The adverse impacts of climate change are
predicted to severely constrain the lives and livelihoods of Africans. Pastoralists
are among the most vulnerable population groups. Considering the fact that the
Horn of Africa has a large concentration of pastoral communities and that
pastoralist conflicts are rife in the region, many fear that climate change-induced scarcity will increase the incidence and severity of pastoral conflicts during the coming decades.This book is not only attempting to understand and document the problem, and
analyze the interventions but also to understand the traditional coping mechanisms of pastoral communities and evaluate whether external interventions streamline those mechanisms. Environmental disasters are not new phenomena to this region, thus pastoralist communities are assumed to have developed coping mechanisms to survive such disasters which have allowed them to survive across the generations. This book includes 15 papers categorized under four chapters, each covering a more or less clear theme. The first chapter consists of four papers covering paleoclimatic and linguistic evidence of climate change, its consequences in pastoralist areas and its use in vulnerability assessments for the HoA region. The second chapter, with three papers, attempts to cover the traditional coping mechanisms for climate change in the region. The third chapter includes three papers focusing on issues related to the nature of interventions by governments and climate change adaptation projects. The last chapter includes five papers that discuss the nexus between climate change and violent conflicts in the region, and local and regional conflict resolution
approaches.
