Montana State part of $3 million Defense Department project on social elements of climate change

BOZEMAN – A Montana State University geographer is leading part of a multi-institutional study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to examine the effects of climate change on agriculture in Africa and how that may tie into U.S. national security.

The study is funded by a $3 million grant from the Defense Department’s Minerva program, which supports cross-institutional projects related to national security. It involves researchers from five universities and is led by the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Some research suggests climate change may be, in military parlance, a threat multiplier or catalyst to conflict in political situations,” said Cascade Tuholske, assistant professor in MSU’s Department of Earth Sciences in the College of Letters and Science.

He said MSU’s portion of the project will study to what extent changing climate conditions are driving agriculture-related migration among the citizens of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

Africa is generally growing hotter, he said, with some areas experiencing increasing extremes — dry regions becoming drier and wet regions wetter. That can impact Africans’ ability to work in agriculture, but it remains unclear whether those changes are prompting agricultural workers to leave rural areas altogether, Tuholske added.

Tuholske, along with a graduate student and post-doctoral researcher, will conduct surveys in Kenya and Zambia in 2024 and again in 2027 to assess whether climate-caused changes in food production, processing, distribution and consumption are influencing people’s decisions to relocate. The surveys also will inform satellite-based analysis in Tanzania, Tuholske said.

The MSU team will blend survey results collected in the field with satellite data to better understand how the populations of those countries are shifting. MSU’s Geospatial Core Facility, which helps researchers on campus distill complex sets of geographic data, will assist.

In addition to shedding light on migration trends possibly related to climate change, the demographic information collected during the study could help the African countries with planning infrastructure and better understanding their citizens’ needs, Tuholske said.

He added that the work may reveal lessons in resiliency that can be applied elsewhere.

“Southern and eastern Africa have tremendous potential for strong agriculture even with the challenge of climate change,” he said. “We can learn from communities how they are strengthening their societies through agriculture.”

The research methodology developed during the study also will be useful closer to home.

“The code we write, and a lot of the data sets we use from the climate side are global,” Tuholske said. “It can be leveraged by graduate students asking similar questions about climate impacts to farmers and ranchers here in Montana.”