Climate change is a risk, said Maurice Amollo, a Mercy Corps Chief of Party in Nigeria Mercy Corps. “But it is also an opportunity if people come together.” He spoke at a recent USAID Adaptation Community Meeting, “Tackling the threat multiplier: Addressing the role of climate change in conflict dynamics.” The discussion focused on USAID’s Peace III initiative that Amollo and Mercy Corps implemented in the Karamoja region along the borders of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda, where climate and conflict shocks are part of daily life for pastoralist ethnic groups. Addressing climate and conflict issues in these regions will require using the environment to build cooperation and peace, said Eliot Levine, the Director of Mercy Corps’ Environment Technical Support Unit.

The Arctic is changing, and it’s changing fast, even faster than models had predicted. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report found with strong confidence that the Arctic is warming two to three times faster than the global average.

Rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are reshaping the world from the top down, according to a special report on the world’s oceans and frozen regions from the United Nations climate panel.

Policymakers and emergency managers tend to build a conceptual wall between natural hazards and terrorism. The causes of—and remedies for—these two kinds of disasters are seen as separate and distinct. But, in the era of climate change, the wall between the two is crumbling.

“Today we face two existential threats: nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change,” writes Daniel Poneman, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy, in his book, Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change. “Both stem from human origins. We need to fight both threats aggressively.” At a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center, Poneman discussed his book. While the dangers of nuclear energy are clear from incidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl, Poneman proposes policies that aim to encourage a safe, non-carbon baseload power that responds to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report and keeps our global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, per the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Water security is a pervasive climate issue and one that has increasingly been viewed as a gendered issue. Worldwide, women and girls spend 200 million hours collecting water every day. While doing so, they place themselves at increased risk of assault and become more likely to develop medical issues related to physical labor. They also pay an opportunity cost, as this time could be better spent in school or performing other productive tasks. 

When thinking seriously about a world increasingly afflicted by climate change, radio and television soap operas are not the first things that leap to mind. But for countries likely to suffer the most from climate change, popular serial dramas can play a critical role in helping vulnerable populations adapt to the looming challenges.

What do we (think we) know about the links between climate change and armed conflict? Early attempts to theorize what climate-related conflict might look like were exceptionally successful in sparking policymaker interest in and funding of research on climate-conflict links. But they were more like works of science fiction than science. Since then, research on climate-conflict links has exploded, with hundreds of articles and working papers published on the subject. Moreover, the findings have been all over the map, with some arguing for strong impacts of climate on conflict at multiple temporal and spatial scales, while others argue—in both specific instances, about the supposedly climate-fueled Syrian Civil War, and more generally—that climate-conflict links are overstated.