· 24 min read
Introduction
Every year, COP negotiations dominate headlines with pledges on emissions, finance, and adaptation. Yet in the middle of these marathon talks, one critical dimension remains on the sidelines: security. Climate change is not only an environmental challenge, it is a force multiplier for instability. Droughts fuel food crises that spark protests; floods displace millions into fragile cities; sea-level rise threatens the very sovereignty of small island states. These are not distant scenarios, they are unfolding now, reshaping geopolitics, supply chains, and economies.
The paradox is striking. Outside the COP process, security institutions are already sounding the alarm. NATO tracks climate threats to bases and operations. The U.S. Department of Defense has declared climate a national security risk. Humanitarian agencies are planning for climate-driven displacement at record scales. And yet, inside the UNFCCC system, climate security is still treated as peripheral, acknowledged in side declarations, but not woven into the core architecture of NDCs, finance, or adaptation metrics.
COP30 in Belém is a chance to correct this blind spot. For the first time, negotiators can integrate foresight, risk, and stability into the DNA of climate diplomacy. This is not about militarizing climate action; it is about de-risking development, safeguarding investments, and ensuring that adaptation and mitigation efforts hold firm under real-world stress. Without embedding climate security at the heart of the talks, COP risks becoming an exercise in accounting while the world faces cascading crises.
1. The security blind spot in the COP architecture
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was never designed to grapple with the security dimensions of climate change. Its mandate was clear and narrow: cut greenhouse gas emissions and mobilize finance for adaptation. For decades, that division of labor made sense, climate risk was seen as an environmental or economic issue, while peace and security were considered the remit of the Security Council and specialized agencies.
That neat separation no longer holds. As warming accelerates, climate impacts are colliding with existing vulnerabilities in ways that destabilize entire regions. Drought is not merely a meteorological event if it ignites food price spikes, triggers protests in already fragile states, or drives pastoralist migration that leads to violent clashes. Floods are not just humanitarian emergencies if they overwhelm governance in weak states, fuel organized crime in urban slums, or accelerate refugee flows across tense borders. Sea-level rise is not just a slow-onset hazard if it forces entire nations to contemplate relocation, raising questions of sovereignty, maritime rights, and even statehood.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed what practitioners have long seen in the field: climate hazards rarely act alone. They interact with violent conflict, governance fragility, corruption, and economic inequality, producing systemic crises rather than isolated shocks. In this reality, the distinction between “environmental” and “security” risks collapses. Climate change amplifies pre-existing tensions and acts as a threat multiplier, and ignoring this nexus risks leaving adaptation and mitigation efforts fatally incomplete.
Security institutions have begun adapting. The UN established the Climate Security Mechanism (CSM) in 2018 to provide analysis and support across peace operations, development planning, and humanitarian work. Regional bodies are following suit: the African Union has integrated climate considerations into its conflict prevention frameworks, while the OSCE has explored climate impacts on political stability in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. NATO has explicitly labeled climate change as a defining security risk for the alliance, linking it to operational readiness, infrastructure resilience, and geopolitical competition.
And yet, at the multilateral level, progress remains fragmented. The UN Security Council has been unable to fully incorporate climate into its formal mandate due to political divisions, with a landmark resolution on climate and security vetoed in 2021. That gridlock has left a gap at precisely the moment when climate security needs mainstreaming upstream, at scale. The COP process, where nearly every government on earth gathers annually to chart the path forward, is uniquely placed to fill that void.
So far, however, the COP architecture has only touched human security at the margins. The Warsaw International Mechanism’s Task Force on Displacement has focused on climate-induced migration, the Santiago Network was created to channel technical assistance on loss and damage, and COP28’s Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace represented a breakthrough by formally acknowledging the role of climate action in fragile and conflict-affected settings. These are important steps, but they remain peripheral. They are not yet stitched into the core negotiating streams, nationally determined contributions (NDCs), climate finance commitments, and the Global Stocktake, where real money, measurable metrics, and political accountability live.
