In April 2021, the Biden administration announced a new greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for the United States. In the accompanying “nationally determined contribution” submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the administration highlighted the interplay between national and subnational policy in driving climate progress. The document promised that federal action will “[build] upon and [benefit] from a long history of leadership on climate ambition and innovation from state, local, and tribal governments.”

My latest book—States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge University Press)—has been more than two decades in the making. And as I reflect on that journey, I see significant parallels between my own trajectory and the larger efforts to define and refine thinking about climate security.

In Iraq, climate change is adding stress to an already precarious situation. Weak public services,  growing unemployment, fossil fuel-related environmental and health hazards, and other factors have generated high levels of social vulnerability and contributed to recent protests. In the top post for May, Dylan O’Driscoll and Shivan Fazil write about how, against this fragile backdrop, insecurity is heightened by increasingly deadly flash floods and more frequent dust storms that pose a public health threat.

Is a “green resource curse” on its way? Kimberly Thompson, a Senior Advisor for Natural Resources and Conflict and the Industry Lead for Mining at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), says that the current status quo in the green mining industry risks “inadvertently creating the conditions” for it to happen.

In an increasingly unpredictable world of pandemics, conflict, and disasters, climate change is often at the center of conversations about the instability of global affairs. From California wildfires to droughts across East Africa, the role of climate cannot be ignored in any analysis of global unpredictability. And citizens around the world know it. Growing global public support for governments to aggressively act on climate change has led to an increase in policy action on climate issues.

The massive floods, heat waves, raging wildfires, and devastating droughts of 2021 brought the present reality of climate change’s catastrophic impacts on people and ecosystems home to our doorsteps.