Nairobi — When the Swedish Nobel Prize committee awarded their prestigious prize for peace to Prof Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist, in 2004 and then more recently in 2007 to former US Vice-President Al Gore, the committee was explicitly making the connection between climate change and global conflict.

But, has the scientific community proven a definitive link between the raving effects of climate change and armed conflict in developing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa? Or, are the environmental activists, prominent world leaders and influential Non Governmental Organisations making bold, unsubstantiated claims without the proper scientific evidence for their own particular agendas?

For example, some analysts believe that the roots of (and ultimate solution to) Darfur's troubles lie in the bolstering of its disintegrating ecology from drought and desertification.

Such sentiments about the role of environmental degradation and the carnage in Darfur have been voiced last year by, among others, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Dr Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute.

However, while environmental issues, particularly freshwater availability and arable land, are essential for sustainable socio-economic development in Africa and elsewhere, the truth of the matter is that a definitive link between climate change and conflict on the scale of Darfur or Somalia or Afghanistan has not been scientifically proven.

The conflict risk associated with climate change is often overstated given our current state of knowledge. The fact is that little is known to draw such very bold conclusions.

While there is now overwhelming scientific proof for human-induced climate change, there has been very little scientific research done on the social impacts. This notwithstanding, many doomsday scenarios (e.g. "water wars") have been prophesied in the media and elsewhere.

Marc A. Levy of CIESIN, Earth Institute at Columbia University, and his colleagues investigated the relationship between water availability and internal war outbreak in their 2005 publication Freshwater Availability Anomalies and Outbreak of Internal War: Results from a Global Spatial Time Series Analysis.

They concluded that, at the global scale, there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal wars. These experts say that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood that low-level conflict will escalate to high-level conflict approximately doubles.

Therefore the effects of climate change can, and do increase the general risk of conflict, but this does not mean that one can make the leap to saying that any particular conflict was caused by climate change.

"Although these findings are consistent with what we read about how drought exacerbated Darfuri-central government conflicts, it doesn't prove that the drought 'caused' the problems. It is seldom possible to ascribe causation in this kind of situation to a single root cause. There are always too many interacting forces at work," says Levy.

Other researchers such as Ragnhild Nordas and Nils Petter Gleditsch note that: "Despite the breadth of this security concern in the public debate, statements about security implications have so far largely been based on speculation and questionable sources."

These researchers also say that, "the causal chains suggested in the literature have so far rarely been substantiated with reliable evidence given the combined uncertainties of climate and conflict research, the gaps in our knowledge about the consequences of climate change for conflict and security appear daunting".

Clionadh Raleigh and Henrik Urdal, both of the Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) and the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway (PRIO) say that there could be other more important factors.

In their paper, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Armed Conflict, their findings suggest that, "the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant".

Furthermore, they say despite the attention given to environmental factors as potential security threats; it appears that one cannot consider them in isolation from economic, political and social factors.

Ecological destruction, in the case of Darfur, is just one component in a very complex crisis that can not (and should not) be separated from other more important aspects such as the politics of the Sahara region, a militant Arab supremacist ideology, Islamic extremism, proliferation of firearms, Sudan's complex internal politics, land wrangles, British colonial policies or attitudes, the destruction of ancient institutions for conflict resolution, etc.

What we do know about Darfur is that a systematic attempt to ascertain early warning signs of genocide, from the historical data, found a number of factors that in general were associated with elevated risks of genocide. Prior to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan had a number of "alarm bells" going off on that list.

According to Professor Barbara Harff in her 2003 study, No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955, some of these early warning signs include the fact that almost all genocides of the last half-century occurred during or in the immediate aftermath of internal wars, revolutions and regime collapse.

This was certainly true for Darfur since the slaughter was taking place in the backdrop of the Naivasha Peace Agreement, signed in Kenya in 2005, which officially ended over two decades of civil war in the south.

Harff also emphasises that ideologies that mobilise potential revolutionaries can also incite ethnic hatred and provide incentives to kill real or perceived enemies of the new order. Other early warning alarm bells include potential perpetrators being agents of the state or rival authorities, for example, military or police units, or militias such as the Janjaweed.

The debate on the link between climatic variability and conflict in the developing world got some impetus from a 1994 essay titled The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. It was written by American journalist Robert D. Kaplan and first published as an article in the February 1994 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.

The main focus of this piece was the various conflicts in West Africa at that time. According to Kaplan: "it is time to understand 'the environment' for what it is: The national-security issue of the early twenty-first century." Furthermore, Kaplan also warns Western powers that: "We ignore this dying region [Africa] at our own risk." Kaplan's story is considered to be one of the fundamental theses on the state of current world affairs in the Post-Cold War era.

