Mitigation and Adaptation: Sustain Peace and Build Resilience through Climate Action
From the monsoon-on-steroids floods in South Asia, to the devastating drought in Africa, to violent competition for water in the Middle East, extreme climate events have pushed societies towards global humanitarian crises, instability, and conflicts. In all of these cases, climate change is not only the crisis itself but a threat multiplier that aggravates existing grievances and fuels instability, making it a recognised concern that challenges security on national, regional, and global levels.
As the link between climate change and security risks gains recognition, integrating climate action into international security risk assessment and management and committing adequate climate finance are emerging as top global priorities to diminish the compounded security risks and build resilience. This article explores the two main types of climate action - mitigation and adaptation - and offers strategic recommendations for sustaining peace.
Climate Mitigation: Limiting Climate Change
As scientific evidence points to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels for electricity as the main driver of climate change, stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere lies at the heart of limiting global warming and climate change. Efforts to reduce climate change - either by decreasing the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions or by enhancing carbon sinks that store these gases - are referred to as climate mitigation.
Based on the global consensus on limiting global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels, the ultimate goal of mitigation is to achieve net zero - or balancing greenhouse gas removals with greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, though mitigation options take various forms - from transitioning to renewable energy, improving energy efficiency, to expanding the size of forests - they all tackle the root causes of global warming and are key to avoiding, minimising, compensating or offsetting climate calamities.
Climate Adaptation: Adjusting to Climate Change
While mitigation aims at avoiding and neutralising human-induced climate change, the relentless rise of emissions and climate extremes has caused some irreversible effects. Therefore, adapting to climate change becomes another key strategy where residual impacts remain after mitigation. Climate adaptation refers to adjusting to actual or expected climate change - either by making ecological, social or economic changes in response to the adverse effects or by taking advantage of the opportunities that may arise.
Unlike mitigation, adaptation alleviates climate impacts by providing climate solutions tailored to each situation, taking into consideration factors such as geographic location, demographics, infrastructure, and institutional capacities. That is, adaptation strategies are never one-size-fits-all and can vary across communities based on their distinct characteristics. Common practices include diversifying crops and livelihood, relocating to higher ground, insuring assets, and setting up early warning systems.
Sustaining Peace and Security through Climate Action
While mitigation and adaptation cushion climate shocks, the nature of climate change as the ultimate threat multiplier makes its compounded risks too complex for either intervention alone to be sufficient to address. Tackling climate change as a threat multiplier is therefore imperative to break the climate-fragility feedback loop and sustain peace.
To achieve that, world leaders, policymakers and international institutions are tasked with incorporating conflict-sensitive, context-specific climate action into their humanitarian aid and peacebuilding efforts. Given that climate vulnerability is highly interlinked with the localised interplay of risk factors, mitigation and adaptation measures should be informed by thorough climate-security assessments and tailored to local contexts - such as institutional capacity and governance, allocation and access to natural resources, livelihoods of marginalised populations, and existing tensions between communities - particularly in fragile or conflict-prone areas. With considerations of local contexts, climate action and peacebuilding interventions are more likely to be effective and compatible with the larger environment, avoid unintended aggravation of existing inequalities and grievances, and strengthen resilience against future climate hazards.
Another factor enabling mitigation and adaptation to be successfully implemented is climate finance. While it is widely recognised that no climate instruments would work without sufficient financing, mitigation and adaptation finance flows not only failed to keep up with the global pledge of US$100 billion annually, but were significantly incommensurate to adaptation costs and financing needs. As the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main greenhouse gas emitted from human activities and the culprit of global warming - hits record high, the total adaptation finance needs are estimated to skyrocket to US$202 billion per year for the 2021-2030 period aside from incremental mitigation efforts. Dedicating adequate financing to cross-cutting mitigation and adaptation projects, following through on political commitments, and closing the climate finance gap are essential to the effectiveness of climate action.
As scientists warn that the international society is far behind in delivering on the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C, wide-ranging mitigation and adaptation measures offer solutions to limit climate change and enhance capacity to cope with climate stimuli. Only with an integrated climate-security management approach and adequate climate finance will these solutions be turned into successful climate action that neutralises the compound risk of climate change and contributes to building resilience against conflict and insecurity.
Pakistan’s Devastating Floods, its Ensuing Health Crisis, and the Road to a Just Rebuilding
This year, Pakistan has been grappling with a series of unprecedented climate turmoils. Following the extreme, record-breaking spring heatwaves, the south Asian country is now the epicentre of deadly floods. Since June, torrential monsoon rainfall has led to the worst floods Pakistan has ever seen in a decade, leaving one-third of the country underwater, more than 33 million people affected, 1,500 dead and almost 150,000 displaced, in addition to $30 billion in financial losses.
Climate change is blamed as the culprit of the humanitarian crisis. Pakistan’s climate change minister and UN Secretary-General alike pinned the catastrophic floods on climate change. Scientists suggest that human-induced global warming has increased the intensity of rainfall. However, the risks brought about by climate change have gone beyond. Not only has climate change contributed to the extreme monsoon rainfall that directly led to the deadly floods, but it has also multiplied the magnitude of instability by paralysing the country’s already fragile emergency response system.
One of the most immediate, live-threatening fallouts of the climate disaster is an unfolding health crisis. With a vast amount of stagnant water, outbreaks of flood-related diseases, including water-borne ailments, such as diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis and skin conditions, and mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, are reported in the areas ravaged by flooding. In the hardest-hit province Singh alone, more than 2 million patients have been treated in makeshift health facilities since July, in addition to 588 confirmed malaria cases, and tens of thousands of diarrhoea and skin disease cases.
