A2 · Elementary
10 min
climatearmed conflictafricageopolitics
The Advancing Sand: Climate and War in the Sahel
La Arena que Avanza: El Clima y la Guerra en el Sahel
This week, the militant group JNIM announced that the Malian army withdrew from Tessalit in the Kidal region. Fletcher and Octavio explore how the advancing Sahara is emptying northern Mali and creating the perfect conditions for armed conflict.
Esta semana, el grupo yihadista JNIM anunció que el ejército de Malí se retiró de Tessalit, en la región de Kidal. Fletcher y Octavio exploran cómo el avance del desierto del Sahara vacía el norte de Malí y crea las condiciones perfectas para el conflicto.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el desierto | the desert | El desierto crece cada año en el norte de Malí. |
| la lluvia | the rain | Hay muy poca lluvia en el Sahel. |
| el árbol | the tree | Quieren plantar árboles para parar el desierto. |
| poder | to be able to / can | No puedo hablar español bien, pero aprendo cada día. |
| el agua | the water | Sin agua, la gente no puede vivir allí. |
| la paz | peace | Sin agua y comida, no hay paz. |
I've been staring at a map of northern Mali for the past two days, and there is almost nothing there.
No cities, no roads, no rivers.
Just sand, and the name of a place called Tessalit, which made the news this week because the Malian army just walked away from it.
Sí.
Yes.
Tessalit está muy lejos.
Tessalit is very far away.
Está en el norte, cerca del Sahara.
It's in the north, close to the Sahara.
The group that announced the withdrawal is JNIM, which is al-Qaeda's affiliate in the Sahel.
They said the soldiers handed over their weapons for safe passage out of town.
Which, depending on your read, is either a humiliation or a practical arrangement.
Es un problema muy grande para Malí.
It's a very big problem for Mali.
Kidal es una región importante.
Kidal is an important region.
Right.
But here's the part that I think gets lost in the security reporting: the reason northern Mali is ungovernable is not just political.
A large part of it is climatic.
The Sahara has been eating this region for decades.
Sí.
Yes.
Hace mucho calor allí.
It's very hot there.
Y hay muy poca lluvia.
And there's very little rain.
The Sahel, for listeners who aren't familiar, is that band of semi-arid land that runs just south of the Sahara, coast to coast across Africa.
Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad.
It's a transition zone, and it's been moving south for a long time.
El desierto crece cada año.
The desert grows every year.
Eso es un problema para la gente allí.
That's a problem for the people there.
The numbers are genuinely stark.
The Sahara has expanded by roughly ten percent since 1920.
Temperature rises in the Sahel are running at about one and a half times the global average.
And rainfall, what little there was, has become completely unpredictable.
Los pastores necesitan agua para los animales.
Herders need water for their animals.
Sin agua, no pueden vivir allí.
Without water, they can't live there.
And this is where the climate story and the conflict story become the same story.
The Tuareg people of this region, and other pastoralist communities, have been moving with their herds across these landscapes for centuries.
Climate change has compressed those routes, dried up the wells, and put people into competition with each other over what's left.
Sí.
Yes.
Los pastores y los agricultores tienen problemas.
Herders and farmers have conflicts.
Necesitan la misma tierra.
They need the same land.
Exactly.
And when you have communities in chronic stress over water and land, and a central government in Bamako that is, to put it charitably, not reliably present in the north, you get a power vacuum.
And JNIM has been filling it.
JNIM da agua y comida a veces.
JNIM sometimes provides water and food.
Por eso la gente los acepta.
That's why people accept them.
That is a point that almost never makes it into the Western coverage, and it matters enormously.
Militant groups in resource-stressed environments often function as the only reliable service provider.
They dig the wells, they mediate disputes, they control the trade routes.
The ideology is secondary to the logistics.
El gobierno de Malí está muy lejos.
The Malian government is very far away.
La gente en Tessalit no ve al gobierno.
People in Tessalit don't see the government.
I covered northern Mali briefly back in 2012, just after the coup, and that distance between Bamako and the north was palpable.
I remember a local official telling me, basically, we govern on paper.
That's it.
Tessalit tiene un aeropuerto.
Tessalit has an airport.
Es importante para el ejército.
It's important for the military.
Pero ahora el ejército no está.
But now the army isn't there.
It does, and that airstrip has a history.
The French military used it extensively during Operation Serval in 2013, when France intervened to push back a combined rebel and jihadist advance that had taken Timbuktu and was moving toward Bamako.
For a brief period, it looked like the tide was turning.
Thirteen years later, the army is handing over their rifles and walking out.
Francia salió de Malí en 2022.
France left Mali in 2022.
Después de eso, la situación es peor.
After that, the situation got worse.
The French withdrawal is its own complicated story, and there's plenty of blame to go around.
But the point I want to stay on is the climate piece, because it's the part that doesn't get fixed by a better military strategy.
El clima cambia todo.
The climate changes everything.
Sin agua, no hay paz.
Without water, there is no peace.
There's a phrase that regional analysts use: climate as a threat multiplier.
It doesn't cause conflict on its own.
But it takes existing tensions, existing poverty, existing political failures, and it amplifies all of them.
Sí.
