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.

 

A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

In Conflict-Affected Somalia, Climate Change Adds to Migration Pressures

In the Somalian coastal town of Hobyo, thousands of residents—some of whom settled there to flee the country’s civil war—are starting to leave. Why? Their homes are being engulfed by sand.

Gunfire erupted at the border of the Afghan Nimroz Province and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan Province on May 27, 2023, amid rising tensions over water rights, killing troops on both sides.

Iranian and Afghan government officials have blamed each other for triggering the incident. But whatever the cause, the tensions over water flows between these nations have been simmering for at least a century. Indeed, in 1999, under the first iteration of the Taliban, flows were restricted completely causing damage to the delicate Hamoun Region—a registered UNESCO biosphere site of social and ecological importance.

Midwives play a central role in maternal and newborn health. So, it is fitting that their efforts took the spotlight at a two-day event – The 5^th Global Midwifery Symposium – held during the first ever International Maternal and Newborn Health Conference (IMNHC) in May 2023 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Central Sahel is increasingly deemed the new epicenter of terrorism, accounting for 35 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2021. Yet as the situation in the region continues to deteriorate, artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) both persists and proliferates. For instance, in Mali, where much of the region’s security crisis originates, this conundrum is laid bare.

Nigeria is home to many violent conflicts, one of which is the farmers-herders conflict that has posed severe security challenges in the country. The human toll of the violence has been immense, claiming more lives than the Boko Haram insurgency. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or displaced. Nigeria has also experienced increased ethnic, regional, and religious polarization, and this crisis has undermined national stability and unity.

The idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” has been gaining steam since it was first proposed roughly 15 years ago. This framing acknowledges that climate can interact with existing political, social, and demographic conditions to heighten communities’ security risks—which in turn suggests that problem-solving in the face of these risks must be interdisciplinary.

Russia’s brutal aggression has wreaked devastation in Ukraine for more than a year. It has also forced a fundamental rethink of geopolitics. Central to that new thinking is the role of energy security and how to manage the insecurities created by the lopsided dependencies exposed by the conflict.