Understanding the Climate–Food–Conflict Nexus in Sudan

This part examines how food security, climate change, and conflict interact in Sudan. Rather than treating them as separate crises, it shows how they reinforce one another through livelihoods, displacement, markets, land and water access, governance, and humanitarian conditions. Climate stress can reduce harvests, pasture and water availability, while conflict can prevent people from farming, moving livestock, accessing markets, or receiving support. At the same time, food insecurity can deepen vulnerability and increase pressure on already fragile livelihood systems. Understanding these interlinkages is essential for avoiding simplistic explanations and for recognising why Sudan’s crisis is both environmental and deeply political.

The climate–food–conflict nexus refers to the way climate change, food security, and conflict interact rather than operate as separate problems. In Sudan, food insecurity is not caused by one factor alone. It emerges from the combined effects of climate variability, environmental degradation, war, displacement, market disruption, weak governance, poverty, land-use change, and restricted access to resources.

 

For Sudan, the nexus is especially important because much of the population depends on climate-sensitive livelihoods such as rainfed farming, pastoralism, agro-pastoralism, irrigated agriculture, forestry products, and seasonal labour. These livelihoods are directly affected by rainfall variability, droughts, floods, heat stress, and vegetation change. However, the same livelihoods are also affected by insecurity, blocked mobility routes, looted assets, disrupted markets, displacement, weakened veterinary and extension services, and the collapse of local governance. The nexus, therefore, helps us understand why climate stress becomes much more damaging when it occurs within a conflict-affected and politically fragile context.

 

This perspective also helps avoid simple explanations. Climate change can increase risks, but it does not automatically produce conflict or famine. Conflict can deepen hunger, but its effects vary across livelihood systems, regions, and social groups. Food insecurity can also feed back into instability by increasing competition over scarce resources, weakening household resilience, forcing distress migration, and making young people more vulnerable to recruitment, exploitation or survival-based violence. The relationship is therefore circular and cumulative, not linear.

 

Sudan’s current food crisis illustrates this complexity. It is a compound crisis shaped by the interaction of armed violence, displacement, market collapse, environmental stress, weak governance, and institutional failure. These pressures reinforce one another and make food insecurity more severe than any single factor could explain on its own.

Selected readings

• Anderson, W., Taylor, C., McDermid, S., Ilboudo-Nébié, E., Seager, R., Schlenker, W., Cottier, F., de Sherbinin, A., Mendeloff, D., & Markey, K. (2021). Violent conflict exacerbated drought-related food insecurity between 2009 and 2019 in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature Food, 2, 603–615. doi:10.1038/s43016-021-00327-4.
• Busby, J. W. (2016). Feeding Insecurity? Poverty, Weak States, and Climate Change. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
• Daoudy, M. (2021). Rethinking the climate–conflict nexus: A human–environmental–climate security approach. Global Environmental Politics, 21(3), 4–25. doi:10.1162/glep_a_00609.
• Hendrix, C. S., & Brinkman, H.-J. (2013). Food insecurity and conflict dynamics: Causal linkages and complex feedbacks. Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 2(2), Article 26. doi:10.5334/sta.bm.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009325844.
• Mach, K. J., Kraan, C. M., Adger, W. N., Buhaug, H., Burke, M., Fearon, J. D., Field, C. B., Hendrix, C. S., Maystadt, J.-F., O’Loughlin, J., Roessler, P., Scheffran, J., Schultz, K. A., & von Uexkull, N. (2019). Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict. Nature, 571, 193–197. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1300-6.
• NUPI & SIPRI. (2022). Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet: Sudan. Oslo/Stockholm: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
• Scheffran, J., Ide, T., & Schilling, J. (2014). Violent climate or climate of violence? Concepts and relations with focus on Kenya and Sudan. The International Journal of Human Rights, 18(3), 369–390. doi:10.1080/13642987.2014.914722.
• Sulieman, H. M., Mokhtar, M. M. M., M. A. Hissin, Abdalla, T. A. 2026. Consequences of the Ongoing War on Pastoralist Mobility in Eastern Sudan. Sudan Working Paper, Number 2, Chr. Michelsen Institute. Link: https://www.cmi.no/publications/file/9951-consequences-of-the-ongoing-war-on-pastoralist-mobility-in-eastern-sudan.pdf
• Verhoeven, H. (2011). Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: Global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles. Development and Change, 42(3), 679–707. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01707.x.

Climate stress affects food security through drought, erratic rainfall, delayed growing seasons, floods, heat stress, vegetation decline, and pressure on water resources. In ordinary circumstances, Sudanese farming and pastoral systems have developed ways to manage such variability. Farmers adjust planting dates, crop choices, and labour arrangements. Pastoralists move livestock across seasonal grazing routes. Rural households diversify income, rely on social networks, and use local knowledge to cope with uncertain rainfall.

 

Conflict changes the meaning of climate stress. A flood becomes more destructive when roads are insecure, emergency services are weak, and displaced people are already living in fragile shelters. A poor harvest becomes a wider food crisis when markets are blocked, seeds and fertilisers are unavailable, banks stop functioning, labour is displaced, and humanitarian access is restricted. A drought becomes more dangerous when pastoralists cannot safely move to alternative grazing areas. In this sense, conflict does not simply coexist with climate stress; it multiplies its effects.

