Conversations around climate change often take place at the “30,000-foot level,” said Ohio University Professor and ECSP Senior Advisor Geoff Dabelko in a recent radio interview with WOUB Public Media, based out of Athens, Ohio. Emission reductions, carbon concentrations, global temperatures. But a certain amount of change is already baked into the system and impacts are playing at in different ways around the world already.

“We have to adapt, we have to spend time understanding how these impacts are going to play out and bring it down to that ground level, and then start trying to build resilience at multiple levels,” said Dabelko.

Helping policymakers move along this response chain was the aim of a new report authored by Dabelko and a consortium of research organizations including the Wilson Center on behalf of the G7 governments. The report, A New Climate for Peace, recommends concrete steps governments should take to address climate-fragility risks.

Cutting Across Agendas

While commissioned by seven countries whose combined economies make up almost half the global GDP, Dabelko said the report’s recommendations apply to developed and developing countries alike. “How do you minimize the threats that are posed to the Arctic, to transboundary river basins, to local communities that are suffering food insecurity?” he said. These are not problems that any one country, rich of poor, can address in isolation.

The report highlights how certain structural fragilities – from economic inequality to finite natural resources – can act as fault lines for instability and how climate change can exacerbate these vulnerabilities. Importantly, these fragilities can interact with each other in complex ways to produce compound risks, said Dabelko. Food security, for example, is tied to growing populations and increased consumption, as well as changing rainfall patterns and groundwater availability. Water use impacts multiple sectors, from agriculture and public health to the generation and consumption of power. And all of these can be impacted by poverty, poor governance, and conflict over shared resources.

“The foreign policy, the economic policy, [and] the national security policy of countries today have to find ways to understand and respond to these issues that cut across all those agendas,” said Dabelko.

Many governments and NGOs have already acknowledged that tackling climate change means tackling these issues together, but such a multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary approach is easier said than done. “How do we move beyond the rhetoric of saying, ‘These issues are all integrated, we have to better work together across our departments, across our topics’?” said Dabelko. “How do we move from that rhetorical commitment to actually doing it?”

A Matter of Framing?

Countries need to reckon with the fact that climate change is an issue of social and environmental justice, said Dabelko. “Right now, the people causing the problem are the wealthy, for the most part, and the people suffering the most from the impacts are the poor. That’s an equity issue between rich and poor.” This was noted by Pope Francis in his recent encyclical on the environment, where he described how exploitative economic and social structures produce environmental change that often disproportionately affects the poor and marginalized. Hearing this sort of message from a public figure as trusted as the pope could be critical to starting conversations on climate change across different sectors and in different communities where its impacts are not being considered or planned for, said Dabelko.

A New Climate for Peace’s first and foremost recommendations are to the G7 countries to reduce emissions and integrate their own development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding efforts to incorporate climate-fragility risks. But the authors also put forward a call for more meaningful cooperation with powerful international organizations, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and less developed countries.

“We need to partner not as donor-and-recipient but as true partners with these situations of fragility,” said Dabelko. Coastal and delta communities in the United States, for example, could have a lot to learn from someone in Bangladesh who is already adapting to climate change with far fewer resources.

Dabelko says it is the small actions that should give global leaders hope that change can be achieved. “Often after a lecture I get asked, ‘How can you get up in the morning if this is your agenda every day?’ I think you do have to be optimistic. I think you have to see that there can be small steps and see, at least in history, we have a lot of times where something that was unimaginable can be turned on its head.”