As flood, fire, and fighting grow worse, the intersection of climate change and conflict is weighing increasingly heavily on humanitarians, who fear these complex drivers of crisis will only merge further as the planet heats and geopolitical faultlines fracture.
The past two UN climate summits saw rushes of high-level support and money for what was once a niche policy area, but experts are now sounding the alarm about the neglect of the climate, peace and security agenda at the COP30 summit in Brazil – and worry about what that means for communities caught up in converging crises.
The lack of attention to climate, peace and security comes amid major global changes since COP29, where host government Azerbaijan backed a series of climate-conflict initiatives, and COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, which saw the policy agenda receive major political recognition for the first time (under the branding “Relief, Recovery and Peace day”).
Perhaps most crucially, the second administration of President Donald Trump has seen the collapse of US political support and financing for climate and aid, and this has had massive chilling effects: Other donors also cut their budgets and humanitarian agencies removed references to climate from their websites.
A major UN humanitarian agency “asked me to do the comms and send the invitations for a high-level meeting [on climate] because they couldn’t be seen doing it”, Mauricio Vazquez, head of policy at the Global Risks and Resilience programme at ODI, a think tank, told The New Humanitarian.
The extensive aid budget cuts triggered by Trump in January have, for many, been the overriding feature of the year.
The reductions have caused “blockages – people dealing with the fallout instead of planning, having less time to think, and don't know if they will still have a job by COP,” said Annika Erickson-Pearson, who manages the Environment, Climate, Conflict, and Peace (ECCP) community of practice.
As the wider humanitarian sector grapples with similar finance problems – and as COP30 kicks off in the Amazon – The New Humanitarian examines the state of play for the floundering efforts to drive forward the climate, peace and security agenda.
A reluctant host
While the COP negotiations are officially run by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the summit is hosted by a different government every year, each leaving their own diplomatic stamp on the event.
Previous big events on climate, peace and security have been initiatives of host governments and – while technically unrelated to the UNFCCC negotiations – are a chance to put such issues in the spotlight.
COP30’s host government Brazil – which is led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (often known as Lula) – has been reluctant to engage with the climate, peace and security policy.
“Peace has dropped off the agenda for COP30,” according to a statement from Ecosystem for Peace (an earlier incarnation of the ECCP). Achieving the world’s climate goals, including those championed by Brazil, “will struggle without a deliberate attempt to include conflict-affected settings”, it said.
“Dedicated conversations… at COP30 are crucial to maintain momentum and take forward coalitions formed at previous global meetings that can accelerate implementation of commitments for conflict settings,” added the statement.
COP initiatives often receive criticism for having insular focuses that are slow to translate into real-world results, but Brazil’s disregard for climate and peace is being particularly keenly felt by grassroots campaigners from conflict-affected countries.
Nisreen Elsaim, executive director of the nascent Youth Alliance for Local Adaptation and Peace (YALAP), stressed how Brazil’s lack of engagement on the topic meant her group – a network of climate activists from conflict-affected countries – will now not get any publicity for its work.
COP30 “would have been time to take advocacy to the next level for implementation, flow of finance, acknowledgement not only of the problem but the bodies that exist and work on the problem,” said Elsaim. “And now all of this is not there.”
The summit in Brazil had also been seen as a chance to move climate, peace and security from parallel initiatives into the main COP negotiations.
“We were thinking of applying for a new UNFCCC constituency for countries in conflict, and it will be harder now,” said Elsaim. “We were hoping to have climate change, peace and security as part of the negotiating text or preamble of the agreement, but now there is zero chance for that.”
This could have helped change what campaigners regard as the unacceptable status quo of fragile and conflict-affected countries being regarded as having similar needs to other Global South countries. “You definitely cannot compare [mostly peaceful, governed] Kenya with DRC [the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which suffers from fractured governance and numerous conflicts],” she said.
The fear of sovereign intrusion
Brazil’s reluctance to prioritise climate, peace and security stems from several factors.
The main BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) – a group of emerging powers of which President Lula is currently chair – all take a sceptical approach to climate peace and security.
According to Barbara Magalhães Teixeira, a researcher in the Climate Change and Risk Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), they are concerned that it will distract policy attention from development.
There’s also a fear that linking global warming with conflicts could “legitimise interventions in the name of climate security” for the benefit of high-income countries, said Teixeira, referencing how migration – including discussions about people displaced by climate – has become framed as a “problem the Global North has to keep out”. The BRICS “see that as very problematic for their sovereignty and national agendas and policies”, she explained.
But it’s “very detrimental” not to focus on communities suffering amid conflicts at COP30, especially when it comes to climate finance, said Teixeira. “If they don't look at the structural inequalities when it comes to conflict-affected settings, then that makes them even more vulnerable,” she said. “They're going to be completely cut out of the discussions on climate financing and development financing, and that further marginalises them.”
“Climate is inseparable from peace and security”
While many powerful countries prefer to skip over the topic, conflict-affected states – many of them among the least responsible for the emissions that have caused climate change – are increasingly vocal in highlighting how the two issues collide to exacerbate their vulnerabilities.
In Somalia, “climate is inseparable from peace and security”, Abdihakim Ainte, the head of climate and food security in the Somali prime minister office, told The New Humanitarian.
