Paper short abstract:

Balancing national interest, regional collaboration and economic sustainability will be more important in a world where climate change creates a different distribution of key resources such as water.

Paper long abstract:

Perennial flooding that impacts countries and communities within the Lake Chad Basin Development Areas (LCBDA) annually has increased in recent years due to climate change. Its negative impact on the communities is further accentuated by the absence of multinational and cross regional cooperation between the governments of Nigeria and Cameroon. As a result, the affected communities have seen an increase in divisiveness, despair and reduced economic sustainability. These factors foster the growth of extreme and violent fringe groups.

Likewise the disputes between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over the waters of the River Nile, which has intensified since 2011, has heightened political tensions. In July 2022, after Ethiopia commenced the third-stage filling operations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Egypt and Sudan bristled over the stalled tripartite negotiations. While each country is entitled to take actions to support its citizenry, if the broader region is destabilized such support will not be sustainable.

Balancing national initiatives with a socio-economic perspective on a larger, trans-national region will be increasingly important due to climate change. Cross-regional cooperation, with fundamentally similar development aspirations and approaches, can lead to better outcomes for local communities, larger nation-states and geopolitical regions. It can be argued that improved outcomes also support more stable political institutions which further help the populace.

Using these examples as context, the paper will present key factors for leaders to consider when confronting regional environmental decisions - either planned or unplanned.