Rob Crilly: Hate not heat fuelling wars in Africa

Darfur is an inhospitable place at best. At its worst, along the border with Chad, it is a barren desert where a hairdryer-hot wind whips dust into the face, drying the skin and making life impossible for all but the hardiest of gnarled acacia bushes.

It is tempting to see the roots of conflict in that arid environment. Darfur's war, so the argument runs, is a battle for resources. As the Sahara continues its southerly march, the farmers and the herders face a life and death struggle for land and water, increasing the rivalry between them until centuries of co-existence and barter eventually broke down into war.

Three years ago, Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations general secretary, publicly declared the Darfur war - and its more than 200,000 dead - to be the result of an ecological crisis, due at least in part to climate change.

In conflicts across the continent, global warming has become the overriding narrative. In the Horn of Africa, in Somalia, Ethiopia and northern Kenya, desiccated land and food insecurity are blamed for setting clan against clan or tribe against tribe.

Politicians and aid experts have been quick to seize on the link. For example, Margaret Beckett, when she was Foreign Secretary, warned that climate change would cause future resource conflicts and said Africa was already in the grip of such wars. The theory has plenty of advantages for policymakers and activists.

Why raise money to help African countries led by thugs and crooks who have embarked on costly wars? It is much easier to fund aid programmes that are working to help the innocent victims of climate change.

Even better, the spectre of global warming increases the pressure on western donors to act. It is our greenhouse gases that are to blame for the drought that is killing pastures, and increasing violent cattle raids, in the northern reaches of Kenya. Africa, still in an early stage of development, represents a tiny fraction of the world's carbon emissions.

Just one problem: There is almost no scientific evidence that drought or prolonged heat waves cause conflict in Africa.

A paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that climate was not to blame for Africa's civil wars. Halvard Buhaug, of Oslo's Centre for the Study of Civil War, found that the incidence of conflict and the number of war deaths had each declined in the past 15 years at a time when temperatures had increased steadily and rains failed.

Instead, he concluded that political factors were the driving force behind conflict - factors such as economic disparity, ethnic tensions and political instability.

Now, this is not to say that climate change will have no impact at all on the prevalence of future conflict.It may well be that changing rainfall patterns, desertification and altered temperatures will have impacts on economic disparity, ethnic tensions and political instability, which themselves are drivers of conflict.

But the point to make is that these issues are too important to be left to assumption and intuition. We need more scientific research to elucidate the links by which climate change will exert its effects in everyday life.

So in the case of Africa's wars, these might not necessarily be solutions that focus on climate adaptation or mitigation; they might take the form of conventional peace building initiatives and conflict resolution strategies.

And the solutions do not lie thousands of miles from Africa's scorched plains, amid the oil and coal-fired power stations that light our towns and cities. They lie in African capitals such as Khartoum, Kinshasa and Mogadishu. The notion of climate wars might be desperately fashionable but they aren't really all that different from the conflicts that went before. It's just a new excuse for leaders who hate each other to lead their people into battle.