which could affect the shrinking resources of traditional modes of agriculture, such as grazing and water.
Countries Respond to the Sahel
The United Nations (UN), Denmark, Germany, and the European Union (EU) will host a ministerial conference on Tuesday, October 20, to address the humanitarian concerns in the Sahel region.
Lowcock said that organizations had acknowledged the underlying problem in the Sahel, but something must be done with the inadequate action in helping the region adapt to global warming. He noted that the Sahel would always come at the eighth, ninth, or tenth place in the list of things to talk about whenever world leaders gather, which makes it never to get the attention it deserves.
The risks of a global tragedy happening can only be stopped if the international community does something about the issue and does them differently this time. The problem of Sahel in climate change is not solely theirs as it affects the world as a whole.
EU is planning a special envoy to the Sahel region in which Angel Losada Fernández describes it as a perfect storm of crises in the region because it could feed Islamist militancy.
Overlapping Insurgencies in the Sahel
In 2012, a coalition of local separatist tribesmen and Islamists took control of much of the Northern Mali which bred to the extremist violence in the Sahel. Various military groups from different countries have tried to weaken the overlapping insurgencies in the area but failed, and so security has continued to deteriorate.
UNICRI's Countering radicalization and violent extremism project aimed at providing the existing body of research on how to make communities within the Sahel region and its neighboring areas affected by extremism more resilient to these violent acts mainly attributed to the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), an affiliate of ISIS.
Due to this extremist violence, environmental projects have failed to make a significant impact on the region like the Great Green Wall project that up until now has only covered 4% of its target area.
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