Understanding the hydrology of armed conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin

Both natural and social science have been debating the existence, nature, and relevance of the interconnections between water and conflict. The intrinsic complexity of these interconnections makes representing them in a quantitative way a challenging task. Yet, there are actors in intra-state conflicts allegedly taking advantage of environmental stress, often in contexts where resources such as water and land have a primal role in the local population’s livelihoods. In this regard, the environmental aspects of conflicts become of special interest. We investigate these aspects and interconnections for conflict events occurring in the Lake Chad Basin from 2000 to 2015. We use custom-made spatially distributed hydrological simulations to construct and quantify water availability indicators explicitly accounting for human dimensions of water demand and water utilization, focusing in particular on agriculture as a key sustenance mean. Then, spatial econometric regression models are employed to test conflict occurrence against a set of covariates including water scarcity, but also other biophysical and social stress variables, and accounting for space- and time-specific conflict mechanisms through ad-hoc modeling structures. As a complement to this analysis, we develop a methodology to spatially cluster conflicts in association to water scarcity and so identify specific patterns of water availability recurring in specific conflict dynamics. While from the spatial econometric analysis we find that, in line with previous literature, the self-feeding mechanisms of conflict play a stronger role as conflict drivers than water scarcity, from the clustering analysis emerge complex, context-specific interconnections between water availability, water scarcity and conflict, with particular water utilization processes and specific conflictual mechanisms as intermediary processes. More in general, advanced hydrological simulations and statistical analyses are combined with a critical approach to how socio-hydrological processes are described, making quantitative results able to support qualitative insights. This approach can contribute to close the gap between biophysical environmental stress modeling and qualitative social stress representations, so to build more comprehensive knowledge frameworks for complex socio-environmental issues.