Climate change is no longer a ticking time bomb. It is already exploding. Across Africa, temperatures have risen by more than one degree Celsius since the last century. The rise in average temperatures in Africa is projected to be more than that of the global average, making Africa the hardest-hit continent. In places like South Sudan, the newest internationally recognized country in the world, the climate crisis is anticipated to manifest in the worst ways.

Ranked among the top ten most vulnerable countries to climate change on the African continent, South Sudan is a microcosm of how extreme climate change can affect a country, its people, and an entire continent. Already, the consequences of climate change are causing immense suffering there. With the rise in temperatures, droughts, floods, and erratic season rainfalls have caused substantial damage to livelihoods, infrastructure, and development in South Sudan and across the continent. Yet while industrialized Western nations and big economies have caused unprecedented emissions of greenhouse gases, which have led to rise in temperatures, the least developed nations in Africa and elsewhere are the ones that are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

Climate Change Hazards in Africa and South Sudan

In many parts of Africa, rainfalls are projected to increase, which will worsen flood conditions across the continent, increasing fears of more frequent and severe droughts. In South Sudan, the incidences of floods and droughts have been on the rise. For example, the number of floods in South Sudan over the past thirty years has come close to the total number of flood incidents in the sixty years preceding that; twenty-six incidents of floods were recorded between 1991 and 2021 compared to eighteen incidents between 1961 and 1991 and eleven incidents from 1930 to 1960.  This coincides with an increase in the country’s temperatures, which have risen by more than one degree Celsius since the mid-1970s.

In South Sudan, seasonal rainfalls have become unpredictable and early rainfalls have consistently gotten delayed. As in 2021, droughts have been occurring mostly earlier in the season from April to June and flooding later in the season from July to October. Floods are caused by heavy rainfall that is triggered by the excessive evaporation generated by high temperatures while the frequency of droughts is the result of high temperatures that have been drying up the land, leading to long and frequent dry spells.

Most of South Sudan lies within the Nile Basin and the flood plains and is therefore vulnerable to floods. Floods mostly originate from the Ethiopian Highlands through the Sobat River, which joins the Nile at Malakal in South Sudan, from Uganda through the White Nile River, from the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo through the Bhar Ghazal River and its tributaries, and from the runoffs of local torrents. Rise in the water levels of Lake Victoria has been the single most devastating climate phenomenon facing South Sudan and countries downstream of the White Nile. The current flooding episode in the Nile Basin countries was caused by heavy rainfalls leading to the rising water levels in Lake Victoria, which were caused by an unprecedented increase in the sea surface temperatures of the India Ocean.

South Sudan’s vulnerability to climate change impacts is made worse by reliance on natural resources, which are susceptible to climate change shocks; political instability, as the country has been experiencing civil war since 2013 and has gone through a devastating war of independence for more than two decades prior to independence; and existing communal conflicts that have torn the social fabric. In addition, lack of access to water in high grounds causes people to live close to rivers, which exposes them to flood risks.

Impacts of Climate Change: Food Insecurity, Displacements, and Conflicts

Across Africa, floods have affected millions of people almost every year. For example, in October 2020, a total of six million people were affected by floods in East Africa, a fivefold increase from 1.1 million people in 2016. The severity of climate change impacts has also differed across the continent, with the more vulnerable countries like South Sudan being hit harder than the rest. For example, of the six million people affected by floods in 2020 in East Africa, about a million of them were from South Sudan. Climate disasters, which have been on the rise, have caused widespread and chronic food insecurity, displaced people, and caused or exacerbated deadly conflicts.

Food insecurity

Due to destruction of livelihoods, people have been left food insecure. For example, according to Save the Children, about 7.2 million South Sudanese have been on the brink of famine in 2021 due to a combination of climate shocks, violent conflicts, the COVID-19 pandemic, high prices, and inadequate access to humanitarian services. This is a 50 percent increase in the number of those exposed to famine compared to ten years ago, which seems to correspond to the rise in the frequency and severity of climate shocks, which act in synergy with other stressors.

This mirrors the same situation of food insecurity across Africa, where about more than 250 million people have faced acute food shortage in 2019, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Of these, about thirty-seven million were food insecure due to conflict and twenty-six million as a result of climate shocks. Since some of the conflicts were triggered by climate change, addressing climate shocks is also another way to address conflicts.