The result is a structural blind spot. While humanitarian, development, and defense institutions are already integrating climate security into their planning, the UNFCCC continues to treat security as “someone else’s problem.” This omission means that billions in adaptation and mitigation finance risk being deployed without accounting for instability, leaving projects vulnerable to disruption and communities trapped in cycles of fragility. In a world where climate stress and security risk are inseparable, this gap is no longer sustainable.
2. The world outside the negotiating halls is already treating climate as a security risk
While the UNFCCC continues to treat climate security as a peripheral issue, the rest of the world is already moving decisively in this direction. Security actors, humanitarian agencies, and development banks increasingly treat climate change not as an environmental backdrop, but as a front-line risk that shapes their strategies, budgets, and operational priorities. The evidence is clear across four dimensions:
Displacement: From natural disaster to political flashpoint
By the end of 2024, more than 80 million people were living in internal displacement. While armed conflict remains the dominant driver, climate and weather-related disasters are playing an increasingly central role. Floods in South Asia, cyclones in Southern Africa, and record-breaking heat waves across the Middle East have each displaced millions in recent years. These are not temporary disruptions. When families cannot return home, they crowd into urban peripheries where housing is inadequate, public services are overstretched, and employment opportunities are scarce.
In fragile states, this kind of climate displacement quickly becomes a political flashpoint. In places like Sudan, Somalia, and northern Nigeria, displacement exacerbates ethnic tensions, fuels competition over scarce resources, and provides openings for extremist groups. What begins as a climate shock cascades into a stability crisis. For host countries and neighboring regions, large-scale population movements test governance capacity, border management, and even diplomatic relations. Displacement is no longer just a humanitarian issue, it is a security risk with regional and global consequences.
Food insecurity: Climate as a catalyst of fragility
Over 700 million people remain undernourished worldwide, and climate change is now one of the leading amplifiers of that crisis. Rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and more frequent extremes disrupt crop cycles, livestock health, and fisheries. For subsistence farmers in the Sahel, Himalayan foothills, or Andean highlands, even a single season of crop failure can push households into poverty traps.
Food insecurity, however, is not just about hunger. When bread prices spike, governments fall. From the Arab Spring uprisings to ongoing unrest in parts of Africa and Latin America, the link between food insecurity and political instability is well documented. Malnutrition also undermines long-term development, weakening labor productivity, straining health systems, and increasing susceptibility to conflict recruitment. In peace processes, food insecurity complicates negotiations by worsening grievances and deepening mistrust among groups. Climate extremes are thus not just agricultural setbacks; they are catalysts of fragility that undermine governance and peacebuilding.
Global risks: Climate as a defining systemic threat
In global risk assessments, climate change is consistently ranked among the top long-term threats to economic and political stability. Extreme weather events, critical ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss are no longer niche environmental concerns, they are recognized as defining systemic risks for the next decade. When combined with geopolitical instability, cyber threats, and economic inequality, climate shocks accelerate the risk of cascading crises.
This convergence is particularly dangerous for financial markets and global supply chains. A typhoon that shuts down ports in Southeast Asia disrupts electronics supply worldwide. A drought in North America drives up global grain prices. Wildfires in energy-producing regions send ripples through oil and gas markets. For governments and corporations alike, climate change is no longer background noise. It is a force that reshapes the global risk landscape, demanding integration into economic planning, security assessments, and resilience strategies.
Security institutions: Mainstreaming climate into national defense
Recognizing these realities, security institutions are moving faster than the climate regime itself. NATO has formally recognized climate change as a defining security challenge, analyzing its implications for military readiness, critical infrastructure, and strategic competition in regions such as the Arctic. The U.S. Department of Defense has declared climate change a national security risk, incorporating it into strategic planning, base resilience, and long-term force deployment models.
Small island states have gone further, framing climate change as an existential threat. For countries like the Maldives, Kiribati, and Tuvalu, rising seas are not a distant concern but a present danger to sovereignty and survival. Their advocacy at international forums underscores that climate change is not just an economic or environmental risk, it is about the very existence of states within the international system.
