Zambia pursues peace and security to power green growth under climate change 

Authors: Marianne Gadeberg, Gracsious Maviza, and Giulia Caroli (Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT)  

Zambia’s Ministry of Green Economy and Environment has included climate, peace, and security perspectives in its new National Green Growth Strategy 2024-2030, adopting insights from the CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR). Zambia aims to pre-empt and mitigate climate-related risks to peace and security, thereby enabling a USD 10 billion investment in green growth.

Currently, Zambia is experiencing the worst drought in four decades. This crisis is causing food insecurity for more than a million people, cutting off hydroelectric power supply, adversely affecting the economy, amplifying vulnerabilities and inequalities, all while compromising social stability.

“With the climate change impacts that we are currently facing, especially with the current drought, we are experiencing conflicts over water and energy. That’s why it is so important to include these aspects of climate, peace, and security as we aim to grow our green economy,” explained Philippa Hamakasu, Senior Green Economy Officer-Projects at the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment.

To avoid the human, financial, and political costs of growing climate-related risks to peace and security, Zambian policymakers have integrated preventative and mitigative measures into the new Green Growth Strategy. Building on ClimBeR research that connects local and national experiences, the strategy names peace and stability as guiding principles for achieving green growth. It lists enhancing institutional capacity as a key enabling condition, and its accompanying implementation plan provisions for both more research and training on climate, peace, and security.

Ultimately, the Green Growth Strategy, for the realization of which Zambia seeks to raise USD 10 billion, is intended to foster a low-carbon, resource–efficient, resilient, and socially inclusive economy by 2030.  

Community voices raise climate challenges and grassroots solutions 

In recent decades, Zambia has suffered climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, increased dry spells, higher temperatures, flash floods, and changes in the growing season. Projections indicate that by 2030, heat, drought, and flood events will co-occur more frequently. 

When conducting fieldwork in Zambia’s Southern Province in 2023, ClimBeR researchers found that even though Zambia has avoided any violent conflict so far, climate change impacts are already challenging social cohesion in some places and within some demographics. ClimBeR, in collaboration with Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture, used a ‘community voices’ methodology to discuss current challenges and local solutions with 49 community members from Muchila in Namwala district and Lusitu in Chirundu district, both in the Southern Province.

These discussions revealed that climate change impacts are driving important social changes that can have implications for social cohesion, stability, and peace, particularly if climate action is not urgently taken. For example, the impacts of droughts and dry spells have prompted some people from the Southern Province to move north in search of water and farmland. However, tensions have emerged when these newcomers start uprooting trees, which is their traditional way of clearing land—but significantly different from the methods used by the communities already residing in northern provinces. This makes the northern communities fear for their land, livelihoods, and food security.

“Where there is hunger, people get angry,” explained Dr Rose Fumpa-Makano, who has been passionately engaged in socially inclusive development and climate action in Zambia for over three decades.  

Dr Fumpa-Makano contributed to a stakeholder consultation workshop organized by ClimBeR in July 2023, and she welcomed ClimBeR’s efforts to pre-empt conflicts through participatory community engagement on climate risks and solutions. She stated that people living with the realities of climate change impacts already realize that certain unsustainable practices—such as clearing land by uprooting trees or cultivating crops on wetlands or riverbanks—need to change, and that these insights need to be built into policy documents such as the Green Growth Strategy.  

“We need solutions that start from the grassroots,” she said. “That way, the government is able to lean on these solutions because they will not be speculation—they are based on information from the communities themselves, who understand their environments and what they contend with.”

The community members that ClimBeR researchers interviewed proposed solutions such as improving equitable access to water through collective–action institutions as well as strengthening equitable access to land through a communal land trust endorsed by local chiefdom authorities.

National stakeholders committed to rethinking policies for climate-resilient peace 

When 45 experts and representatives from civil society, academia, regional and international organizations, and national ministries gathered for ClimBeR’s 2023 stakeholder consultation workshop, the goals included bringing the challenges and solutions identified by local communities into national policies. The workshop was co-hosted by Zambia’s Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, the CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict and Migration and the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD).

Stakeholders defined, based on community discussions, four pathways that can potentially cause climate-related conflicts and community instability: mobility (i.e., rural-urban or rural-rural migration); competition over water; growing conflicts over land; and worsening livelihoods. They also established a shared interest in creating a community of practice to continue raising awareness on the climate, peace, and security nexus in Zambia and co-designing solutions to mitigate related risks.

“It is important for us to have a common understanding of the linkages between climate change, peace, and security,” said Dr Oita Etyang, Head of Governance Peace and Security at the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), who also contributed to the stakeholder consultation workshop.

During the workshop, participants agreed on the need to rethink national policies and frameworks, following which the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment requested ClimBeR researchers’ insights on priorities and plans for enhancing peace and security under climate change to inform the Green Growth Strategy. 

The Ministry also requested ClimBeR researchers to provide Zambia-specific definitions of “climate, peace and security” and “climate-related peace and security risks” to be included in the Strategy’s glossary. These definitions, developed in collaboration with ACCORD, provide a shared reference for how to articulate the climate, peace, and security nexus, not only as it relates to reduced social cohesion and risk of conflict but also as an entry point for peace-positive growth. 

“I think that Zambia’s integration of climate, peace, and security linkages into its Green Growth Strategy could not only inspire other countries in the region, but it could also trigger collaborative efforts, especially as neighboring countries face very similar challenges,” reflected Dr Etyang. “So, we could see an evolution away from a nationalistic approach to a more collaborative and regional approach to some of these challenges.”

Next steps for Zambia toward peace and security 

In line with the priorities set out in the Green Growth Strategy, ClimBeR will be providing training for staff at the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment to expand shared understanding of the climate, peace, and security nexus and the implications for Zambia. The training will draw on analysis from ClimBeR’s Climate Security Observatory, an online decision-support tool that pinpoints how, where, and who is impacted by climate security risks, and highlights risk mitigation options. 

ClimBeR has also planned upcoming field research in the Southern Province, in collaboration with Zambia’s Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at the Copperbelt University. This work will focus on gendered differences in climate resilience and investigate the potential for collective action and local strategies for adaptation led by women and youth. Goals include increasing understanding of the gender dynamics within climate, peace, and security as well as the key roles women play in leading responses to these challenges.