Climate shocks’ impacts on food security in South Sudan in particular and in Africa in general include destruction of crops, death of livestock, and shortage of food supply, among others. Shortages in food supply have often led to an increase in prices, making it hard for people to access and buy food. Because much of transport infrastructure has also been destroyed by the floods, this has curtailed the ability to transport food to flood-affected areas. For example, in South Sudan, roads and airstrips have been swept away by the floods and people have been trapped in flood-prone areas without access to food in the last three years of consecutive extreme flood.

Displacements and migration

The first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that the single greatest impact of climate change will be on human migration. Already across Africa, millions of people have been displaced by climate-related shocks, some migrating within their countries and others beyond their internal borders and out of the continent. About twenty-seven million people were displaced yearly between 2012 and 2017 by climate hazards. This will get worst in the years to come. According to the World Bank, about eighty-six million Africans will be at risk of being uprooted from their homes and displaced within their countries by climate change by 2050. It is estimated that by the year 2050, about 150 million people are highly likely to be displaced on an annual basis by water scarcity, storms, floods, and other climate-related disasters.

In South Sudan alone, of the one million affected by the flood between May and December 2020, more than half were displaced internally. Displacement has caused homelessness, with people—mostly the elderly, children, and women—sleeping in the cold without shelter and cover and exposed to mosquitoes and other disease vectors. Some of the displaced have succumbed to water-borne and climate-related diseases such as malaria, typhoid, and cholera. Others have suffered from hunger due to loss of livelihoods and due to constraints of the international humanitarian response to destruction of infrastructure, insecurity, and inadequate availability of food.

Conflicts

Climate change shocks, particularly high temperatures, droughts, and floods, have strong co-relations with violent conflicts, which have threatened peace and security in many places on the African continent in general and in Nile Basin countries in particular. While these shocks do not lead to major violent conflicts in developed nations, countries in Africa with weak institutions and rule of law, and that rely on rain-fed agriculture and natural resources, are highly susceptible to climate-shock-induced conflicts. Due to the state’s weak capacity in responding to the climate crisis, climate change exacerbates conflicts or causes them in two main ways: tension over access to resources and the raiding of cattle as a way to compensate for loss of assets to climate shocks.

In South Sudan, societies that traditionally conduct raids on neighbors are highly likely to raid neighbors when a drought or flood destroys their livelihood assets such as cattle. In more settled agrarian communities, such shocks do not often lead to raiding. Even so, these communities are still threatened when pastoralist communities are forced to migrate into their areas in search of better pastures following a flood or drought. For example, there has been chronic tension that has often led to bloodshed between Dinka pastoralists that have left their original lands in the Jonglei State due to frequent flood and settled within the agrarian communities of central Equatoria State.

In the Jonglei State in South Sudan, the Dinka, Murle, and Nuer people have often raided each other following an extreme climate event. For example, the floods of 2019 and 2020 were followed by heavy raiding involving thousands of men. According to Douglas Johnson, an expert on the history of Sudan and South Sudan, fighting between these communities, particularly between Dinka and Nuer, has often been influenced by climate disasters. Four major floods in the nineteenth century in the Upper Nile region were all associated with conflicts between the Dinka and Nuer. Interviews I have conducted with the communities in the greater Bahr Al-Ghazal region in South Sudan revealed that communities clash over pastures, water points, fishing grounds, and lands, among others, following a climate disaster that make these resources scarce.

Restoring Justice: Adaptation and Resilience Actions

Africa must adapt to climate change, and it must do so with a sense of urgency. As climate change is not of Africa’s making, it requires external support to amend the injustice that has been inflicted on Africa by the Global North, which has been responsible for most emissions of greenhouse gases and the subsequent rise in temperatures.

To amend climate injustice, Africa must be supported financially to implement adaptation measures. African people and their governments must own the projects and supplement whatever funds donated by the Western countries with African resources, as the continent cannot entirely rely on the handouts for climate finance. This requires putting the climate agenda on top of African governments’ priority lists. Donor countries must fulfil the promises made twelve years ago at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to contribute $100 billion dollars annually to enable developing countries to adapt to climate change. This will go a long way in amending the climate injustice inflicted on Africa and other developing nations.

