The research, conducted by Francisco Proença Garcia, Lucie Calléja and Raquel Duque at the Instituto de Estudos Políticos of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, examines how regional organisations can act as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts, using the African Union as its central case. The authors frame climate change not as a direct trigger of war but as a threat multiplier, a term borrowed from security analysis that describes how environmental stress interacts with poverty, inequality and weak institutions to raise the risk of instability. Their findings arrive at a moment when the climate-security debate is intensifying across Africa, a continent that spans the latitudes of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and faces heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms with increasing frequency and severity.

The conceptual foundation of the study reflects a hard-won consensus in the climate-conflict literature. Scholars increasingly agree that climatic shocks rarely generate violence in a linear fashion. Instead, they interact with exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity, shaping social and political outcomes through pathways that are deeply context-specific. Quantitative research has yet to identify a robust, generalisable relationship between climate variability and armed conflict; climate-related stress is more likely to manifest as communal violence, protests or displacement than as full-scale war. The authors also cite a caution that is often overlooked: poorly designed responses to climate change, including securitised approaches to migration or mitigation projects that compete with local land use, can themselves become sources of conflict. This is why the study insists on conflict-sensitive climate governance that prioritises cooperation and prevention.

What makes regional organisations uniquely important in this landscape, the authors argue, is their position between the global and the local. Compared with global actors, bodies like the African Union offer greater contextual sensitivity and political ownership over risks such as droughts, floods and resource competition, whose impacts routinely cross borders. Since the mid-1990s, regional organisations have expanded from traditional diplomacy into preventive diplomacy, mediation, peace operations and post-conflict reconstruction. The African Union, formed in 2002 under the banner of African solutions to African problems, has built an ambitious peace and security architecture, including the Peace and Security Council and the Continental Early Warning System. Yet scholars caution against overestimating its operational capacity: dependence on external funding, sovereignty concerns and uneven political will among member states have long constrained outcomes.

To investigate how the AU translates climate-security awareness into practice, the team focused on the Africa Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Early Action System, known as AMHEWAS. Established in 2022 by the African Union Commission, AMHEWAS is designed to strengthen continental capacity for early warning across droughts, floods, extreme rainfall and other hydro-meteorological hazards. Its stated objectives include enhancing access to multi-hazard warning information at continental, regional and national levels, reducing disaster impacts through anticipatory action, supporting resilience in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and Agenda 2063, and improving interoperability across member states and Regional Economic Communities. Implementation is supported by the Italian Government in partnership with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the CIMA Research Foundation.

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative case study combining document analysis of AU policy documents, peace and security frameworks and official AMHEWAS reports with a structured questionnaire administered online between January and May 2026 to AU policymakers, technical experts, representatives of Regional Economic Communities and climate-security specialists. Respondents were identified through purposive and snowball sampling, and four responses were received, reflecting the access constraints inherent in research on active institutional programmes. The sample included two respondents affiliated with the AMHEWAS programme, a former senior official of a Regional Economic Community, and an academic expert in peace and security with policy engagement in AU governance. Responses were analysed through thematic coding organised around five categories: early warning, early action, institutional coordination, knowledge production and information sharing, and political constraints. The authors are candid that the results are exploratory rather than fully generalisable, but the consistency of insights across documents and interviews strengthens their reliability.

The technical architecture that emerged from this analysis is striking. AMHEWAS operates through a subsidiarity-based governance model in which the African Union provides strategic orientation and norm harmonisation, Regional Economic Communities serve as technical and operational interfaces, and member states retain primary responsibility for implementation on the ground. A Steering Committee provides strategic oversight while a Technical Working Group of experts from member states, UN agencies, civil society and academia refines methodologies. The system’s operational backbone includes a Continental Situation Room in Addis Ababa, a Multi-Hazard Early Warning Advisory Centre in Niamey, regional situation rooms in Nairobi under IGAD and Abuja under ECOWAS, and the first national situation room in Dodoma, Tanzania. These facilities run around the clock on standardised operating procedures, aggregating risk data and issuing continental watches and advisories.