 

For example, the 2024 floods and the Arbaat Dam collapse show this interaction clearly. Heavy rains damaged the Arbaat Dam near Port Sudan, affecting water infrastructure, boreholes, latrines, and surrounding communities. Humanitarian agencies reported severe humanitarian impacts, including missing people and damage to essential water and sanitation systems. Reports described how the collapse disrupted Port Sudan’s water supply in a city already absorbing large numbers of displaced people. The case is important because the disaster cannot be understood only as “heavy rain”. It was also shaped by infrastructure vulnerability, maintenance gaps, weak emergency capacity, displacement pressure, and the wider conditions of war.

 

This is where governance becomes central. Climate hazards do not produce the same outcomes everywhere. In Sudan, long-term political instability and weak governance have reduced the ability of institutions to manage climate stress, protect livelihoods, and prevent local resource disputes from becoming wider insecurity.

Selected readings

• FAO & WFP. (2024). Special Report: 2024 FAO/WFP Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Sudan. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme.
• Hanafi, H., Casteran, S., & Vu, M. (2024). If Bullets Miss, Hunger Won’t: Beyond the Numbers – Hunger and Conflict in Sudan. Danish Refugee Council, Mercy Corps and Norwegian Refugee Council.
• Hoffmann, A., Mohamed, M., & van den Tempel, L. (2024). Sudan’s Agricultural Input Supply in Times of War: Proposed Interventions to Counter the Unfolding Famine. The Hague: Clingendael Institute.
• Mohammed Ali, I. M. (2019). The ecological, socio-economic and political constraints on pastoralists’ access to water, Blue Nile State, Sudan. Nomadic Peoples, 23(2), 282–302. doi:10.3197/np.2019.230207.
• (2024). Sudan: Collapse of Arba’at Dam in Port Sudan, Red Sea State – Flash Update No. 02. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
• Pantuliano, S. (2010). Oil, land and conflict: The decline of Misseriyya pastoralism in Sudan. Review of African Political Economy, 37(123), 7–23. doi:10.1080/03056241003637847.
• Sulieman, H. M., & Young, H. (2023). The resilience and adaptation of pastoralist livestock mobility in a protracted conflict setting: West Darfur, Sudan. Nomadic Peoples, 27(1), 25–56. doi:10.3197/np.2023.270102.
• (2026). Restoring Water for 230,000 People in Port Sudan. United Nations Development Programme Sudan.
• Wahlstedt, E., & Sulieman, H. M. (2024). Supporting Conflict-Resilient Food Systems in Sudan. Conflict Sensitivity Facility – Sudan.
• Young, H., & Ismail, M. A. (2019). Complexity, continuity and change: Livelihood resilience in the Darfur region of Sudan. Disasters, 43(S3), S368–S387. doi:10.1111/disa.12337.

Climate change is real and important in Sudan, but blaming climate alone is misleading. It risks turning a deeply political crisis into a natural disaster story. This matters because the way a problem is framed shapes the solutions that are proposed. If conflict and famine are described mainly as climate-driven, the response may focus narrowly on climate adaptation, water projects, or technical early-warning systems. These are important, but they are not enough if the main constraints are war, land dispossession, militarisation, weak institutions, and political exclusion.

 

The “climate war” framing of Darfur is the clearest example. In 2007, Ban Ki-moon argued that the Darfur conflict had ecological roots and was linked partly to climate change. This framing helped draw global attention to environmental pressures, but it also generated criticism because it risked simplifying the conflict. Darfur was not only about rainfall decline, drought, or desertification. It was mainly about land rights, centre–periphery inequalities, militarised governance, identity politics, counterinsurgency, weakened customary institutions, and contested access to resources.

 

The danger is in treating climate as the main explanation while pushing politics into the background. Climate-centred explanations can unintentionally excuse political responsibility by suggesting that decision-makers “could not do much” because the problem was climatic. This is especially problematic in Sudan, where governance decisions have shaped land access, agricultural expansion, emergency response, public investment, and the distribution of violence. A more useful approach is to ask how climate stress becomes dangerous through political and economic systems.

 

climate change matters, but it operates through social, political, and livelihood systems. Understanding this complexity is essential for designing responses that address both climate resilience and political responsibility.

Selected readings

• Ban Ki-moon. (2007). A climate culprit in Darfur. The Washington Post, 16 June 2007.
• Brown, I. A. (2010). Assessing eco-scarcity as a cause of the outbreak of conflict in Darfur: A remote sensing approach. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 31(10), 2513–2520. doi:10.1080/01431161003674592.
• Daoudy, M. (2021). Rethinking the climate–conflict nexus: A human–environmental–climate security approach. Global Environmental Politics, 21(3), 4–25. doi:10.1162/glep_a_00609.
• De Juan, A. (2015). Long-term environmental change and geographical patterns of violence in Darfur, 2003–2005. Political Geography, 45, 22–31. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.09.001.
• Flint, J., & de Waal, A. (2008). Darfur: A New History of a Long War. London: Zed Books.
• Kevane, M., & Gray, L. (2008). Darfur: Rainfall and conflict. Environmental Research Letters, 3(3), 034006. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/3/3/034006.
• Mamdani, M. (2009). Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Maystadt, J.-F., Calderone, M., & You, L. (2015). Local warming and violent conflict in North and South Sudan. Journal of Economic Geography, 15(3), 649–671. doi:10.1093/jeg/lbu033.
• Selby, J., & Hoffmann, C. (2014). Beyond scarcity: Rethinking water, climate change and conflict in the Sudans. Global Environmental Change, 29, 360–370. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.01.008.
• Verhoeven, H. (2011). Climate change, conflict and development in Sudan: Global neo-Malthusian narratives and local power struggles. Development and Change, 42(3), 679–707. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01707.x.