The Bush Administration picked up on the theme of Kaplan's essay as well as other reports on the same theme and used them as one raison d'etre for the US to focus its "War on Terrorism" efforts in Eastern Africa, The Horn and the wider Sahara region generally.

Convinced of the linkage (or perhaps searching for justifications to increase its military expenditure), the US turned its sights not to West Africa (the focus of Kaplan's scorn) but to the conflicts and poverty in large parts of East Africa and Horn of the continent as the next potential threats to US national and international security.

Consequently, the Bush administration has designated the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) a front-line region in its global war against terrorism.

The consequences and implications of worrying too much about the link between climate change and conflict in these developing regions is obvious. Firstly, it lets despotic leaders and irresponsible governments in Africa and elsewhere off the hook from their responsibility for the socio-economic development of all their citizens.

It's all to convenient for President Bashir's government in Sudan, for example, to blame the carnage and suffering in Darfur on environmental factors and the "fact" that Black African and Arab "tribes" have been at each other's throats since time immemorial because of dwindling natural resources such as water and pasture. And that the current tragedy is a modern day manifestation of these ancient tribal animosities.

Another outcome of putting too much emphasis on the climate's role in conflict is that it continues to brand Africa and elsewhere in the developing world as a perennial victim of nature's wrath. This turns our attention away from the numerous examples of how developing countries are adapting to extreme climatic variability and change.

One such example is the flexibility of some African farmers in terms of subsistence activities. In a dry year such farmers may look for alternative pasture for their cattle and irrigate their fields.

Seeing Africans as perennial victims is also not a constructive approach. The Western media's portrayal of sub-Saharan Africa's helplessness and hopelessness installs a sense of resignation to the fact that climate change will only increase poverty and that this poverty will ultimately lead to conflict akin to the Rwanda genocide of 1994. It also gives the false impression that Africans have no traditional social mechanisms for resolving conflict.

Somalia is prone to drought but its pastoralists as well as peasant farmers have developed sophisticated systems to deal with changing environmental conditions. What farmers did was to diversify their crops. They would also protect crops in the field by building up protections against floods in riverine areas of the country.

If land conflicts did arise then it was traditionally dealt with between Somalia's various clans in accordance with what is known as Xeer (an inherited social contract) and Sharia.

Experts tell us that climate change has occurred throughout human history. History itself informs us that past African civilizations, empires and emerging states such as Meroe in Sudan and Aksum in Ethiopia collapsed due to environmental degradation or a combination of foreign invasion and environmental collapse.

However, earlier periods of climatic and environmental variability and stress also affected Ancient Africans in positive ways.

According to Dr Nick Brooks, Director of the Sahara Studies Program, Tyndall Centre for Climatic Change Research and School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, there is sufficient evidence that climatic and environmental stress played a key role in the emergence of early civilizations, and that increasing aridity in particular acted as a trigger for increased social complexity associated with urbanization and state formation.

In the case of Darfur, local conflicts between and amongst various herding and agricultural groups have always existed. However, these struggles neither traditionally involved Ukrainian Antonov-26 and Russian MI-24 attack helicopters nor criminal recruits organised as mounted paramilitary forces. There were also no scorched earth policies and mass rape designed to humiliate, demoralise and crush the rebels.

The key word here is marginalisation. If President Bashir's administration with its massive oil wealth had paid genuine attention to Darfur and not just use it as a pawn for its political and military ambitions one minute then turn around and neglect the region the next, things would be different.

Even if there would be drought and desertification, that would be still the government's responsibility to establish real (not just token) projects to offset such calamities.

It was national and regional politics that caused the deepening rift between the "Arab" and "African" communities in Darfur, not the effects of climate change. Environmental factors just aggravated an already politically charge atmosphere.

In short, the current government of Sudan bares sole responsibility for the Darfur crisis. This is by no means to say that the environment should be ignored in the development planning and policy-making process in former war-torn regions in Africa and elsewhere, quite the contrary.

No one has yet claimed that environmental degradation was a root cause of Somalia's 16-year civil war. In fact, Somalia expert Christian Webersik of Columbia University's Earth Institute says in his 2004 paper Differences That Matter: The Struggle of the Marginalized in Somalia, "the struggle for resources was a consequence rather than a cause of the civil war that started in southern Somalia in 1991".

Nevertheless, ecological destruction is one key issue that whatever legitimate government emerges out of the chaos, will have to urgently address if peace and stability is to prevail.