U.N. poobah Ban Ki-Moon sums up his recent travels to northeast Africa:

I have just returned from a week in Darfur and the surrounding region. I went to listen to the candid views of its people -- Sudanese officials, villagers displaced by fighting, humanitarian aid workers, the leaders of neighboring countries. I came away with a clear understanding. There can be no single solution to this crisis. Darfur is a case study in complexity. If peace is to come, it must take into account all the elements that gave rise to the conflict.

Everything I saw and heard convinced me that this is possible.

The whole thing is well worth reading, but since I just spent some time digging into the idea that climate change might or might not be at the root of the crisis, this part caught my eye:

During my visit, I was shown Gaddafi's Great Manmade River: hundreds of miles of pipeline carrying millions of gallons of fresh water from beneath the Sahara. In a region where water is so scarce, this is remarkable. Flying over Lake Chad -- a vast inland sea that has shrunk to one-tenth its original size -- the previous day, it was obvious that this region's future also depends on supplies of water.

In N'Djamena, Chad, President Idriss Deby told me that without water there can be no economic development.

That's a bit of a different take that that of Nick Kristof on the impact of climate change on the region. More on the disappearance of Lake Chad here. It's reportedly down to 20% of the size it was just 40 years ago, and the BBC at least blames both global warming and water extraction.