Climate change is recognized as a threat multiplier that aggravates non-climate stressors such as population growth, poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions. As such, there is a critical need to understand and address the climate-drivers of conflict. This webinar tackles these issues.

Global warming is impacting the world’s water supply and life cycle in almost every way. The impacts of climate change on water are particularly acute in areas of the world experiencing conflict. As water supplies become more strained in conflict contexts, they are increasingly being exploited and weaponized as strategic targets. Danilo Türk of the Geneva Water Hub and Hamish Young of UNICEF spoke with the Global Observatory about these challenges.

The Arctic has long been considered as an area of low military tension with a potential for sub-regional cooperation, especially in jointly developing energy resources in the High North. Receding polar ice, as a result of climate change, has created even more opportunities in this respect. It also encourages more intensive use of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which is gradually opening up for navigation for ever bigger parts of the year. However, the Arctic region is no longer exempt from broader geopolitical tensions.

To tell the stories of Somali people struggling to cope with a changing environment, photographer and filmmaker Nichole Sobecki released photos and a documentary. She aimed at highlighting the relationship between climate change and conflict by giving voice to Somalis affected by a changing environment.

In an interview with EURACTIV Germany, Mohammed Baba Baituna, the founder of Green Sahel, spoke about conflicts in his home country Nigeria, where his organisation and other local activists have been trying to cushion the effects of climate change, which are strengthening the jihadist terror group Boko Haram.

How can climate action contribute to peacebuilding? And how can peace intervention be more effective due to taking to account of climate impacts? This new study on the role of climate adaptation in reducing security risks was commissioned by the Global Commission on Adaptation as part of a series of background papers for the 2019 Flagship Report Adapt Now.

Ahead of the New York Climate Week 2019, PSI lists relevant events connected to climate security. If you are aware of other events, please feel free to contact us so we can add them:  [email protected] or via Twitter @PlanSecu.

September 12, 2019 marks one year since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and former Vice President-turned-opposition leader Riek Machar signed a new peace agreement. The human and environmental cost of the five-year war it ended has been staggering. [...] Gender-sensitive environmental peacebuilding promises to be one of the strategies needed to resolve these multiple challenges.

On September 23, the United Nations is convening the Climate Action Summit, and while the UN was founded on maintaining international peace and stability, climate change is a risk that the founders could not have foreseen. Given both the unprecedented nature of the climate risk, and our predictive capabilities when it comes to the global climate, much more systemic changes must be made to prevent and prepare for it.