More practically, Africa should invest in climate-smart agriculture and irrigation systems; build seeds systems that are resilient to drought and floods; and develop climate change adaptation policies in the form of diversification of income and assets. It should also build flood defenses such as dykes and dams; pursue flood-prevention solutions such as dredging and remodeling of the rivers and tributaries; and enhance the capacities of the vulnerable groups such as women. Some of these solutions will be demonstrated briefly below in the case of South Sudan.

South Sudan’s climate change response

In South Sudan the main climate shocks have been droughts and floods, which have been wreaking havoc to livelihoods and food security; peace and security; and sustainable development. Droughts require a number of prevention measures, including building irrigation systems, climate-smart agriculture, and usage of crops that can do well in both water-scarce and water-logged conditions. For both droughts and floods there is a need to build the capacities of communities, including diversifying their livelihoods and assets; integrating adaptation and mitigation measures into policies and institutions; and cultivating political will so that the country becomes sustainably resilient to these extreme climate events. Political will is defined by political scientists as determination or a commitment by a political leader or a political party or policymaker to make changes happen. In this sense, it can be collective or individual. In our case, the political will to prioritize addressing climate disasters can be cultivated by engaging political actors through evidence-based advocacy as well as through political processes such as raising these issues during elections, where citizens can choose those who are willing and committed to implement such an agenda.

At the moment, in South Sudan, the political establishment is through the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (RARCSS), signed in 2018 to end the 2013 civil war. Therefore, actors in this arrangement should be engaged to prioritize addressing climate disasters as part of addressing conflicts, as both interact to create shocks and consequences. This will entail engaging these stakeholders, creating awareness, establishing a climate change policy unit within the highest office in the land (particularly in the presidency to provide necessary technical backstopping and to raise the profile of the climate change issues, allocating considerable budget), and engaging and asking donor community to contribute. Relevant government institutions, academia, civil society, private sector, individual change agents, and political actors have a role to play and should get in forefront of realizing this climate adaptation and mitigation agenda.

Flood threats come from Lake Victoria in Uganda, the Ethiopian Highlands, the CAR, the Congo, and from local torrents as a result of heavy rainfalls as mentioned previously. To control these flood threats, South Sudan should design solutions that reduce the river flow into flood-prone areas during the floods; increase the river flow out of those areas; control the flood using levees and dykes; and/or relocate the population away from flood prone areas.

Increasing the volume of flow and use of excess water

The reason a flood happens is due to the river’s inability to accommodate an excess volume of water during years of heavy rainfall upstream, which causes flood in the low-lying areas. Therefore, one of the solutions is to increase the carrying capacity of rivers and streams so that excess water can stay in the channels. This can be achieved by dredging (removing silt and other material from the bottom of bodies of water) and straightening channels of the White Nile and other Nile tributaries in South Sudan. Experiences show that several channels of the Nile and its tributaries have accumulated sands, and that a dredging will go a long way in increasing the channel’s capacity. Other channels meander too much, which slows the speed of the river and creates accumulation of excess water and spillover. In this case, straightening channels within the Sudd wetlands can help. However, the magnitude that dredging and straightening may help in mitigating the flood impact is not yet known; therefore, this will require studies to establish what volume of water can be contained in the rivers through this method.

The other approach is to divert and channel excess water to water-scarce areas by creating diversion canals and reservoirs to store and manage water for irrigation and other purposes. Such canals and reservoirs can be connected to irrigation schemes particularly located in water-scarce areas. Like the method of dredging and straightening of river channels, this method can help divert excess water and minimize flood levels, and will put the excess water into use instead of it causing damage to livelihoods and getting lost through evaporation. While it can help, the extent to which this can be effective is not yet known, and therefore, it would have to be subjected to feasibility studies and environmental and social impacts assessment.

Defending communities and cities

To defend cities and communities against floods, South Sudan should build flood defenses in the form of dykes. These can be helpful only if they are well-studied, well-designed, and are constructed using the right materials and correct alignment. Currently, some of the dykes in South Sudan are made with earth mounds and are easily eroded by the menacing floods. The problem is that dykes are not sustainable if not well-designed and can block rain water from draining into water bodies alongside other devastating ecological consequences. One of the ways to build dykes in the proper way is to set them back a considerable distance from the edges of the wetlands as well as from the River Nile and its tributaries. Besides, they require materials that cannot be eroded or penetrated easily by water, and the slopes must be made gentle and planted with trees to strengthen them and withstand the forces of erosion. Credible feasibility studies and environmental and social impacts assessments must be conducted to inform the design of the dykes. Other components that should be included when studying and designing dykes include flood boxes, flood gates, and pumping stations at streams and other depressions to control flooding and ensure drainage.

