This year’s World Economic Forum called for greater urgency in discussing the impacts of climate change on human security and social, political, and economic stability. And a recognition of the destabilizing effects of climate change also has led the UN to emphasize the risks they pose to the most vulnerable populations, including poor, conflict-affected, and displaced persons.

Recent Conference of Parties meetings have called for climate action for peace, and an increasing research agenda focuses on how climate change interacts with instability or conflict in areas including food insecurity and land degradation.

Asia provides a useful stage in examining crucial links between climate change and insecurity. While the “climate security” discourse has gained less traction than in other parts of the world, tackling these complex connections is crucial for future stability in this high-growth region.

Much of the public discourse surrounding climate security has been led by Western-based actors whose humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding efforts in Africa and the Middle East confront overlapping climate, food, economic, and security crises. Across Asia, however, traditional security issues are rarely emphasized in public climate change discussions, even as the region’s most climate-vulnerable countries, including Pakistan, Myanmar, and the Philippines, also contend with major security challenges.

Instead, Asian governments often use development themes focused on livelihoods or migration to frame their concerns. Yet while responses by Southeast Asian governments to climate impacts are promoting mitigation, adaptation, resilience-building, and regional cooperation, they are taking little notice of the risks posed to national and regional stability.

Connecting climate change, peace, and security objectives in Asia has the potential to contribute to conflict reduction and prevention, bring a more diverse group of stakeholders into adaptation and mitigation efforts, and unlock greater access to climate financing for marginalized or disenfranchised populations.

Limits to a “Climate Security” Lens?

Perhaps one reason that climate security has not been prominent on the radar in Asia is that the link between conflict and climate change is not as visible in many Asian contexts as it is in parts of Africa, such as the Sahel, for instance. While the farmers and pastoralists who make up a great part of that region’s population are often the first to experience tensions associated with climatic changes, over half of Asia’s population is urban, with livelihoods less directly dependent on agriculture or livestock. Government infrastructure in urban areas is better than in rural areas, and the grievances that often contribute to triggering conflict or instability after extreme weather events or natural disasters can be more easily alleviated.

International interests also play a role. Across much of Asia, high-level efforts to combat climate change and ambitious mitigation or adaptation strategies are defined and led not by foreign or multilateral agencies, but rather by the continent’s national governments. For these countries, the climate security discourse is fraught, risking unwanted attention on regional conflicts or threatening key sovereignty and non-interference norms. Embracing a security-based approach for combatting climate change could create political risks for some Asian nations.

It is good news that, aside from a few hotspots such as in Myanmar and Afghanistan, conflict and human insecurity in Asia have steadily decreased. However, parts of the region remain fragile due to weak governance, poverty, and underdevelopment. Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka also experience systemic forms of violence, including discrimination and marginalization, but they are not subject to active, sustained, and militarized violence.

Asia’s Changing Climate

Intensifying climate impacts might raise the profile of a climate security lens in Asia. Changing monsoon patterns and melting glaciers already contribute to water and energy stress on the continent, while more frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels drive food insecurity, displacement, and migration. Cyclones, floods, and typhoons displaced 9.6 million people in Southeast and East Asia in 2019.

Over the past five decades, disasters in Asia are estimated to have caused nearly half a million deaths, affecting over 3 billion people, and resulting in 2 trillion USD in damages. In 2023, Asia was the world’s most disaster-affected region given climate change, weather, and water-related hazards.

Other challenges are also becoming more serious. Moderate or severe food insecurity in Asia has risen steadily over the past decade. In Southern Asia, 41.3% of the population suffered moderate or severe food insecurity between 2021-23. In 2023, rice prices soared to their highest levels since 2008 following adverse weather conditions and trade restrictions. Under 1.5°C and 2°C warming scenarios, East and Northeast Asia are projected to suffer the highest agricultural losses in the region, while Southeast Asia will see the greatest GDP loss.

Local Initiatives Offer Models 

The prevalence of climate-related risks to human security in Asia highlights the need for region-specific action. Though they are not necessarily framed as climate change, peace and security interventions, such initiatives do exist in the region.

The Mekong River Commission supports Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in achieving consensus-based development for the river basin. This body also offers technical assistance for areas of concern, including sustainable fishing, hydropower, agriculture, navigation, flood, and drought management, and ecosystem preservation. Such structures for dialogue and multistakeholder cooperation could be deployed to tackle climate change-related social and political risks that affect its member countries.

In Mindanao, Philippines, the Conflict-Sensitive Resource and Asset Management project combines economic development, peacebuilding, land rights advocacy, and social inclusion initiatives to address poverty and conflict. Implementing the government’s peace and development agendas here has required stakeholders to focus on conflict-sensitive and climate-resilient investments. It is an approach that could be replicated in other areas where governance issues hinder climate change responses.

Myanmar’s community-led Salween Peace Park gives Indigenous communities an opportunity to reclaim traditional practices, assert their rights, and sustainably manage natural resources. The project illustrates how environmental protection can be pursued in areas regularly affected by violent conflict by empowering local leadership and linking Indigenous knowledge with global conservation priorities.

Steps to More and Better Action

Further assessment of local-level initiatives can identify opportunities to scale up while supporting ethnic groups to maintain peace and stability. But clearly they must be accompanied by broader commitments.

A shift in perspective may be crucial. If climate security dominates the discourse, policymakers and practitioners in Asia may struggle to engage. Yet initiatives addressing connections between climate change and human security risks, including food insecurity, displacement, and conflict, do exist across the region.

Thus, exploring and expanding effective responses to climate change and conflict could reveal mutual interests and entry points for bilateral or community-based trust-building in Asia. Identifying what works, and where it works, and why, and under what conditions successes occur can help to ensure that present and future investments in a climate-resilient Asia will contribute to stability and peace.