Climate-induced potential driver of water conflicts over natural resource and the role of land use and land cover change in the Lake Chad catchment

• Changes in land use pattern provides reflection on the cause’s conflicts among pastoralist and small-scale farmers • Drivers of land cover change are mostly driven by anthropogenic activities in the LCB • Climate anomalies intensify competition over dwindling natural resources • Land conversion triggers adaptation strategies most often met with communal violence With changing climatic conditions and land use patterns, communal conflicts over access to and control over natural resources are likely to intensify in the Lake Chad basin (LCB). Against the backdrop of the popular discourse of climate wars, environmental scrutiny research has not sufficiently addressed the role of land use and land cover change (LULCC) as potential drivers of such conflicts. Historical climatic data for a period of 30 years were obtained from CHIRPS due to its high spatial and temporal resolution and Landsat and Sentinel-2 images from 1993, 2003, 2013, and 2023 were used for LULCC detection. A supervised classification with the maximum likelihood classifier was applied to generate LULCC maps for the selected periods. Results indicate that environmental stressors were only partly predictive of conflict events due to changes in land use patterns. Results of the geospatial data reveals losses in water bodies and natural forage over the three decades as major factors that could trigger tensions between pastoralists and small-scale farmers. An interdecadal comparison of rainfall shows a statistically significant difference ( p = 0.031) between the first and second decades, corresponding to declining trends in vegetation cover, water bodies, and cultivated land in the LCB attributable to rainfall anomalies. These results provide valuable insights to better understand potential drivers behind armed conflict, the contribution of land use dynamics, and their interconnectedness between human-induced land transformation and climatic anomalies over shared resources which interact reciprocally to intensify resource competition among individuals and groups.