Rural economic buffers as structural security safeguards: mitigating the climate-conflict nexus in sub-Saharan Africa

Climate shocks and their consequences are not always an inevitable consequence of conflict, but rather reflect governance failures stemming from limited state investment and institutional capacity. The study analyses that whilst climate change is not a direct cause of conflict, it exacerbates existing vulnerabilities, thereby increasing security risks. Threats posed by climate conditions cannot be solely mitigated by states' financial capacities. This creates a situation that is vulnerable, prone to external intervention in resource driven armed conflict. Methodologically, the climate-conflict nexus is here empirically scrutinized using cross-sectional dependency frameworks to model a critical rural governance threshold that conditions climate-induced security risks.