Relocation of populations to areas with less flood risks

The majority of human settlements in Africa are close to rivers, where they are exposed to flooding. In South Sudan, part of the reason people live near rivers and wetlands is because of conflict as well as a lack of water in areas less prone to floods. Therefore, the government should relocate populations away from rivers and wetlands to areas within their territories that are less prone to floods. It requires political will or commitment and determination from the government to see this happen. The government should identify areas of resettlement and provide security as part of this adaptation because it will allow the population to stay in relocated areas and minimize communal conflicts. Relocation will also require resources, and this requires members of Parliament to raise relocation as a motion to be passed into law or an executive order from the president. This will involve awareness creation among the population as well as among the policymakers. This should be a collaborative effort that should also involve development partners to help in financing, and the parliament in allocating a considerable amount of money to relocation and provision of security.

Reducing the excessive river flow to flood-prone areas

To control floods, we must cut or control the excessive flood water from flowing to flood-prone areas using dams. This stands the highest chance of effectively controlling floods. South Sudan is the only country in the Nile Basin that does not have a dam on its Nile. Dam construction as part of flood control was first proposed by the British in the twentieth century as part of the Equatorial Nile Project, which was a hydrological plan intended to store and manage water and control flooding in the Nile Basin, particularly in the White Nile in South Sudan. This project included a series of dams or reservoirs in Uganda and South Sudan. Uganda completed the Owen Falls Dam in the 1950s as a result, but the rest of the dams were not constructed.

Some of the proposed dams were supposed to be built at Lakes Kyoga and Albert in Uganda, and Nimule and Bedden in South Sudan. Lake Albert and Nimule sites are some of the best for controlling the flood downstream in South Sudan. South Sudan and Uganda should initiate the building of a reservoir at Lake Albert for both flood control in northern Uganda and in South Sudan and for power generation for regional consumption. Other torrent-balancing dams in Nimule, Bedden, and Lake Kyoga should be explored as proposed originally in the Equatorial Nile Project. Lake Albert has steep banks which make it a natural place to store water, and has sufficient rainfall to balance water loss through evaporation. If well-studied and designed, these dams can hold back excess water and only the quantity that is safe can be released downstream. Reviving the Equatorial Nile Project along with the dredging of the Nile can lead to a considerable control of flood in South Sudan and northern Uganda.

In addition, South Sudan should explore and develop a flood management project on the Bahr Al-Ghazal River, which originates from an area with considerable amount of rainfall and ends up spreading over the flood plains and causing floods. Building a dam upstream on the Jur River, the Lol, or other tributaries, along with diversion canals, and dredging may help in minimizing flood impacts and water loss in the Bahr al Ghazal Basin. Another dam should be studied and constructed on the Baro River in Ethiopia to control flooding in the eastern parts of the country. Key stakeholders in these projects include the states of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda. Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda can benefit from power generation and flood control. The private sector, which can invest in the building of dams and communities, is another important stakeholder to engage. Egypt and Sudan, which are downstream and have interest in having constant flow of water, should be engaged diplomatically.

As Africa is most affected by the effects of climate change, it alone cannot take measures to combat them. Developed and industrialized nations who have caused this peril must take the lead in financing adaptation in Africa, and vulnerable nations like South Sudan must of course follow their lead and prioritize climate change on its agenda. The most important tool required is commitment from leadership: leadership from the global North, leadership from Africa, and leadership from South Sudan. Commitment from leaders is required because combating climate change crises requires political will to mobilize technical expertise, build capacities where necessary, and mobilize and channel resources for adaptation and mitigation priorities. With the 26^th Conference of the Parties underway in Glasgow, global leadership is required to cut greenhouse gases to below 1.5 degrees Celsius and provide the much-needed $100 billion dollars annually to finance climate adaptation and mitigation efforts in developing nations, where South Sudan should strategically position itself to benefit and fence off the menacing threats of climate change.