State Fragility and Cascading Climate Risks

The world is experiencing more conflict now than since 1946. State fragility, peace and security are increasingly at the forefront of development policy, which is seeing an overall trend towards ‘securitisation’. While limited funding for climate change adaptation is well-documented, can the framing of climate change as a ‘security’ issue unlock new avenues of financial potential, or will the actors driving action create more problems by overlooking issues of power?

When service provision and institutional capacity are low, climate change can impact state fragility, although there is no consensus on what exactly state fragility means. Our K4DD reports ‘Climate, Peace and Security: Cascading Risks and Conflict Prevention Tools’ explore how state fragility is defined and addressed, while ‘Approaches to State Fragility and Climate Security’ explores the links between climate, peace and security, including issues of cascading climate risk. This has also been explored through the lens of Climate Related Fiscal Risk, including how to respond to issues relating to the stranding of assets and public financial liabilities associated with ever-increasing climate change risks.

Fragile states, powerful actors

The attribution of causality between climate change, fragility and conflict remains highly contested, yet the term ‘fragility’ has become increasingly common in development policy, especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

There are numerous indices that seek to quantify and rank countries’ fragility. These are commonly based on indicators of state monopoly on violence, legitimacy, and capacity to provide basic public services, though weightings and individual indicators vary (for example, the biannual Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI), the Constellations of State Fragility, and the Fragile States Index).

Security discourses are critiqued for their role in legitimising the role of military actors and agendas in climate adaptation. With these power dynamics in mind, systems analysis is seen to be a useful tool for planning, programming and policy response, enabling the recognition of diffuse relationships between variables, and the interconnectedness of distributed social, ecological, political, historical and economic factors which can contribute to conflict.

Causal attribution of climate change and conflict

There is no consensus over the influence of climate change on state fragility, with divisions in the literature over the causal attribution of climate change and conflict, which entails a number of assumptions about the nature of conflict and natural resource (mis)management. Evidence shows three prevailing approaches typify understandings of the relationship between climate-related conflict, peace and security issues:

1. Claiming causal linkages between environmental change, resource scarcity, and violent conflict, usually based on assumptions about population growth;
2. Emphasising indirect linkages between climate change and conflict, and the role of local institutions and behaviours; and
3. Highlighting the complexity and politics of how climate change and conflict are presented.

Cascading climate risk

There is a significant amount of research that emphasises the links between local climate, peace, security, and international geopolitics, which intersect with notions of cascading climate risk. However, there is far stronger evidence to suggest that resource abundance has a greater influence on conflict risk. For example, the race to extract and utilise newly accessible resources, including rare earth minerals, oil and gas in the Arctic as sea ice recedes and shipping routes open up. In addition to this resource (abundance) conflict and the localised socioecological impacts, the damage to the Arctic environment is expected to have widespread, transboundary cascading climate impacts. However, where these may be felt in the longer term, and where the Arctic is subject to geopolitical dispute, these risks are not currently prioritised in policy governing “green” energy transitions, which often include a reliance on rare earth minerals, though they inform significant future security threats.

Cascading climate risks are commonly understood through direct and indirect transboundary impacts on coupled systems, for example, trade and supply chains. This informs direct structural risk cascades such as infrastructural disruption and asset stranding, and indirect social risk cascades resulting from human behavioural responses to shocks, capacity to adapt and respond to (both of the public and the state), public service provision, and resultant policy (in)coherence and integration of risk responses.

Policy incoherence

Policy incoherence is highlighted in the evidence as a key challenge for bringing together climate and conflict prevention tools. There is a need to pay attention to both the short- and long-term impacts of policy and programming to meet integrated objectives, responding to both immediate needs (through peacebuilding and humanitarian interventions) and longer-term adaptive capacity (addressing climate-resilience and strengthening local institutional responses).

Prominent critics have also cautioned against common perceptions of the environment as a neutral entry point for peacebuilding. In fragile and conflict-affected settings, where the social contract of the state and the provision of key services are already fractured, consistent attention to power relations and the structural inequalities that continue to inform and shape experiences of vulnerability is necessary.

While there is no consensus on the definition of state fragility, cascading climate risks are likely to increase multifaceted vulnerabilities in conflict-affected states and beyond. Climate risk cascades won’t stop at country borders, necessitating a longer view for the policy-making governing “green” transitions. Policies that are not grounded in evidence risk contributing to future climate risk cascades.