Understanding the connections between climate stress, conflict, and food insecurity is essential for planning recovery, strengthening resilience, and supporting peacebuilding in Sudan. Drawing on relevant literature, this online resource offers practical insights and lessons for responding to Sudan’s current crisis and planning for a more resilient future.

About this online resource

This online resource explores how food security, climate change, and conflict interact in Sudan. It shows how climate stress affects livelihoods and food systems, while conflict disrupts farming, pastoral mobility, markets, and access to support. The resource also explains why climate alone cannot explain Sudan’s crises and how a better understanding of the nexus can support recovery, resilience, and peacebuilding.

Central questions

The central question guiding this online resource is: What is the current understanding of the interlinkages between food security, climate change, and conflict in Sudan?

More specifically, the resource asks:

• How do climate change and conflict interact to create additional stress on livelihoods and food security in Sudan?
• Why does blaming climate alone oversimplify the complexity of Sudan’s crisis?
• How can a better understanding of the climate–food–conflict nexus support planning for recovery, resilience, and peacebuilding?

Content

This online resource consists of four modules that examine the climate–food–conflict nexus in the context of Sudan.

Part 1: Introduce the conceptual framework

Part 2: Explore the understanding of the interlinkages between food security, climate change, and conflict in Sudan.

Part 3: Explain how a better understanding of the nexus helps for a better future for Sudan

Part 4: Synthesising the key lessons for Sudan’s future.

Context

Sudan’s food crisis cannot be understood through climate, conflict, or politics alone. It sits at the intersection of all three. The country has long depended on climate-sensitive livelihoods, especially rainfed farming and pastoralism. These livelihood systems have always had to adapt to variable rainfall, droughts, floods, and changing environmental conditions. However, repeated conflict, weak governance, unequal development, and political instability have made many communities less able to cope with these pressures. This means that climate shocks often become more damaging when they occur alongside violence, displacement, market disruption, and limited access to basic services.

Sudan has experienced repeated cycles of armed conflict and political instability for much of its contemporary history. Struggles over power, land, identity, resources, and unequal development have shaped conflicts. The current war, which began in April 2023, has deepened this long history of instability and created one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises.

Political instability has shaped how people experience climate stress and food-system disruption across Sudan. Droughts, floods, and failed agricultural seasons do not affect communities only through rainfall or temperature change; their impacts depend on access to land, water, markets, services, mobility, humanitarian support, and protection. In areas where institutions are weak, land rights are insecure and markets are disrupted, climate hazards become far more damaging.  These structural problems are important because climate hazards do not affect everyone equally.

Climate change can increase pressure on food systems and natural-resource-based livelihoods. But climate stress does not automatically lead to conflict. Whether it contributes to violence depends on wider political, economic, and social conditions, including governance, inequality, land rights, displacement, armed mobilisation, and the strength of local institutions. In Sudan, climate change is therefore best understood as a risk multiplier: it can exacerbate existing pressures, but its impacts are shaped by conflict, political instability, and the unequal ways people access resources and protection.