On the other hand, the climate disaster has disrupted access to healthcare, leaving flood-stricken populations more vulnerable to both pre-existing and flood-induced diseases. With more than 1,400 health facilities damaged and bridges and roads extensively destroyed, essential medical services and supplies are inadequate and inaccessible for stranded, displaced flood victims. The knock-on effect of the floods illuminates the nature of climate change as a threat multiplier that intersects with other risks and threatens global security.
Confronted with ‘a climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportion’, an intense sense of climate injustice is vividly perceived in the flood-ravaged country. Though accounting for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, Pakistan ranks amongst the top 10 most affected countries by extreme weather events from 2000 to 2019. Pakistan’s climate change minister argued that the country is at ‘ground zero’ of extreme weather events, urging the world to take collective responsibility and appealing for climate reparation.
Indeed, while the Global North reaps the economic fruits of industrialisation through fossil fuels emitting high levels of greenhouse gas, it is the Global South that bears the brunt of global warming for which the industrialised countries are largely responsible. To tackle the climate injustice, demands for climate reparation and climate finance have emerged as heated topics on the agenda, with the former referring to remediation actions taken by the Global North to correct their historical contributions to the disproportionate climate liability on the Global South nations such as debt relief, and the latter referring to financing that seeks to support climate mitigation and adaptation actions such as putting in place resilient infrastructure.
However, most developed countries have been falling short of their responsibilities for both climate reparation and climate finance. Most developed countries have contributed to climate finance an amount massively incommensurate with their ‘fair share’ considering their historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and ability to pay. In the case of Pakistan’s floods, the largest aid packages, $58 million and $50 million from China and the United States respectively, are also out of proportion to the donors’ contributions to global warming, far from enough to compensate for the irreparable losses and damage the country has endured.
As climate change becomes an exigent threat multiplier to global security, keeping up with commitments of climate finance and securing funding to address loss and damage are essential to maintain climate justice and global security. When the floods recede and the time for rebuilding comes, it is the collective responsibility of the world, and of industrialised nations in particular, to ensure a just, sustainable rebuilding of infrastructure and livelihoods in Pakistan to prepare for likely recurring extreme weather events ahead.
Somalia’s Worst Drought in Four Decades and its Repercussions on Security
Climate change has emerged as a critical ‘threat multiplier’ that intersects with other risks and conflict drivers and jeopardises global security. Growing international attention highlights the compounded security risks, including loss of livelihoods, competition for resources, forced migration and displacement, civil unrest, and violent conflicts, fueled by the interplay of climate change with other underlying socioeconomic distress and environmental risks.
An independent report commissioned by the G7 members in 2015 indicates that climate change aggravates existing risks and thus contributes to the fragility of states and societies. Similarly, NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept recognizes climate change as a threat multiplier that “exacerbates conflict, fragility, and geopolitical competition”, making it one of the 14 major strategic concerns highlighted in the Strategic Concept.
As climate change accelerates and natural disasters become more prevalent, climate-related security risks have never been more conspicuous. This article series explains the concept of climate change as a threat multiplier to global security, examines international case studies of climate-related instability, and explores strategic recommendations for promoting peace and security by strengthening climate resilience.
Somalia’s current calamity of drought is a vivid example of a climate-related security crisis. Struggling with the worst drought in four decades, the East African nation faces a catastrophic famine that has displaced more than 1 million people and left nearly 6 million people, or 40% of its population, at risk of starvation. Failing harvests, dying livestock, and soaring food prices have suffocated the impoverished country’s main source of income, worsening the economic distress for the 69% of its population that live below the international poverty line.
Aside from the direct impacts of loss of livelihoods, involuntary displacement and starvation, the climate-induced famine has far-reaching repercussions on security as the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab exploits the growing food crisis. The lack of access to food and water makes al-Shabaab membership a source of income for youngsters out of economic options, boosting the violent extremist group’s recruitment and expansion. Meanwhile, militants distribute aid resources and take credit for the supplies, strengthening the terrorist group’s control over and support among the Somalis.
To make matters worse, international aid groups aiming to access unreachable areas controlled by the group have often been faced with multiple hazards: the imminent threat of being kidnapped or killed, and the moral dilemma of paying off a terrorist organisation or leaving people die of starvation. Extreme climate patterns have thus created a hotbed that feeds the terrorist power and cripples the global anti-terrorist and humanitarian effort in the nation, making conflict and violent insurgencies more likely to occur.
Through the drought of Somalia, it is manifest that climate change has become a threat multiplier to global security, especially to countries and communities that are vulnerable to socioeconomic shocks. As climate impacts disproportionately affect economically marginalised populations, strengthening resilience to climate risks, including developing adaptation measures and mitigating climate-related injustice, becomes an indispensable part of an integrated security risk management and peacebuilding strategy.
Overlooked Political Risks for 2022: The Politicization of “Everything”
Pressing or emerging political and geopolitical risks that have flown under the radar, including;
Contested perspectives of climate mitigation- Climate justice, reparations, and the politicisation of climate policy as a foreign policy tool and domestic issue.
The politicisation of critical resources- Critical mineral supply chains, water security, and key commodities like semi-conductors.
The growth of state-sponsored organised crime- Cyber activity and state-endorsed opioid sales.