“Climate is intimately related to all sorts of crises that often happen in Somalia – in communal conflicts, drought – all are intimately linked to the climate crisis, because it can have an impact on grazing, land, impact on how people in different clans live together,” said Ainte. “If the rain fails, it can always be a source of tension for clans cohabiting in rural areas.”
Ainte explained how many of Somalia's active and frozen conflicts could be traced back to resource-sharing and said climate change was therefore an “existential” crisis for the country.
The Somali government’s climate priority is to adapt and build resilience for areas like agriculture and water. It wants to do this through developing infrastructure, such as wells, and building institutions “that can deliver for the people”, said Ainte. “All this is investing in preventing a future communal conflict”.
“If the rain fails, it can always be a source of tension for clans cohabiting in rural areas.”
Doing this requires climate finance, and the main sources are through multilateral bodies like the Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund.
Much of the climate, peace and security advocacy at previous COPs has demanded that these multilateral bodies invest more money into fragile and conflict-affected states, and make it easier for those countries to apply for funding.
While the Green Climate Fund, in particular, argues that it has been making considerable efforts to do this, “nothing has really changed as far as I know”, said Ainte. “Somalia is still disproportionately disadvantaged from accessing climate resources,” he added, noting that the aid cuts mean “things are really now getting much worse”.
Somalia’s Ainte is not alone in his views.
The g7+ group of conflict-affected countries has been behind much of the advocacy for increased climate action and finance in warzones.
In a 5 November blog, “COP30’s dangerous Omission”, Habib Mayar, deputy general secretary of the g7+ Secretariat, wrote along with ODI’s Vazquez that COP30 should lead “the push for multilateral development banks and climate funds to overhaul their outdated, zero-tolerance risk models; ensuring a significant share of the new Loss and Damage Fund and other adaptation finance is explicitly earmarked for conflict-affected communities; and making sure that investments focus on people, not states.”
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage is still developing its working policies, but it is clear that there is reluctance among some of its supporters to finance work in conflict-affected states.
Mayar’s final point – focusing on people – is a tricky one to accomplish amidst the COP’s state-centric processes, but one that is increasingly demanded by grassroots-focused campaigners.
While many donors shrink from providing funding to governments involved in conflicts, YALAP’s Elsaim said climate finance should go straight to community organisations. “In spite of what a lot of people think, there's a very active civil society movement in these countries” that are in conflict or at risk of it, she said.
For Elsaim, the traditional splitting of projects or organisations into either peace or climate classifications misses the mark: “Why should we be categorised as one or the other when working in both?”
So what’s the path forward?
Behind much of the slow progress in helping conflict-affected countries prepare and respond to global warming impacts is donor reluctance to spending scarce – and increasingly politically sensitive – climate finance in such places.
“This continues to be one of the main barriers: The risk appetite and tolerance from the board members [of climate funds], and the politics about who gets the money,” said Vazquez. Grant-funded climate funds should be more risk-taking, serving countries – like those in conflict – who find it hard to get the kind of concessional loans from multilateral development banks that are accessible to more stable governments, he suggested.
At “the core of the problem” is the fact that high-income country contributors to green funds treat climate finance as taxpayer-financed aid, and try to take a more controlling donor-style approach, according to Vazquez. But under the Paris Agreement, climate finance has important distinctions from aid, including that it is “money from developed to developing countries based on [Common But Differentiated Responsibilities]”, he added.
Vazquez continued: “It’s [developing] countries’ money, not donor money. They are not donors, that's the point; they are literally compensating those countries which contributed the least to climate change and are suffering the most.”
Unsurprisingly, the governments providing the money tend to see it differently, and the discordant financial backdrop isn’t exactly promising. While aid budgets are declining, the COP has set targets for climate finance to hit big annual goals – $300 billion annually by 2035 – though not all of it will be grant-based. By contrast, total aid flows in 2024 were $212 billion and will be much less this year.
Whatever the challenges, campaigners on climate, peace and security are still keen that some of this money reaches places affected by conflict and fragility, despite predicting a setback at COP this year.
The work is already being done in many places, according to the ECCP, which lists a “repository of climate-peace case studies” on its website so that policymakers can get a better idea of what such programmes entail.
Many studies are looking at national policies as the next step for this work.
Erickson-Pearson, of the ECCP, highlighted efforts to ensure the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) – which allow access to some climate finance – are conflict-sensitive, meaning, at the very least, that they don't inadvertently aggravate the dynamics behind violence. But advocacy for the topic’s inclusion in Brazil’s COP30 agenda was unsuccessful, she added.
For others, though, conflict sensitivity doesn’t go far enough. More needs to be done to ensure that the governments of fragile and conflict-affected countries can properly spend climate funds, according to Vazquez. “We need to rethink how we do readiness in these countries and cannot follow up [with] blueprints developed for more stable contexts,” he said.
In fragile and conflict-affected societies, the national plans for gaining climate finance – known as country platforms – need to move from “being whole of government approach to whole of society approach”, said Vazquez. “If we want country platforms to succeed in these countries, we need to make sure that all constituencies are represented, and they need to focus on transparency and accountability.”
Whatever lies ahead must avoid the power imbalances of the past, according to Elsaim. “Instead of being a Global North colonisation of climate solutions,” she said her organisation’s work will focus on gaining attention to ideas from “just the Global South”.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