The takeaway
If militaries, humanitarian agencies, and development banks already treat climate as a core security issue, it is untenable for COP negotiations to ignore it. The disconnect between the UNFCCC process and the rest of the international system weakens the effectiveness of both. By failing to integrate security considerations into NDCs, finance frameworks, and adaptation strategies, the COP process risks designing policies and investments that collapse under the very pressures they are meant to address. Bridging this gap is no longer optional, it is essential to maintaining peace, stability, and resilience in a rapidly warming world.
3. What COP28 and COP29 achieved and what they missed
The past two COPs have demonstrated that multilateral climate negotiations can still deliver breakthroughs, even in an era of polarization and mistrust. Yet they have also revealed the structural blind spot that continues to undermine progress: climate security remains absent from the center of the negotiations.
COP28 in Dubai: Breakthroughs and missed opportunities
COP28 in Dubai will be remembered for several historic milestones. Most significantly, the Global Stocktake outcome explicitly called on Parties to “transition away from fossil fuels”, a first in the three-decade history of the UNFCCC. This language was hard fought and signaled that the era of fossil fuels as the default global energy system is finally giving way, however slowly, to an age of decarbonization.
Parties also pledged to triple renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy-efficiency improvements by 2030. If met, these commitments would deliver significant near-term emissions reductions and strengthen resilience by reducing dependence on volatile fossil fuel markets.
The long-debated Loss & Damage Fund was also operationalized at COP28, with opening-day pledges in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This represented more than just financial mobilization: it was a recognition of climate justice and the responsibility of wealthier nations to support the most vulnerable in recovering from irreversible harm.
On adaptation, COP28 Parties adopted the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which provides the scaffolding for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). This framework seeks to define indicators for resilience across ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities. Critically, this is the logical entry point for wiring in security-relevant metrics, indicators that track not only ecological resilience, but also human security outcomes such as displacement prevention, food system stability, and conflict sensitivity.
And yet, despite these advances, COP28 stopped short of fully integrating climate–security risk into the architecture of its agreements. The Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace was an important acknowledgment of the issue, but it was positioned as a side-track rather than a core negotiating element. The fundamental metrics, NDCs, finance, and adaptation targets, remained largely silent on security.
COP29 in Baku: Finance and the missing lens
If Dubai was about signaling a pivot away from fossil fuels, COP29 in Baku was about money. Negotiators finally agreed on a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance, set in the hundreds of billions annually. While the exact figure remains debated, the consensus pointed to at least $300 billion per year by 2030 in support from developed to developing countries. This was a much-needed political signal, especially for vulnerable states demanding credibility on finance.
COP29 also saw progress on sectoral initiatives. The Oil & Gas Decarbonization Charter secured commitments from major producers to cut methane emissions to near zero and eliminate routine flaring by 2030. If implemented with rigor, these measures could deliver immediate climate benefits, while also enhancing stability in petro-states where fiscal health, energy security, and social stability are closely tied to hydrocarbon markets.
But again, the negotiations fell short of embedding security into the financial frameworks. The NCQG did not establish dedicated windows for fragile or conflict-affected states. The adaptation finance discussions did not mainstream displacement planning, early warning systems, or conflict-sensitive design as required criteria. The Oil & Gas Charter acknowledged emissions, but not the governance fragility that plagues hydrocarbon-dependent states.
The Common Thread: Security Still Treated as Peripheral
Taken together, COP28 and COP29 advanced the climate agenda significantly. They moved the needle on energy transition, finance, and adaptation. But both missed the same critical point: climate–security risk is still absent from the heart of negotiations.
NDCs continue to read like climate accounting documents, with only occasional mentions of conflict, migration, or peacebuilding. Finance frameworks are structured around mitigation and adaptation categories that fail to account for fragility. Adaptation metrics, despite their promise, do not yet include indicators for displacement prevention, resource-sharing mechanisms, or conflict-sensitive governance.
Without explicit requirements, national plans will continue to make only piecemeal references to the intersection of climate and security. The result is a widening gap: the world outside the UNFCCC is already mainstreaming climate into security planning, while the COP process lags behind, risking irrelevance on one of the defining dimensions of climate risk.
