What happened
FEWS NET and UN OCHA reporting through 2026 has continued to document the compounding relationship between climate shocks, conflict and displacement across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and parts of Southern Africa. Recurrent drought conditions in parts of Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, alongside flooding in South Sudan and parts of West Africa, have intersected with active or latent conflict dynamics to produce displacement patterns that neither climate nor conflict analysis alone adequately explains or forecasts.
GDACS and FEWS NET early-warning data have flagged several African regions as facing simultaneous climate stress and conflict risk in 2026, including the Sahel's central belt, Somalia's riverine areas, and parts of the Lake Chad Basin — geographies where resource competition, particularly over grazing land and water access, has historically fed into intercommunal and farmer-herder violence.
Why it matters
The compound nature of this threat means that organisations analysing climate risk and conflict risk as separate workstreams are likely to miss the interaction effects that actually drive displacement and instability on the ground. Drought-driven livestock loss, for example, has repeatedly been linked by researchers and regional analysts to increased farmer-herder conflict in the Sahel and parts of East Africa, not because drought causes conflict directly, but because it intensifies competition over increasingly scarce resources in contexts where governance capacity to mediate that competition is already weak.
For humanitarian and development actors, this matters because response planning built around single-hazard frameworks — a drought response plan, a conflict response plan — struggles to address populations facing overlapping and mutually reinforcing shocks, often leading to under-resourced or poorly sequenced interventions.
How the threat is evolving
Three dynamics are shaping the compound threat's evolution. First, displacement patterns are becoming more protracted and less linear, with populations displaced by climate shocks moving into areas already affected by conflict, and populations displaced by conflict moving into areas facing climate stress, creating secondary vulnerability rather than resolution. Second, resource-competition violence — particularly farmer-herder conflict — has shown signs of increasing lethality and organisation in parts of Nigeria, the wider Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, with some armed groups reportedly exploiting or co-opting existing resource disputes to expand influence. Third, urban displacement is growing as a share of overall displacement, with climate- and conflict-affected populations increasingly moving toward cities such as Mogadishu, N'Djamena and Bamako rather than remaining in rural displacement camps, straining urban services and creating new social tension dynamics.
Climate stress rarely causes conflict on its own, but it is an efficient multiplier of existing fragility — and in Africa's most fragile regions, that multiplier effect is now visible in the displacement data.
- FEWS NET food-insecurity phase classifications trending toward Emergency or Catastrophe in conflict-affected regions.
- Reported increases in farmer-herder or resource-competition violence in the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin and parts of East Africa.
- Growth in urban displacement as a share of total displacement in capitals such as Mogadishu, N'Djamena and Bamako.
- GDACS and national meteorological agency alerts for drought or flooding overlapping with active conflict zones.
- Livestock price and pasture-access data as a leading indicator of pastoralist distress migration.
Security implications
Security teams operating in affected regions should treat climate-stress indicators as a component of conflict early warning rather than a separate environmental risk category, particularly in farmer-herder conflict zones where seasonal migration patterns disrupted by drought or flooding have historically preceded spikes in intercommunal violence. Urban displacement growth also has direct implications for premises and personnel security in secondary cities not traditionally treated as high-risk locations.
Business implications
Agribusiness, extractives and infrastructure companies operating in climate-exposed and conflict-affected regions should integrate climate-stress monitoring into their conflict and community-relations risk assessments, since resource competition exacerbated by climate shocks can directly affect land access, community consent processes and local security dynamics around project sites. Insurers and investors should treat compound climate-conflict exposure as a distinct underwriting category rather than assessing climate and political risk separately.
NGO/humanitarian implications
Humanitarian and development agencies should build integrated climate-conflict-displacement analysis into needs assessments and programme design rather than running parallel single-hazard analyses, and should specifically plan for the growing urban dimension of displacement, which requires different programming approaches than traditional rural displacement camp responses. Anticipatory action frameworks tied to FEWS NET and climate forecasting should be explicitly linked to conflict-sensitivity analysis rather than treated as purely technical triggers.
- Integrate FEWS NET and climate early-warning data directly into conflict early-warning and programme-design processes.
- Build specific urban displacement response capacity distinct from rural camp-based approaches.
- Incorporate resource-competition and farmer-herder conflict indicators into community engagement and land-access due diligence.
- Link anticipatory action triggers to conflict-sensitivity analysis, not climate data alone.
What to monitor next
Track FEWS NET food-security outlooks and GDACS alerts for the Sahel, Horn and Lake Chad Basin, ACLED data on farmer-herder and resource-competition violence, UN OCHA and IOM displacement tracking for urban displacement trends, and seasonal rainfall and pasture-condition forecasts as leading indicators of pastoralist distress migration.