At the heart of AMHEWAS’s ambition is a shift from hazard-based to impact-based forecasting, a paradigm that links meteorological hazards directly to their anticipated social, economic and infrastructural consequences. The approach operates across three analytical levels: hazard forecasts based on thresholds such as extreme rainfall predictions; impact-based warnings that qualitatively assess expected disruptions to populations and infrastructure; and impact forecasts that quantify affected people, damaged roads and inundated cropland. Operational tools include Flood-PROOFS East Africa, an impact-based river flood forecasting system for the Greater Horn of Africa that combines hydrological modelling with flood mapping and risk analysis, and the African Drought Watch, which provides monthly continental assessments. These systems draw on data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, including five-day discharge forecasts from the Global Flood Awareness System, and collectively reach an estimated 1.5 billion people.

Yet the study’s most compelling findings concern the gap between sophisticated forecasting and effective response. Respondents converged on four structural constraints: heterogeneous national capacities in human resources, technical infrastructure and hazard monitoring equipment across 55 member states; institutional fragmentation, with environment, agriculture and civil protection agencies operating in silos with poorly interoperable data systems; financial sustainability, with early warning systems dependent on external funding that respondents described as frequently motivated by disasters, reactive rather than anticipatory; and limited political ownership by member states, which reduces the operational impact of alerts and constrains investment. On the cultural front, one respondent noted that many administrations are accustomed to communicating danger in generic terms rather than expected impacts, and that changing this logic requires training, analytical depth and clear protocols.

The relationship between AMHEWAS and the Continental Early Warning System emerged as one of the most analytically significant dimensions of the research. CEWS, a pillar of the African Peace and Security Architecture, maintains a mandate of conflict anticipation directly supporting the Peace and Security Council, while AMHEWAS addresses natural and hydro-meteorological hazards. One respondent described the complementarity in institutional terms: CEWS ensures the political-security reading and direct linkage to the Peace and Security Council’s decision-making mechanisms, while AMHEWAS adds a multi-risk analysis that allows anticipatory identification of factors of instability before they materialise into crises. Collaboration between the two systems has existed since AMHEWAS’s inception, with knowledge exchanges and training in 2021 enriching the design of multi-hazard advisories. But respondents also flagged that CEWS has suffered from institutional restructuring that effectively downgraded the system, and that persistent limitations in coordination, data sharing and activation mechanisms continue to constrain integration. Looking ahead, one respondent identified the Extraordinary Conference of Luanda, scheduled for August 2026, as a decisive political moment to drive structural decisions on the coherence, complementarity and operationalisation of early warning systems on the continent.

Ultimately, the study argues that the existence of sophisticated forecasting tools does not automatically generate preventive responses. What determines operational effectiveness is the credibility of alerts, the clarity of communication, the existence of predefined institutional protocols linking alert levels to concrete measures, and the availability of anticipatory financing. Respondents emphasised that trust in the quality of data, resulting from the integration of information on hazards, exposure and vulnerability, is a sine qua non condition for mobilising resources and activating responses. They also highlighted the role of traditional and local knowledge, noting that collaboration with traditional and local authorities enhances early action by ensuring warnings are contextually meaningful. Training has been delivered to representatives from 37 AU member states across five Regional Economic Communities, with national situation rooms planned or in process in Tanzania, Namibia and Ethiopia. The authors conclude that the African Union adds value by coordinating, setting standards and integrating knowledge across levels of governance, but that the challenges facing AMHEWAS are not only technical but fundamentally political and institutional. As climate-related events rise in frequency and impact across the continent, the credibility of anticipatory systems will be measured not by the sophistication of the alerts they produce but by the collective capacity to act preventively, coherently and consequentially before crises materialise.

Subject of Research: The role of the African Union and its AMHEWAS early-warning system in preventing climate-related conflicts through regional peacebuilding governance.

Article Title: The role of regional organisations as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts: the case of the African Union

Article References: The role of regional organisations as peacebuilders in climate-related conflicts: the case of the African Union. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1894679

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1894679

Keywords: African Union, climate security, AMHEWAS, early warning systems, peacebuilding, climate-related conflicts, regional organisations, anticipatory governance, drought, flooding, Sendai Framework, impact-based forecasting