4. Case studies: How climate translates into security
The concept of climate change as a “threat multiplier” can feel abstract until you examine how it manifests in real-world regions. Four cases: the Sahel, the Pacific Islands, the Arctic, and the Amazon, illustrate the diverse and urgent ways climate stress translates into security risks. Together, they demonstrate why COP negotiations can no longer afford to treat security as an afterthought.
The Sahel: Drought, food insecurity, and armed conflict
Few regions illustrate the climate–security nexus as starkly as the Sahel, a band stretching across Africa from Senegal to Sudan. Here, cycles of prolonged drought, desertification, and erratic rainfall have eroded traditional livelihoods, particularly pastoralism and subsistence farming. Herders forced to migrate south in search of water and pasture increasingly clash with farming communities already struggling with dwindling resources.
These local disputes do not remain local. Extremist groups such as Boko Haram, ISIS affiliates, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb exploit grievances rooted in scarcity and poverty. Young men who have lost their livelihoods to climate shocks become vulnerable to recruitment, finding in armed groups both a sense of purpose and a means of survival. What begins as an environmental stress spirals into cycles of violence, governance breakdown, and cross-border displacement that destabilize entire regions.
The Sahel also underscores how climate insecurity radiates outward. Massive displacement fuels migration toward North Africa and Europe, straining international relations. Conflict in one country quickly spills across porous borders, dragging neighbors into overlapping crises. What starts as drought becomes a geopolitical challenge.
COP implication: Financing resilience in the Sahel must be understood as conflict prevention. Investments in drought-resistant crops, sustainable irrigation, early warning systems, and water-sharing agreements are not just adaptation measures, they are bulwarks against extremism, instability, and mass displacement.
The Pacific Islands: Rising seas and sovereignty
For the low-lying island states of the Pacific, climate change is existential. Rising seas threaten to swallow entire nations, rendering them physically uninhabitable. Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis of displacement, this raises unprecedented legal and geopolitical questions: What happens to a nation’s sovereignty when its territory disappears? Do maritime boundaries, exclusive economic zones, and UN membership persist if a state has no land?
In countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu, discussions are already underway about relocating entire populations to other nations. For larger Pacific nations, the problem manifests in urban overcrowding and strained public services, as displaced coastal populations move into already fragile urban centers. The risks are not limited to humanitarian suffering; they extend to the international system itself, which is based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.
These countries are also at the frontlines of climate justice. Having contributed negligibly to global emissions, they face the most severe consequences. Their advocacy in international forums consistently reframes climate change as not just an environmental issue, but a matter of human rights and global stability.
COP implication: Loss and Damage finance cannot stop at compensation. It must include strategies that safeguard sovereignty, cultural continuity, and the legal standing of nations whose land may disappear. Climate security in the Pacific is as much about maintaining international order as it is about protecting vulnerable communities.
The Arctic: Melting ice and geopolitical competition
The Arctic is warming at more than four times the global average. The rapid retreat of sea ice is opening new shipping lanes, cutting weeks off transit times between Europe and Asia, and granting access to previously unreachable reserves of oil, gas, and rare earth minerals. This shift has triggered a surge in geopolitical competition. Major powers, from the United States and Russia to China and the European Union, are racing to secure influence in this strategic frontier.
At the same time, Indigenous communities who have lived in harmony with Arctic ecosystems for millennia face cultural and livelihood collapse. Melting permafrost undermines infrastructure, disrupts hunting and fishing patterns, and forces relocations. What is for some a geopolitical opportunity is, for others, an existential cultural loss.
The Arctic illustrates that climate security is not confined to fragile states. Here, the impacts heighten tensions among powerful nations, raising the risk of militarization and confrontation in a region that has historically been one of low conflict. The melting ice thus becomes a global flashpoint, destabilizing not only local communities but also the balance of great power politics.
COP implication: Integrating security foresight into climate negotiations means acknowledging that climate-driven geopolitical rivalries, in the Arctic, the South China Sea, or beyond, can undermine global cooperation at precisely the moment it is most needed.
