Colliding climate and conflict risks: Building resilience from an integrated approach in fragile and most vulnerable places

The session “Colliding climate and conflict risks: building resilience from an integrated approach in fragile and most vulnerable places” took place within a GRP/FAO side event “Stepping Up Action on Building Climate Resilient Agriculture and Food Systems in Africa” preceding the UN Africa Climate Week, Ghana, 18-22 March 2019.

The session aimed to highlight ongoing actions on the ground in Africa to tackle food insecurity and conflict risks. Specific focus of the session was on how to 1) address the challenges to the implementation of these actions and 2) how to bring them to scale.

The session started with inspiration talks by three participants, presenting concrete examples transformative actions for food security and stability. These inspiration talks included the importance of providing opportunities for women, of local knowledge and solution co-production and of agro-ecological solutions for social-ecological resilience to
climate change. Following the inspiration talks, participants presented and discussed the challenges and opportunities for scaling their own initiatives around smaller round-table discussions. These roundtable discussions brought forward mismatches between important initiatives and needs at local levels and top down structures and policies; tensions, differences and incompatibilities across local-level initiatives for sustainable agriculture; and risks, challenges and possible solutions to the increasing tensions between farmers and pastoralists.

Importantly, increased community cohesion was discussed as a cross-cutting backbone to the effective implementation and amplification of resilient agriculture and food systems in Africa.