The International Committee of the Red Cross released a statement May 12^th calling attention to the Sahel region, where over 10.5 million people in the countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania are at risk of hunger due to an ongoing food crisis. The upcoming lean season – the time between harvests, when food levels are at their lowest – is being compounded by a combination of continued violence and the effects of climate change. This intersection has created a humanitarian crisis throughout the region, most notably in Burkina Faso.

Conflict has destabilized Burkina Faso for years. What started as a rebellion in neighboring Mali has spread across the region, with armed groups capitalizing on poverty, tensions between local communities, and weak government control to expand their influence, triggering widespread displacement and political turmoil. In Burkina Faso, the al Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (J.N.I.M.), which has become the fastest-growing violent group in the world, has driven most of the conflict. This has led Burkina Faso to replace Mali as the center of the crisis in the Sahel, with reported fatalities in conflict rising from a low of just 8 in 2013, to 303 in 2018, before skyrocketing to 2,354 in 2021. 1.8 million Burkinabé, almost 10% of the population, have already fled their homes in search of safety.

At the same time, Burkina Faso is struggling with the effects of climate change. The region is currently seeing record-low levels of rainfall in the midst of the worst drought in decades. This recent drought is just a continuation of a long-term trend driven by climate change, which U.N. estimates show is already affecting around 80% of the agricultural areas in the Sahel. The temperature is rising at one and a half times the global average, with a projected 3ºC increase by 2050 in a region that already has an average temperature of 35 degrees.

These effects are compounded by the fact that the region has the world’s fastest growing population – with a corresponding demand for food. Over four in five people in the region rely on agriculture for survival and up to 50 million people in the Sahel are nomadic, but there is less and less access to grasslands and other valuable resources. Traditional pastoral and nomadic routes have been disrupted. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization has reported that 33 million people in the Sahel are already food insecure as a result of these problems.

These factors, climate change and conflict, have combined to fracture Burkina Faso’s local ties and complicate conflict resolution efforts. The destruction of water infrastructure, amidst the effects of drought, has created a severe water crisis. Many Burkinabé face 72-hour waits in line just to access boreholes. Before, disputes between nomads and resident farmers would be solved through local negotiations. Now, violence forces farmers to flee conflict areas. The Red Cross has found that the provinces of Yatenga and Loroum have yield losses of up to 90% after conflict. This societal flight and instability, coupled with desperation brought about by lack of resources, has collapsed traditional peacekeeping mechanisms and fractured societies, allowing the increasing violence to claim thousands of lives every year. In this way, conflict, and the destruction and displacement it brings, intensifies climate change’s effects on people; at the same time, climate change contributes to the desperation and tensions that drive people to conflict in the first place.

Burkina Faso has seen increasing political instability on the national level. 2014 saw President Blaise Compaoré step down after millions of Burkinabés forced his hand with widespread protests. However, the new government was unable to resolve the conflict, leading Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba to stage a military coup in early 2022, citing the security crisis as a key reason. Damiba’s new administration has pursued increasing militarization and counter-terrorism in an effort to stabilize the region.

“Burkinabés seem to trust in the military and hope the junta will stem the violence,” Fahiraman Rodrigue Kone, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, told Al Jazeera. “However, comparing the limited resources the army has, [the Burkinabés’] expectations are too big.”

Burkina Faso alone will be able to solve neither the issues relating to the conflict nor the underlying climate and food insecurity factors exacerbating the violence. Useful international help, however, has been hard to come by.

European powers, led by France, have been attempting to resolve Burkina Faso’s security challenges for a decade. However, these countries have been criticized for partnering with regional forces that are careless in their conduct, with accusations that hundreds of unlawful civilian deaths are on their hands as a result. Foreign powers’ inability to resolve the conflict has led to public discontent with Europe and frequent anti-France demonstrations. European forces have subsequently withdrawn from the Sahel.

Outside of their militaries, European countries have also shown unwillingness to help with refugee problems, preferring to focus on enforcing their own borders and preventing refugees from arriving in Europe rather than solving the issues which cause migration in the first place.

Finally, the recent violence in Ukraine, in addition to furthering food insecurity problems, has led to a re-prioritization among many in the West. “Some donors have already indicated that they would proceed to a 70 per cent cut of our finding [in order] to support operations in Ukraine,” Safia Torche, General Director for Médecins du Monde in Burkina Faso, said. This drop in funds leaves aid organizations like the Red Cross unable to access hundreds of thousands of people in the Sahel.

Consequently, as the crisis in Burkina Faso deepens, the international community has, paradoxically, only moved further and further away.

The reality is that climate change is both a problem beyond Burkina Faso’s capacity to unilaterally deal with and a problem that they did not create. No amount of action by Burkina Faso’s government will be able to rebuild its capacity to produce the requisite amount of food in the near future. That the European countries most responsible for climate change are doing little to solve its effects in places like Burkina Faso not only represents a moral abdication, but has come back to bite in the form of various refugee crises and mounting military costs. International actors must do more to manage climate change’s fallout in regions like the Sahel, where national actors’ capacity to act in the short-term is limited.

At the same time, European military and counter-terrorism efforts have been shown to be ineffective. As such, in the face of public discontent, European nations should either rethink their approach or withdraw military support in favor of economic support.

Militaristic tactics have been similarly unsuccessful at a national level. The recent military coup indicates that Burkina Faso is likely to continue militarization and aggressively counter armed forces. However, Burkina Faso’s military has yet to prove that it is able to maintain security in the region, and the conflict’s cross-border nature complicates military action.

While one option would be to increase co-operation with neighboring partners like Mali, a more effective approach should combine this with an effort to attack the underlying issues that have driven armed groups in the first place – namely, poverty, local tensions, and governmental neglect. None of these issues can be solved without considering how factors like climate change alter living conditions and exacerbate resource conflicts, so any effort to solve them must account for both prior and future climate alterations, in addition to investing in social services like education.

Finally, Paul Melly of Chatham House told the Inter Press Service that prior administrations, like that of former president Blaise Compaoré, used to cut deals with armed groups to reduce violence. The current administrations, with their more aggressive approach, remove this possibility. While negotiation of this sort may be unpalatable for some, it remains one of the best ways to end hostilities, and, together with a focus on combating economic, environmental, and social issues, finally break Burkina Faso out of its vicious circle of climate catastrophe, poverty, and conflict.