The Amazon: Climate justice, poverty, and governance
As the host of COP30, Brazil has placed the Amazon at the center of the global climate agenda. The rainforest is a critical carbon sink and biodiversity hotspot, but it is also home to millions of people, many of whom live in poverty and bear the brunt of environmental degradation. Deforestation accelerates global warming, erodes ecosystems, and undermines water cycles across South America. Yet it also fuels inequality and weakens governance by empowering illicit economies, from illegal logging to organized crime.
Unchecked, these dynamics destabilize entire regions. Local communities lose livelihoods and turn to unsustainable activities for survival. Criminal groups exploit weak enforcement to expand influence, undermining state authority. Internationally, the Amazon’s degradation jeopardizes global climate goals and destabilizes trade, agriculture, and hydropower systems dependent on its ecological balance.
By bringing COP30 to Belém, Brazil has highlighted both the urgency and the opportunity. The Amazon is not only a site of ecological crisis but also a stage where climate justice, social equity, and governance intersect. Protecting the forest is inseparable from strengthening institutions and supporting the people who depend on it.
COP implication: COP30 offers a unique chance to connect tropical forest finance with peace and stability. Ensuring that funds reach local communities and build governance capacity, rather than being siphoned off by corruption or conflict actors, is critical to aligning forest protection with both climate and security outcomes.
The bigger picture
From the Sahel’s deserts to the Pacific’s atolls, the Arctic’s melting ice to the Amazon’s forests, these case studies reveal a consistent truth: climate change is not just an environmental challenge. It is a systemic driver of insecurity, displacement, and geopolitical tension. Each case also underscores a simple but urgent point, integrating security foresight into climate negotiations is not optional. It is the only way to ensure that adaptation and mitigation efforts remain viable in the real world.
5. A differential diagnosis of climate–security risk
Doctors don’t treat symptoms, they trace pathways. Negotiators should adopt the same discipline. Climate shocks rarely act alone; they cascade through social, economic, and political systems in predictable patterns that compound fragility. By identifying these pathways, the COP process can design interventions that address root risks rather than chasing symptoms. Three pathways stand out as particularly urgent.
Water–food–energy stress loops
Pathway: Drought reduces agricultural yields → hydropower output falters → countries import more fuel → energy and food prices spike → protests and unrest escalate → public trust erodes → governments lose legitimacy.
This loop is already visible in multiple regions. In East Africa, prolonged drought has devastated harvests, leaving millions food insecure while simultaneously cutting hydropower production in Ethiopia and Kenya. Governments are forced to increase fuel imports, straining foreign exchange reserves and raising consumer prices. In fragile political contexts, these conditions have sparked protests, sometimes violent, against both governments and international institutions.
Why it matters: When food, water, and energy systems break down together, they ignite social unrest and weaken state capacity. In contexts with pre-existing inequality or ethnic divisions, this quickly escalates into violence.
COP lever: The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) indicators should include water–food–energy nexus resilience metrics, measuring not just agricultural productivity or renewable deployment in isolation, but how these systems interact under stress. Climate finance should prioritize drought-resilient crops, diversified energy grids, and regional water-sharing frameworks. By doing so, COP would help prevent systemic breakdowns that extremists and destabilizing actors exploit.
Extreme-weather displacement
Pathway: Floods or cyclones trigger mass displacement → displaced populations settle in urban peripheries → informal settlements grow rapidly → gaps in water, sanitation, and policing widen → social tensions and crime rise → instability spreads.
This dynamic has played out in Bangladesh, Mozambique, and the Philippines, where millions displaced by cyclones and floods have migrated into already stressed urban centers. The rapid expansion of informal settlements not only strains infrastructure but also becomes fertile ground for social unrest, organized crime, and recruitment by extremist groups. For host communities, resentment builds when displaced populations compete for jobs, services, or political influence.
Why it matters: Displacement is no longer a temporary humanitarian issue. It is a long-term development and security challenge. Without forward planning, each extreme weather event becomes the seed of future instability.
