Every year, more than two billion farmers around the world work the land day in and day out to earn a living and produce what is needed to feed and clothe an ever-growing global population that reached 8 billion in November 2022. Though they bear the brunt of climate change on the front lines, many of the world’s farmers, ranchers and fishers are unaware of the international processes that affect their livelihoods.

Cairo hoped that COP27 would focus on its stated agenda: climate change adaptation. Yet it was human rights concerns—such as jailed pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah’s hunger strike and rumors of restricted internet access to human rights platforms—that often stole headlines from climate policy or funding pledges. The persistence of human rights coverage demonstrated that Egypt and many other governments fail to recognize that strong governance, human rights protections, and climate change adaptation are mutually reinforcing and have overlapping policy actions.

Climate impacts are growing more frequent and severe as global temperatures rise. Weather-related disasters have seen a five-fold increase over the past half-century. In many cases, these calamities are already testing the adaptation capabilities of vulnerable communities across the world. If emissions follow the trajectory set by current country targets, the chance of temporarily overshooting the 1.5 °C target in the next five years is 48 percent.

This failure would have implications for the global economy and international security. Yet despite the fact that climate change shapes geopolitics, climate risk itself has rarely been featured in international geopolitics and diplomacy.

Which nations are most at risk of catastrophic outcomes due to intensifying ecological threats? The third edition of the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)’s Ecological Threat Report (ETR)—released on October 20, 2022— applies a lens of societal resilience to predict the hotspots most likely to suffer from instability and conflict in the future, and provides projections of ongoing trends to 2050.

2022 was a summer of climate extremes across the globe. Multiple heat events simmered across China and Europe, also in regions that are not “supposed to be this hot,” such as the United Kingdom. The western United States also baked in unusual heat, but perhaps the most damaging episode of the season occurred when extreme precipitation caused major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. This untimely deluge exacerbated a pre-existing water infrastructure crisis in that city, leaving its 150,000, predominately black, residents without access to safe water for days.