Yes.
Y el problema es muy grande ahora.
And the problem is very big now.
El lago Chad, por ejemplo, es mucho más pequeño.
Lake Chad, for example, is much smaller.
Lake Chad is the classic case.
It's lost ninety percent of its surface area since the 1960s.
And in that same period, the region around it, which spans four countries, has become one of the most conflict-affected places on the planet.
That correlation is not coincidental.
La gente del lago Chad no tiene trabajo.
The people of Lake Chad have no work.
No tiene agua.
They have no water.
Los grupos como Boko Haram vienen y dicen: nosotros tenemos soluciones.
Groups like Boko Haram come and say: we have solutions.
That's exactly the recruitment logic.
And it's not purely ideological.
A young man whose family's cattle have died, whose pasture is now sand, who sees no future in the formal economy, is a young man who is listening to whoever walks through the door first.
Hay un proyecto que se llama la Gran Muralla Verde.
There is a project called the Great Green Wall.
Es una línea de árboles en el Sahel.
It's a line of trees across the Sahel.
The Great Green Wall.
I love this idea and I want to believe in it.
Tell our listeners what it's supposed to be.
Quieren plantar árboles de Dakar a Yibuti.
They want to plant trees from Dakar to Djibouti.
Ocho mil kilómetros.
Eight thousand kilometers.
Es para parar el desierto.
It's to stop the desert.
Eight thousand kilometers of trees across the entire continent.
The African Union launched it in 2007 and at last count they were at about twenty percent of the goal.
Which is simultaneously impressive and a little depressing, given that the Sahara keeps advancing regardless.
La idea es buena.
The idea is good.
Pero hay un problema: el conflicto.
But there's a problem: the conflict.
No puedes plantar árboles cuando hay guerra.
You can't plant trees when there's a war.
Which is the circular trap, isn't it.
Climate stress fuels the conflict.
The conflict prevents the reforestation.
The lack of reforestation accelerates the climate stress.
You can see why this is hard to break.
En Etiopía, el proyecto funciona mejor.
In Ethiopia, the project works better.
Plantaron muchos árboles.
They planted many trees.
Hay más lluvia ahora.
There's more rain now.
Ethiopia is genuinely one of the more remarkable reforestation stories of the last decade.
They claim to have planted billions of trees in a very short time.
Researchers dispute the exact numbers, but the satellite imagery does show measurable greening in some areas.
The point is it can work, it just requires stability.
Malí no tiene estabilidad ahora.
Mali doesn't have stability now.
Tiene tres gobiernos militares en diez años.
It has had three military governments in ten years.
Three coups in a decade.
And each time a government falls, whatever institutional capacity existed for managing land, water, and conflict evaporates with it.
You can't build a long-term environmental policy when your government might be gone by Tuesday.
Y ahora Malí trabaja con Wagner, los soldados rusos.
And now Mali works with Wagner, the Russian soldiers.
Eso también es un problema.
That's also a problem.
The Wagner Group, now operating under a different name after Prigozhin's death but essentially the same outfit.
And their approach to counterinsurgency, to put it diplomatically, has not historically involved winning hearts and minds through agricultural development programs.
No.
No.
Los problemas son muy grandes y las soluciones son muy pequeñas.
The problems are very big and the solutions are very small.
That might be the most accurate summary of the Sahel situation I've ever heard.
And it applies, honestly, to climate policy everywhere.
The scale of the problem and the scale of the response are just not in the same conversation.
La gente en Tessalit no habla de clima.
People in Tessalit don't talk about climate.
Habla de agua.
They talk about water.
Habla de comida.
They talk about food.
Which is the gap between how this gets discussed in conferences and how it actually lands on people's lives.
Climate change is an abstraction until it's the well that doesn't fill anymore.
Until it's the harvest that fails for the third straight year.
At that point it's not a policy debate, it's just your life falling apart.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y cuando tu vida no funciona, buscas ayuda.
And when your life isn't working, you look for help.
De alguien.
From someone.
De cualquier persona.
From anyone.
Before we wrap, I want to flag something you said earlier, because I think listeners might have caught it and wondered.
You said the soldiers agreed to hand over their weapons, and you used a phrase I want to ask you about.
You said 'no pueden vivir allí.' Can you break that down?
'Pueden' viene del verbo 'poder.' Significa 'to be able to.' No pueden vivir allí: they are not able to live there.
'Pueden' comes from the verb 'poder.' It means 'to be able to.' No pueden vivir allí: they are not able to live there.
So 'poder' is like the Spanish 'can.' And 'no pueden' is 'they can't.' How would I say 'I can't speak Spanish well'?
Which, obviously, is a sentence I have personal use for.
Muy fácil.
Very easy.
'No puedo hablar español bien.' Pero Fletcher, eso no es verdad.
'No puedo hablar español bien.' But Fletcher, that's not true.
Puedes hablar un poco.
You can speak a little.
Very generous of you.
Last week I tried to tell your colleague I couldn't make a meeting and I accidentally told him I couldn't make a child.
So 'no puedo' it is, filed under phrases I should have learned years ago.
Fletcher, tu español es especial.
Fletcher, your Spanish is special.
Muy especial.
Very special.