June 27, 2025
In the Sahel, climate change is not a distant threat. It’s a daily reality that intensifies existing tensions, deepens socio-economic divides, and fuels violent conflict. Rising temperatures and erratic weather patterns aren’t just environmental concerns. They are powerful accelerants of instability in already fragile contexts.
At Search for Common Ground, we believe that peacebuilding must be locally owned, gender inclusive, and climate responsive, and that such an approach can turn conflicts – including those exacerbated by climate change – into opportunities for collaboration.
To take one concrete example: Bandiagara (Mopti, Mali) has long been a flashpoint for intercommunal tension, particularly between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers. Climate shocks such as droughts and unpredictable rains have strained access to water and land. As pastures shrink and harvests fail, communities are pushed into one another’s territory, igniting a dangerous cycle of mistrust, competing claims, and violence.
Rather than impose quick fixes from the outside, our teams facilitated a two-year local dialogue process. Fulani and Dogon leaders, including women, came together to explore the link between environmental stress and conflict. They didn’t just talk. They co-designed practical, shared solutions.
The result? A joint action plan that led to climate-resilient infrastructure: shared wells, small irrigation dikes, and market gardening areas. But the most powerful transformation came from the emergence of women’s cooperatives: groups of Fulani and Dogon women who now farm together, side by side. Women who once feared entering each other’s villages now grow lettuce together. They share income, responsibilities, and respect.
This is what climate resilience looks like when peacebuilding is done right.
But challenges remain. Resource scarcity is real, creating daily tensions over water, land, and grazing. Insecurity and militarisation make it harder and more dangerous to work directly with communities. And weak local institutions often lack the capacity to lead coordinated, conflict-sensitive environmental responses.
In this context, international partners like the European Union have an important role to play, but must be willing to rethink their approach:
- Local ownership: international partners’ strategies often feel top-down, overly technical, and disconnected from grassroots realities. Conflict sensitivity is frequently missing, and funding mechanisms are too rigid. When priorities shift toward defense and away from civil society, local actors feel sidelined. Even when they’re the ones holding communities together.
- Funding flexibility: In a region where shocks are constant and dynamics shift quickly, short-term, project-based funding is not enough. We need long-term partnerships that are accessible to community-based actors who carry both the risk and the trust that external actors often cannot.
Real solutions to climate and conflict do not begin in Brussels, Berlin or even Bamako. They begin in the villages, women’s cooperatives, youth groups, and traditional councils. That’s where knowledge lives. That’s where peace takes root.
– Francis Sala-Diakanda, Regional Director for West Africa, Search for Common Ground