COP lever: The Task Force on Displacement should be aligned directly with adaptation metrics. National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) must be required to include strategies for urban absorptive capacity, planning for housing, jobs, and services for displaced populations. Climate finance should dedicate resources to early warning systems, pre-arranged relocation support, and host community resilience to reduce the destabilizing impacts of mass displacement.
Coastal squeeze and small island risks
Pathway: Rising seas inundate coasts and saltwater intrudes into groundwater → livelihoods in fisheries and farming collapse → economic activity shrinks and debt burdens grow → out-migration accelerates → sovereignty and territorial integrity come under threat → political and social stability deteriorates.
Small island developing states (SIDS) such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives face the most dramatic version of this pathway. Entire communities are already relocating inland, and in some cases abroad, raising unprecedented questions about citizenship, maritime rights, and statehood. But “coastal squeeze” is not limited to SIDS. In large delta regions such as the Mekong and Nile, sea-level rise threatens food production, urban centers, and regional stability.
Why it matters: This pathway threatens not only human security but also the foundations of international law. Rising seas are testing the very definition of sovereignty and the stability of borders in ways the global system is unprepared for.
COP lever: The Loss and Damage framework must go beyond compensation. It should include conflict-sensitive adaptation planning for coastal and island states, financing relocation where necessary, while also supporting sovereignty strategies — such as digital governance models, legal frameworks to preserve maritime rights, and regional agreements to manage cross-border migration peacefully.
The bottom line
These three pathways, water–food–energy stress, displacement cascades, and coastal squeeze, illustrate that climate security is not an abstract risk. It is a predictable system of interactions that transforms environmental shocks into political instability. By embedding resilience metrics, displacement planning, and sovereignty strategies into its core negotiating streams, COP can begin to treat the disease, not just the symptoms.
6. The path forward: Embedding climate security at COP30
For COP to remain credible, negotiators must stop treating climate change as a narrow environmental challenge and begin recognizing it as a systemic threat multiplier. Climate impacts amplify food and water insecurity, drive forced migration, strain governance, and inflame conflict. If the COP process does not address these realities head-on, it risks designing agreements that collapse under the very pressures they are meant to manage. COP30 in Belém provides an opportunity to correct this blind spot and embed climate security into the DNA of global climate governance.
Here’s what that path forward looks like:
1. Establish a COP Climate Security Work Programme
Security must be integrated, not sidelined. A dedicated Climate Security Work Programme should be created within the UNFCCC process, with equal standing alongside mitigation, adaptation, and finance. This programme could:
- Host regular climate-security dialogues that bring together negotiators, defense planners, humanitarian leaders, and development banks.
- Commission risk assessments that track the interaction between climate hazards and fragility in specific regions.
- Ensure that NDCs and NAPs include conflict-sensitive components, with reporting guidelines that measure whether climate investments reduce instability rather than exacerbate it.
This would give climate-security issues a permanent home in the COP architecture, rather than treating them as ad hoc side discussions.
2. Embed Foresight and Systemic Risk Modeling
COP decisions must be guided by foresight tools that anticipate cascading risks. Negotiators cannot afford to only react to past disasters; they need to model how climate hazards interact with migration patterns, energy systems, food supplies, and security dynamics.
- Regional horizon-scanning mechanisms should be established, linking UNFCCC data with security intelligence and humanitarian forecasts.
- Scenario modeling should be incorporated into Global Stocktake processes, so Parties understand not only emissions trajectories but also the political and security risks of inaction.
- Countries should be encouraged to include systemic risk reporting in their national submissions, capturing how climate hazards threaten governance, social cohesion, and economic stability.
Embedding foresight into negotiations ensures that climate policy moves from firefighting to fire prevention.
3. Reframe Climate Spending as Security Investment
Current climate finance discussions emphasize mitigation and adaptation as separate silos. Yet in fragile contexts, investments in resilience are also investments in peace and stability. Reframing climate spending as security investment can unlock new political and financial momentum.
- Ministries of defense and interior should be invited to co-develop funding proposals, recognizing that resilience reduces future security costs.
