Global climate action must be sensitive to ‘land grabs’ and lost livelihoods for both a safer and greener world to be built in Glasgow.

With all eyes on COP26, the world is holding its breath. This year’s negotiations will need to see truly ambitious commitments to ramp up climate action in order to avoid a dangerous future. There has never been a greater sense of the urgency in the climate movement.

As a peacebuilder, I’m looking closely at what the implications of the much-needed pledges might be for the 1.5 billion people living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The discussion on the impact of climate change on security and social stability is gaining momentum but is still effectively on the fringes of the COP26 agenda. That is a concern.

“Since time immemorial, rape has been used to control women’s sexuality, labor, and reproduction, to shred the social fabric, to conquer territories and populations, and crush the enemy’s moral and will to resist,” said Under Secretary General Pramila Patten, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, at an event focused on addressing conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) organized by The Secretary’s Office for Global Women’s Issues, Search for Common Ground, and the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. In the past two decades, legislative reform, sanctions against perpetrators, and systematic reporting have slowly transformed the climate of impunity surrounding CRSV, said Patten.

Last week, in an unprecedented show of coordination to address the connections between climate change and security, the Biden-Harris Administration released four reports—which taken together, mark significant progress in the effort to center climate change in U.S. national security and foreign policy. The documents—which fulfill key requirements laid out in two Executive Orders issued by President Biden in the early days of his administration—describe how climate change will increasingly heighten instability and influence the United States’ strategic interests, including shaping competition with other great powers—most significantly, China.

“We should not see people moving as a security threat. People do not move if they’ve got a better option. As a community, one of our responsibilities is to provide people with the options,” said Andrew Harper, Special Advisor to the UNHCR High Commissioner for Climate Action, at a discussion on human mobility, climate change, and conflict hosted at the 2021 Berlin Climate and Security Conference. “We need to ensure that projects and activities that have been put in place are not short term, but are geared up to be addressing the challenges that the world will be facing within five to ten years’ time.” 

One in five women who is forcibly displaced will experience sexual violence, said Charlotte Slente, Danish Refugee Council Secretary-General at a roundtable on the prevention of gender-based violence in humanitarian crises during the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly. The high-level roundtable was hosted by the Government of Denmark in partnership with several other international bilateral agencies, as well as women-led organizations.*

“We produce more than enough food for the world’s population, but more and more people have been growing hungry in recent years,” said Kelly McFarland, Director of Programs and Research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) at Georgetown University, during a panel discussion on COVID, Conflict, and Climate co-hosted by ISD and the Stimson Center’s Global Governance, Justice & Security, and Food Security Programs.

This summer, climate-induced heat waves ignited landmines and unexploded ordnance buried in the soils around the Middle East, killing people and causing wildfires.  Warmer waters are speeding up erosion of sunken battleships laden with degrading munitions. A melting ice sheet on Greenland has exposed thousands of barrels of toxic waste at abandoned U.S. military bases.  

Currently there isn’t a lot of good news coming out of the Sahel, the area in Africa that borders the Saharan desert to the north, the Sudanian Savannah to the south, and stretches across the continent. Multiple raging insurgencies, especially in the western part of the region, fuel a news cycle of offensives and counter offensives, responses and massacres.

According to the damning new ‘code red for humanity’ report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the news from the region isn’t likely to get better any time soon.