Record levels of displacement and accelerating climate change have prompted many to wonder if the world is headed toward a more violent future. The nexus of climate change, migration, and conflict is posing fundamental challenges to societies. But not always in the ways you might think. In a new report prepared for the U.S. Agency of International Development, Lauren Herzer Risi and I present a small guide to this controversial and consequential nexus of global trends.

The world of 2035 will be facing global and regional insecurities that could be “more dangerous than the second half of the Cold War era,” according to a 2016 report from the Atlantic Council.

“Water is the frontline of climate change. It’s what every report that you see identifies as the sort of first and foremost effect we see from a climate changing world,” said Sherri Goodman, a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center and formerly of CNA and the U.S. Department of Defense, on October 19.

It was some point in May last year, shortly after ISIS surged into the city of Ramadi, and I was working on a story about Iraq’s fast-disappearing Mesopotamian Marshes. Keen to fact-check a few statistics with the Ministry of Water Resources and to hear the government line on the wetlands’ struggles, I dialed its Baghdad offices. After being passed from official to official like a hot potato, a young employee, Hussein, finally gave it to me straight. “No, no, we don’t have this sort of information,” he said, clearly impatient to get off the phone. “There are much more important things in Iraq right now.”

There may not have been a single question about climate change in the 2016 presidential debates, but it remains a hotly contested, partisan issue for many in the United States. That climate change is happening and requires a response is not up for debate within the upper echelons of the U.S. military, however.

Since its adoption in December 2015, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 on youth, peace, and security has been hailed as the first of its kind to recognize young people as meaningful drivers of change through its explicit encouragement of youth leadership at all levels of conflict prevention and peacebuilding. “It’s a testament to the fact that global youth today can have a real meaningful impact on the big issues of today, in the big arenas where discussions are happening,” said Andy Rabens, a special advisor on global youth issues for the U.S. Department of State, at the Wilson Center on October 6.