- Climate finance criteria should highlight co-benefits for stability, such as preventing resource conflicts or reducing displacement pressures.
- Donor countries can justify scaling up climate finance by linking it to national security interests, demonstrating that dollars spent on resilience reduce the need for far more expensive military or humanitarian interventions later.
This framing could shift climate finance from being seen as “aid” to being understood as a strategic investment in global stability.
4. Launch a Climate-Security Innovation Fund
COP30 could catalyze the creation of a Climate-Security Innovation Fund to channel finance specifically into fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The fund would:
- Support early warning systems that connect climate data with humanitarian and security responses.
- Finance conflict-sensitive adaptation projects, ensuring that resilience investments do not worsen resource competition or inequality.
- Back displacement preparedness strategies, helping cities and states absorb climate migrants without destabilizing host communities.
By ring-fencing resources for these areas, COP30 can ensure that fragile states are not left behind in climate finance flows, and that resilience investments deliver stability dividends.
5. Deliver a COP30 Declaration on Climate Security
Declarations matter. They signal political will and set the tone for future negotiations. COP30 should deliver a Declaration on Climate Security that:
- Formally recognizes climate change as a systemic threat multiplier with implications for peace and stability.
- Commits Parties to integrating security into NDCs, NAPs, and finance flows.
- Encourages collaboration between climate negotiators and defense, development, and humanitarian actors at national and international levels.
Anchoring climate security alongside mitigation and finance would be a milestone — elevating the issue from the margins to the mainstream of climate diplomacy.
6. Foster Inclusive Governance Beyond Environment Ministries
At present, COP delegations are dominated by environment and finance ministries. Yet the impacts of climate change cut across every sector of governance. COP30 should encourage countries to bring more diverse voices to the table:
- Defense and interior ministries, to highlight security risks and resilience priorities.
- Foreign affairs ministries, to integrate climate into diplomacy and conflict prevention.
- Local governments and civil society, particularly from fragile contexts, to ensure that adaptation strategies are grounded in real-world needs.
By broadening participation, COP30 can break down the silos that have long hindered integrated action and move toward a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach.
The bottom line
Embedding climate security into COP30 is not about militarizing climate action. It is about de-risking development, ensuring that the billions mobilized for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage actually deliver resilience in the face of cascading crises.
If negotiators in Belém rise to the challenge, COP30 could mark the moment the world finally treated climate change as what it is: not only an environmental emergency, but a global security imperative.
Conclusion
COP30 in Belém is not just another waypoint on the annual climate calendar. It is a pivotal chance to correct course at a time when the stakes could not be higher. The world is no longer confronting climate change as an environmental challenge alone. We are grappling with climate as a security crisis, a force multiplier that fuels conflict, accelerates displacement, destabilizes economies, and tests the very foundations of sovereignty and international order.
If negotiators continue to treat climate security as peripheral, the COP process risks devolving into an exercise in carbon accounting while societies fracture under cascading crises. The credibility of the UNFCCC depends not only on counting emissions or pledging finance, but on whether those commitments hold when drought sparks unrest, when floods drive millions from their homes, or when rising seas redraw borders.
Climate security is not about militarizing climate action. It is about de-risking development, ensuring that every dollar of climate finance is resilient to instability, that every adaptation project strengthens peace rather than exacerbates tensions, and that mitigation efforts are not undone by the very fragilities they overlook. Safeguarding investments, protecting vulnerable populations, and maintaining stability are not add-ons; they are preconditions for effective climate action.
The choice before negotiators in Belém is stark. Either COP remains blind to the security dimensions of climate change and risks losing relevance as the world slides into instability, or it becomes the forum that finally bridges the gap, linking climate ambition with peace, stability, and resilience.
To deliver on its promise, COP30 must go beyond rhetoric. It must embed foresight, integrate security, and deliver frameworks that protect people as much as they protect the planet. Only then will the COP process evolve from pledges to resilience, and with it, provide not only a pathway to sustainability, but the very foundations of peace in a warming world.
This article is also published on PSCG Global. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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