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Following the devastating floods of 2023, Zambia — like other countries across Southern Africa — now confronts what is being called the worst drought in four decades. This has triggered a national emergency, causing acute food shortages, water scarcity and widespread human suffering.

While this crisis has caused significant challenges across Zambia, the drought is not the only climate-related issue it faces, as the impacts of climate variability and extreme weather are putting a growing strain on the nation’s social fabric. Across the country, worsening food insecurity and water scarcity — exacerbated by pre-existing socioeconomic pressures — are heightening communal tensions and complicating efforts to maintain social cohesion and peaceful relations.

For instance, these stresses are deepening the divide between host and migrant communities, leading to disputes over dwindling resources and job opportunities. They’re also causing Zambians to move to other parts of the country, as they seek to diversify their livelihoods in a bid to adapt to the rapidly changing climatic conditions.

The strain on Zambia’s resilience and the limited financial and risk management capacity of its institutions are becoming evident. If unaddressed, these climate-induced disruptions will continue to increase the risk of social instability.

In response, the government has developed a National Green Growth Strategy that seeks to facilitate Zambia’s transition to a low-carbon, resource-efficient, resilient and socially inclusive economy by 2030. The government will invest an estimated $10 billion to implement this strategy, while seizing emerging business opportunities both nationally and internationally.

The strategy also includes a focus on the impacts of climate change on peace and security, adopting insights from research and recommendations made by our team at CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security, which were informed by stakeholder consultations and extensive fieldwork in the country’s Southern Province. These insights aimed to highlight how climate change-related risks challenge social cohesion and stability in some local communities and within some demographics.

Below, we’ll discuss how we generated these recommendations and worked with the Zambian government and other stakeholders to incorporate some of them into the country’s Green Growth Strategy. And we’ll share four “Climate Security Pathways” that emerged from our research, exploring why they’re essential to ensuring sustained peace amidst the climate crisis — and highlighting the immense opportunities they can generate for the private sector.

Integrating Local Realities into National Policies

It’s essential that climate policies implemented at the national level reflect and respond to the realities people experience at the local level. To that end, in 2023, we co-hosted a stakeholder consultation workshop with Zambia’s Ministry of Green Economy and Environment and Ministry of Agriculture, along with the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD). This workshop was a crucial step in ensuring that community-level insights would find their way into the country’s national policy frameworks. During the workshop, we worked closely with more than 45 experts across various sectors, including civil society, academia, and regional and international organizations, to map out Climate Security Pathways in Zambia.

Climate Security Pathways are possible routes through which the adverse impacts of climate change interact with existing sources of vulnerability — such as political or socioeconomic factors — to compound existing risks to social cohesion, resilience and stability, or even create new ones. Although Zambia has not experienced violent conflict due to climate change, these pathways are useful to understand how climate variability and extremes are reshaping the dynamics of interactions between and within communities in ways that affect peace and security, particularly for the most marginalized and vulnerable groups.

Findings from this workshop and fieldwork research informed the insights and recommendations integrated into the Green Growth Strategy. But before our recommendations could be integrated into an official national strategy, we needed to articulate them in a way that met the unique expectations common among public sector partners. Consequently, the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment requested our support in defining key terms we had used, such as “climate, peace and security,” to facilitate their inclusion in the Green Growth Strategy. This was not merely an academic exercise; it was about creating a shared language that would enable more effective communication and collaboration across the country’s ministries and sectors. The definitions we developed, in partnership with ACCORD, now serve as a foundation for understanding and addressing the complex interconnections between climate change and social stability in Zambia.

These interrelated impacts are at the core of the Climate Security Pathways we identified, which form an essential part of Zambia’s effort to ensure sustained peace amidst its broader climate adaptation efforts.

The Role of Climate Security Pathways in Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy

The Climate Security Pathways which subsequently informed parts of Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy cover four key areas, each of which has relevance to local businesses working in the country.

1. Competition over water sources: In Zambia’s Southern and Western provinces, where rain-fed agriculture and animal husbandry dominate livelihoods, droughts and erratic rainfall are intensifying competition over scarce water resources. This strain on social relations is worsened by inadequate knowledge of sustainable water use, weak infrastructure and poor governance, leading to inequitable distribution and heightened local tensions.

Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy offers significant opportunities for private sector solutions in regions grappling with water scarcity and resource inefficiency. In the agriculture and animal husbandry sectors, agritech companies specializing in sustainable water management could provide water-efficient irrigation technologies, like drip irrigation or solar-powered water pumps to local MSMEs, to reduce dependency on rain-fed systems. There is also room for private firms to invest in community water management solutions, such as reservoirs or sustainable aquifer recharge systems, which could address competition over water sources and ease local tensions. These solutions align with the strategy’s Enhanced Resource Efficiency pillar, which aims to foster sustainable growth and reduce strain on natural resources.

2. Worsening livelihoods conditions: Climate change is depleting natural resources like water, forests and fertile land, undermining agricultural productivity and threatening jobs and incomes. At the individual level, this drives people towards harmful coping mechanisms — like crime, early marriage and charcoal production — especially among those unable to diversify their livelihoods. On a broader scale, disruptions to food supply chains are pushing up prices, challenging government response capabilities and eroding public trust in institutional effectiveness.

The Green Growth Strategy aims to commit $1.1 billion to enhancing resilience in agriculture and $3.8 billion towards renewable energy deployment. MSMEs and other private businesses can leverage this support by producing and marketing eco-friendly products that can tap into growing global demand for sustainable goods, such as organic produce and sustainably harvested timber. Workforce development is another critical area of this part of the Strategy, offering scope for businesses to collaborate with vocational training centers to create green skills programs, focusing on sustainable farming, solar installation, waste management, etc. This sort of partnership can expand job prospects for rural youths and equip Zambia’s workforce to pursue employment opportunities in the green economy.

3. Land-based conflicts: Historically, land disputes in Zambia have stemmed from inconsistent management and unequal practices related to resource allocation and distribution. However, these conflicts are escalating due to population growth, increased demand for land and climate change, which is reducing the amount of viable agricultural land available.

Land tenure security directly impacts market stability, investment potential and workforce sustainability. By supporting transparent land documentation and fair distribution practices, companies can help unlock access to land for marginalized communities — especially women, who are proven drivers of economic growth when given productive assets. For example, the partnership between Chief Machiya, leader of the Lamba people in the country’s Mpongwe District and IDE Zambia empowers women through land certification, enabling them to secure land for entrepreneurial ventures, which, in turn, stimulates the local economy.

4. Human mobility: As climate change disrupts food and agriculture systems, more people from southern Zambia are migrating north in search of arable land. This migration is creating cultural clashes and conflicts with resident communities that fear their land will be degraded and resources will become scarce, exacerbating social tensions. For example, in local Zambian communities in the towns of Muchila and Lusitu, there are tensions spurred by the traditional land-clearing practices of newcomers from the Southern Province, heightening the fears of established northern communities over land and food security. These challenges highlight the importance of addressing climate impacts through locally informed and culturally sensitive approaches that can prevent them from escalating into greater instability or conflict.

In response to these challenges, agritech firms, companies that facilitate sustainable land management and data analytics providers could partner with government and local communities to introduce precision agriculture, satellite-based land monitoring and sustainable farming practices to maximize existing arable land.

Whatever approach local businesses take to address the issues outlined above, the $10 billion budgeted for Zambia’s green initiatives offers the private sector an immense opportunity to drive impactful change over the next six years.

Securing Zambia’s Future: Research, Training and Continued Collaboration

As we continue our work in Zambia, we aim to generate policy-oriented evidence on gender dynamics within climate resilience and food systems. By drawing on our previous research in the Southern Province, we will collect data on the roles that women and youth play in leading bottom-up adaptation and resilience efforts, exploring their positive impacts on local peace.

We’re also providing training for Ministry staff on conflict sensitivity and conflict resolution, drawing on tools like the CGIAR Climate Security Observatory and our participatory methodologies to ensure that the insights gained from our research are translated into practical, actionable policy strategies.

Reflecting on our journey so far, it’s clear that the integration of climate, peace and security into Zambia’s Green Growth Strategy is just the beginning. We believe impactful change will come from public-private partnerships, informed by local insights from the research community, that aim to address the root causes of resource-driven conflicts and lay the groundwork for long-term stability and economic growth for all Zambians.

Gracsious Maviza is the Southern Africa Regional Lead for the CGIAR FOCUS Climate Security team and Giulia Caroli is a Specialist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, and Ibukun Taiwo is leading communications for CGIAR‘s climate security agenda.

Photo courtesy of Adam Öjdahl / IWMI.