At the crossroads of security and sustainability
At COP29 – and likely running into COP30 and beyond – the overlap between climate change and global security began coming into sharper focus. Initial drafts of the New Collective Quantified Goal highlighted the lack of accessible climate finance in fragile and conflicted affected states, while the Baku Call on Climate Action for Peace, Relief, and Recovery – endorsed by Germany, the UAE, Uganda, the UK and others – signalled mounting support for integrating peace and security considerations into climate policymaking.
These and other moves seem to indicate that climate change – once viewed largely as an environmental issue – is being increasingly recognised by the global climate players as a contributor to, if not a determinant of, many local, national and transnational security challenges. As the world heats up, intensified competition for dwindling land, water and other resources is entrenching inter-community inequality and exacerbating existing conflicts, while a deepening sense of ‘them and us’ fuels new ones. Mass northwards migration, driven by accelerating habitat change, is complicating social cohesion and threatening stability both in migrant-source and migrant-host countries.
And yet in spite of this growing awareness, institutional responses remain fragmented. The Paris Agreement remains silent on matters of peace and conflict. Military emissions are still excluded from national climate targets. And most climate finance continues to flow to middle-income, low-risk environments rather than fragile states on the sharp edge of the climate–security interface.
Climate change as a weapon
While the global climate action community takes its time to join the dots, the linkages between climate change, instability and insecurity have not gone unnoticed by other geopolitical players. Both state and non-state protagonists have spotted the potential of climate change to weaponise mass migration, erode trust in democratic processes, and – by framing net zero targets as wealthy nations ‘pulling up the development drawbridge’ – driving wedges between previously aligned powers.
As communities in fragile states grapple with the local impacts of climate change, what does the link between climate and conflict mean for national security and resilience policy, bilateral dependencies, transnational disruption, and the global balance of power? Is climate change set to become the ultimate asymmetric weapon for both state and non-state actors? And how do we confront a challenge that permeates and ties together every aspect of our political, security and economic lives?
Climate as a local-to-global conflict multiplier
Climate change and conflict are linked, interact and overlap across levels – from local, through bilateral and transnational, to global. Those links are most readily apparent at the local level. In northern Nigeria, desertification has forced herders and farmers into violent confrontation over dwindling arable land, while deaths from pastoralist-farmer violence in the Sahel have skyrocketed, transforming local resource grievances into flashpoints for wider conflict. In Pakistan, flash floods have wiped out entire districts, displacing millions, overwhelming governance capacity to provide basic resources, and fraying an already fragile social contract. From Myanmar to Jordan, government response capacities are being pushed to breaking point by climate shocks that fragile states are ill-equipped to manage. When governments respond insufficiently, law-and-order vacuums are created that extremists, organised crime, and rival powers are quick to fill.
At the bilateral level, climate stress is reshaping dynamics between neighbours, adversaries and even partners. The Grand Renaissance Dam has become a fault line between Ethiopia and Egypt, threatening the water flows that support 90% of Egypt’s population. Water, once a basis for cooperation, now sits firmly at the heart of adversarial national security planning. Meanwhile, ongoing will-they-won’t-they tariff threats have highlighted the US eastern seaboard’s reliance on Canadian hydroelectric power to meet clean energy goals – tying national decarbonisation strategies to increasingly tenuous diplomatic relations and competing economic interests. As resource scarcity increases, shared rivers, aquifers and energy flows are becoming political bargaining chips. Moving focus further north, melting sea ice in the Arctic has altered marine access and fishing rights along the Norway–Russia border so that what was once frozen and fixed is now fluid and contested – prompting re-militarisation, naval deployments, and new resource claims that challenge long-settled bilateral agreements on territorial sovereignty.
At transnational level, the impacts of climate change appear primarily in the form of mass migration. As livelihoods collapse under the pressure of drought and extreme weather events, places like Jordan, Lebanon, Hungary and the Balkan states have become transit hubs both for huge numbers of people and for illicit economies of arms and drugs. Flows into and out of these porous zones are easily manipulated. For example, Russia has been linked to funding the captagon trade in Syria, the proceeds of which have financed militias and warlords from the Middle East to Central Asia, destabilising states and feeding regional disorder. Mass migration has evolved from being a by-product of climatic instability to a tool of proactive coercion, a vector of multiple threats, and a funnel for organised violence.
Zooming out further still, climate change is reframing the global rules of engagement. The rush for rare earth minerals, concentrated in unstable places such as the DRC and Afghanistan, has sparked a new round of great-power competition. China, through its long-term investments in Africa, now dominates global supply chains essential to clean energy technologies. It is hard to miss the paradox of net zero targets precipitating a ravaging of some of the world’s most biodiverse landscapes on earth, as well as the irony that the same sought-after minerals are vital to the military power behind global resource colonialism.
The US, meanwhile, is playing catch-up through a form of ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ that would have been unthinkable in the second half of the 20th Century – from forceable co-option of Ukrainian mineral resources to hints at annexation of Canada. In the Arctic, melting polar ice is opening strategic sea lanes, reigniting old rivalries, catalysing new ones —such as tensions between the US and Denmark over Greenland—, and fuelling a new geopolitical contest: between states that see environmental disruption as an opportunity for power projection and states that cling to an increasingly toothless rules-based international order.
Climate action as political realism
So where does this leave us?
For decades, climate change has been treated primarily as a scientific and environmental issue, measured in tonnes of carbon and degrees of warming. Where the humanitarian impacts of climate change have been recognised, that recognition has been limited to the material consequences of changing environments. These challenges remain as pressing as ever. But the additional reality we now face is political, violent, and destabilising.
How should policy, development and security actors respond to this “everything, everywhere, all at once” paradigm of 21st Century insecurity? Is it enough to react to symptoms like forced migration, or must we address the root causes of climate-driven conflict? How do we convince less-developed countries to align with mitigation goals when they see industrialised nations as the original gangsters turned global police, turning around to impose restrictions after comfortably – and emissions-heavily – achieving their positions of wealth?
The answer may lie in a new approach, one that integrates climate adaptation and mitigation into conflict prevention, foreign policy, and power strategy. Climate action can no longer remain a purely scientific discipline. It must become responsive, not only reactive, to the changing physical environment, and recognise that these changes extend beyond just the physical. Climate action must be mainstreamed into conflict response, peacebuilding, and politics. Western nations must offer more than vague references to “people in vulnerable situations” – they must prioritise conflict-affected areas as their highest-priority recipients of climate resilience support.
The era of incremental change is over. Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue. It is a weapon, a bargaining chip, and a source of leverage in geopolitics. If the international community fails to address these links, we risk a future defined not only by rising temperatures but also by rising instability.