Climate change and the environmental determinants of violence and mental distress in fragile contexts: Ethiopia, Myanmar and Nepal

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Conflicts and environmental disasters alike cause huge disruption to daily life particularly in contexts that are already fragile. However, understanding how different people experience the related disruption is not well known. We can assume that the intense insecurity caused by drought and flooding will trigger significant mental distress and trauma however understanding the specific behavioural-emotional responses as a consequence are not well documented. The lack of understanding means that the humanitarian and development sectors tend not to incorporate emotional wellbeing into their programming. We will explore and argue that in not doing so key stakeholders miss the opportunity to tailor their activities in a way that could in fact bolster the emotional resilience of men and women and thereby make them more able to cope with and move through periods of intense insecurity. The project will therefore build on previous projects. First; 'Water-security in Ethiopia and the Emotional response of Pastoralists (WEEP)'. Pastoralist are farmers who raise livestock and move their herds in search of fresh pasture and water supplies. In Ethiopia there are around 12 million of them and they are acutely vulnerable to extreme poverty made worse by an ever changing climate, specifically water shortage, which in turn triggers conflict between pastoralists and land users. This situation has been intensified by a government policy to push arable farming that is water dependent thereby depleting further the resource available to pastoralists. The situation is predicted to get worse, the project therefore wanted to capture the emotional and wellbeing impact the situation was having on this group with the view to influencing water policy and practice in Ethiopia in the first instance, and then more widely to see indicators relating to wellbeing included in standard monitoring and evaluation tools used by implementing agencies. The project has had success in evidencing the importance of including well-being indicators in monitoring, evaluation and learning approaches which are now used by the project's Co-Investigator IRC Ethiopia. The second project; 'Narratives of violence: the impact of internal displacement on violence against women in Nepal and Myanmar' focused on two contexts, Myanmar and Nepal that are both in transition having recently emerged from long-term civil conflicts which impacted on the lives of women in many ways. Both countries have also suffered from the consequences of natural disasters including flooding. As a consequence internal displacement regularly occurs. The project sought to understand better how this displacement impacts on the lives of women and in particular to see if an increase in forms of violence against them could be evidenced. The project was able to capture shocking data that clearly showed that women suffer intense physical insecurity following flood related displacement and furthermore it is not adequately responded to in current humanitarian and development responses. The project has generated a series of learning briefs which has driven impact in particular at the level of local women's organisations in both countries who have been able to use the data to argue for more resourcing to support women at times of displacement. The new combined project will drive forward the impact already achieved by offering more data evidencing how disasters triggered by drought or flood impact emotionally on men and women. A reanalysis of all data sets through a gendered and wellbeing lens will mean a much more nuanced picture will emerge of how different groups experience insecurities and the level of mental resilience they have during and in the aftermath. In turn this will feed into a new framework to direct key stakeholders more holistically to include emotional responses as part of their work.