Vulnerability to climate change is in part determined by exposure to specific changes – proximity to low lying coastal areas or areas of likely drought – but state capacity also plays a major role. And interventions targeting either must reflect the complex links that bind the two, says International Alert’s Janani Vivekananda in an interview with adelphi’s Environment, Conflict, and Cooperation platform.

Vivekananda describes climate vulnerability as the combination of a country’s exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. While the first two “are in the hands of luck,” adaptive capacity is closely tied to governance and stability. Both can be in short supply in weak or fragile countries, creating an “inexorable link between climate change and security,” she says. “If we’re trying to understand how to address the issue we need to understand these linkages.”

These links manifest in five key areas:

1. Institutions: Countries need institutions that can deal with uncertainty and flux and can withstand the direct impacts of climate change (like droughts) as well as the indirect impacts (like food insecurity).
2. The Private Sector: The private sector can have a positive or a negative impact on resilience, but its impacts are often overlooked in discussions of climate vulnerability. Researchers need to understand what they are and how to foster positive impacts while minimizing the negative ones.
3. Migration:  There can be significant security impacts from migration but it is a dynamic that should be understood with nuance. A range of environmental, political, and economic factors can push and pull people, and movement takes place at different scales. “It’s not simply going to be international migration from sinking, small islands to the developed world,” says Vivekananda. “A lot of it is rural-urban migration, it’s going to be changes in seasonal migration patterns amongst agricultural workers.”
4. Resilience: Building resilience means embracing complexity. “Households don’t face single risks in isolation,” and to respond to that reality “we need to be able to deal with complexity better within our institutions and within project interventions in fragile states.”
5. Development: Echoing a theme, the development community just isn’t set up to deal with complexity, Vivekananda says. From funding structures, to institutions, to field work, “the current approach to development is severely limited in that it’s very siloed.” There needs to be a rethink on how development is done so that “we can cross these sectoral boundaries and promote complex solutions to complex problems.”