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.

At a recent Brookings Institution event titled Climate Change, Food Insecurity, and Migration in the Middle East, Ferid Belhaj, Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the World Bank, observed that the MENA region relies heavily on grain exported from both Ukraine and Russia. When the 2022 invasion reduced grain exports to a trickle, the entire region suffered heavily.

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.

The increase in global temperatures by over 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times is already having broad and significant impacts. An ongoing multi-year drought in Eastern Africa, for instance, has been attributed to global warming. Hunger crises, displacement, and exacerbated conflict between pastoralist groups are some of the reported dire consequences.

Climate change’s ripples reach every corner of the globe, but nowhere is their geopolitical impact more pronounced than in China’s relations with the United States. This is especially the case as the undisputed security risks posed to both nations by climate change become intertwined with broader arcs of political, economic, and military competition on both sides.

Northern Central America is experiencing a confluence of insecurity and migration challenges that are increasingly intertwined with climate change. What are the contours of this emergent convergence—and how can responses be developed and implemented more effectively?