“I think we need to approach climate security completely differently,” said Sharon Burke, Founder and President of Ecospherics and Wilson Center Global Fellow, at the recent 2024 Montreal Climate Security Summit. “It’s not just that climate change is an opportunity cost in combat power, or that it’s effecting our bases and operating environment, or that it is an accelerant to instability. It is itself the threat.”

From record-breaking heat in 2023 to alarming levels of biodiversity loss, our global climate and environmental crises pose a growing threat to human and planetary wellbeing. But even as these crises intensify, the work of documenting them has itself become increasingly risky.

Across the world, threats and attacks against journalists who report on environmental degradation and investigate environmental crimes are on the rise. A recent UNESCO survey reported 300 attacks against environmental journalists in the last five years—a 42 percent jump from the previous 5-year period.​

In a new Occasional Paper published by the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program and ECSP, journalist Taylor Luck examines the climate priorities of wealthy and middle-income countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Luck analyzes the policies adopted by MENA states, highlighting gaps and offering recommendations to strengthen climate action in a region strained by both instability and climate change.

The global transition to low-carbon energy is spurring new momentum to produce and secure the mineral inputs necessary for renewable technologies. Yet meeting demand may prove difficult. From electric cars to wind turbines, essential renewable energy technologies often require more minerals than fossil fuel-powered infrastructure. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that efforts to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement could lead to a fourfold increase in mineral demand by 2040.

In the wake of Storm Daniel, which hit Libya in September 2023, ECSP spoke with Wilson Center Global Fellow Peter Schwartzstein about the storm’s tragic fallout and its connection to conflict. As an environmental journalist and consultant, Schwartzstein has written extensively about the climate-conflict nexus and other environmental and geopolitical issues, primarily in the Middle East, North and East Africa.

From individual health risks to geopolitical tensions, climate impacts are relevant to every facet of peace and security.  Focus on these links has sharpened in recent years, as governments and international security organizations like NATO increasingly recognize that climate responses must be part of promoting peace and security.