Experts will be studying conflicts caused by climate change in Europe and Africa

EurekAlert: The European research project CLICO -Climate Change, Water Conflict and Human Security- devoted to the study of climate change and its social dimensions will begin in February with conferences that will take place from 25 to 27 February in Bellaterra. During the next three years, researchers from 14 institutes, under the direction of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), will be analysing the effects hydro-climatic phenomena -drought, flooding and rise of sea levels- have on the intensification of social tension and conflicts in eleven regions of the Mediterranean, Maghreb, Middle East and Sahel, and will propose specific actions to guarantee the peace and security of the population in each area.

24 February 2010.- The unprecedented speed at which changes in the climate are taking place all over the planet represents a threat to human security, especially in regions greatly affected by droughts, flooding or rise of sea levels which can cause or worsen violent conflicts and humanitarian disasters such as hunger or hordes of climate refugees.

The European Union has voiced its concern over the social and political consequences of water conflicts caused by climate change, both those originating in member states -between towns and cities of the same state- and those occurring in nearby countries, such as in the Middle East. The project CLICO was born as a means to find solutions to these problems and is financed by the EU Seventh Framework Programme. The project will be financed with 3.8 million euros and will last three years. It is the only European project dedicated to research in the field of social sciences and humanities coordinated by a university and research institutes in Spain.

…The CLICO project aims to fill a gap currently existing in the study on cause and effect relations between climate change, hydrology, social conflicts and the security of affected populations, and will carry out an exhaustive statistical analysis -the first of its kind- of the climatic, hydrologic, and socio-economic variables of each region. The research will focus particularly on the impact climate change has on the mode of subsistence of the most vulnerable populations and will provide a critical analysis of the role played by public institutions in protecting these populations.

Researchers will be working in a cross-disciplinary manner on the analysis of eleven cases of conflicts related to water resources in the island of Cyprus, the Andalusian-Moroccan biosphere, Niger, Alexandria, Sudan, the desert of Sinai, Egypt, the Ebre Delta and the basins of the rivers Sarno, Italy; Seyhan, Turkey; Jordan, Israel-Palestine-Jordan; and Nile, Egypt-Sudan-Ethiopia….

Sahara Desert, shot by rossella piccinno, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License