A new Global Fragility Strategy, released late last year by the U.S. Department of State, signals a growing awareness of the role that environmental issues play in fragility, conflict, and peace. According to the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, in the last five years alone, “the U.S. government has spent $30 billion in 15 of the most fragile countries in the world.” These “large-scale U.S. stabilization efforts after 9/11 have cost billions of dollars but failed to produce intended results,” writes Devex’s Teresa Welsh. As a result, Congress passed into law in 2019 the Global Fragility Act, legislation that directed the Department of State to lead the development of a new 10-year Global Fragility Strategy that sets out a new U.S approach to conflict prevention and stabilization in fragile contexts.

For years, analysts have disputed the extent of climate change’s role in conflict. But the nature of climate risks can stifle those looking to define them.

The Syrian civil war has raged for almost a decade now, and in the climate security community it can feel as if we’ve spent at least that long arguing about its causes. For every claim about the impact of extreme drought in the lead up to 2011, there’s been blowback, with some scholars arguing that the climate angle has been exaggerated at the expense of other causes of the conflict. And for every argument about rural-to-urban migration, there have been suggestions that its impact in precipitating protests has been overstated. Amid some overly forceful media assertion about the significance of climate change—and valid fears that invoking the environment might be seen as absolving guilty parties, despite efforts to highlight the regime’s ultimate culpability—climate security analysts have struggled to fully pinpoint climate’s precise contribution to the conflict. Cue uncertainty, controversy, and sometimes fierce academic polemics.

Nearly a year ago, somewhere in China, a previously unknown virus made its way from a wild animal into a human host. There it found not only a hospitable home, but also an opportunity to spread trillions of copies of itself, eventually replicating to become the global Covid-19 pandemic.

That outbreak, now having infected more than 46 million people around the world, has been the impetus for a series of actions taken by the Chinese government to — in theory — get a handle on zoonotic disease outbreaks now and in the future.

“It is in Brazil’s interest to climate-proof the nation,” said Wilson Center Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman during a recent International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) event. Referencing a new IMCCS  report, Climate and Security in Brazil, Goodman, who is also Secretary General for the IMCCS, said that Brazilian leaders ought to develop counter-deforestation and climate plans as critical elements of the national security agenda.

Truth, trust, and transparency are key aspects to sound and sustainable governance of the Arctic, said Ulf Sverdrup, Director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He was one of a panel of experts who spoke on Nov. 30 at “The Arctic in a Post-Election World,” the first event in a two-part series sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute.

Chile is on the cusp of a new era. Just as its lithium—a common element of energy storage technology, which is itself a critical component of the clean energy transition—is experiencing a rise in global market demand, Chilean citizens have called for a new constitution.

As violence in Mali and Burkina Faso reached a ten-year high this year, the West African Sahel appears to be experiencing the perfect storm of climate stress, resource degradation, and violent extremism. At the center of that storm, one finds livestock herders—pastoralists—who are both vulnerable to environmental changes in the region, and historically marginalized from politics. Conflict in the region looks like a harbinger of the climate wars to come—but is it really? In research produced for Search for Common Ground, Andrew McDonnell and I found that while competition for land and water resources has increased dramatically across the region, violence associated with pastoralism emerges from a much more complex set of factors. Not surprisingly, the decisive conflict variable is governance.

The United States is in the midst of a maternal health crisis. Indigenous and Alaska Native peoples are 2.3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than their white counterparts. In Alaska, unequal socio-economic status, lack of access to hospitals and quality health services, systemic racism, and a history of colonization drive these disparities in maternal health outcomes. “Weathering”—the deterioration of communal health outcomes caused by persistent socio-economic disadvantages—contributes to many poor maternal health outcomes for Alaska Native women. On top of these systemic problems, climate change impacts threaten to widen the existing disparities for Alaskan Native women.