Multilateralism is under threat, as many global powers increasingly choose to center their security priorities around defense and economic competition over international cooperation. This shift toward short-term national interests risks undermining progress on joint challenges, including climate change, peace and justice. What will be lost if the climate security agenda becomes a battlefield of competing interests? How can peacebuilding and development actors respond?

While originally rooted in hard security and defense-driven perspectives, the international climate security agenda has expanded over the past decade. Greater considerations of the ways in which climate risks impact on peacebuilding, justice and human security are prominent additions.  

Yet these hard-won gains risk being lost if international climate governance is no longer supported by strong multilateral institutions that are able to hold governments accountable. Since achieving global climate resilience depends on effective, cooperative responses, any loss of momentum diminishes the genuinely multilateral responses so critical to building it. Conflict-affected countries may lose the peace dividend of climate action. Developing countries where critical minerals are heavily concentrated may not benefit from the race for these resources.

Indeed, if peace and justice values are sidelined or stymied in governance, efforts to combat climate change may actually contribute to instability and inequality.

A Weakened Environment for Collective Security

Years of effort by coalitions of civil society, NGOs and some governments led to a formal recognition of the links between climate change, conflict and peace in COP28’s declaration on Relief, Recovery and Peace. Two events at COP29 further catalyzed momentum the following year: a Peace, Relief and Recovery day, and the Baku Call for greater “peace-sensitive climate action.”

The cooperative approach may now be running out of road, however. The ‘peace pillar’ was notably absent from COP30 in Brazil. And at the last Berlin Climate and Security Conference, where defense readiness, energy security and private sector investment topped the agenda, the EU’s climate chief stated emphatically that “the way for the EU, for competitiveness, for security is the clean transition”.

If the center of gravity in climate security is moving toward economic, trade and defense interests, the implications for conflict prevention are concerning. Fragile and conflict-affected communities already bear a double burden, receiving a smaller amount of international finance despite being the most vulnerable to climate shocks. In 2025, global donor investment in peacebuilding was projected to decrease by 34% compared to the 2021-2023 average.

This reduction is taking place at a time when state-based armed conflict has reached the highest levels in over seven decades, and global military spending is rising. By the end of 2025, EU member states are projected to have spent €381 billion on their militaries, while the US House approved a record $900 billion defense budget, cementing a global trend where states prioritize individual military power over cooperative stabilization efforts. 

Strategic Interests Take Over the Climate Agenda

The security spending surge is reframing many countries’ climate response from a matter of collective responsibility to a strategic objective. In the face of Chinese dominance over critical minerals and future technology, the EU has rapidly increased investments and agreements to safeguard access and control. Defense experts have urged NATO members to treat investments in low-carbon energy as critical infrastructure development, a core element of national and collective security.

Prioritizing short-term national security interests over long-term cooperative approaches not only risks the gains made in recent years on inclusive, peace-positive climate action. It also portends the loss of the capacity for collective action that is necessary to effectively address the climate crisis, and could generate worse outcomes for fragile, conflict-affected and developing states.

Firstly, without an explicit nexus approach, conflict-affected communities may miss out on peace dividends afforded by climate initiatives. From trust-building among ethnically diverse youth in Kosovo, to the Great Green Wall project supporting land restoration and inclusive livelihoods in the Sahel, a number of environmental peacebuilding initiatives demonstrate climate action’s contributions to peace.

Secondly, a global scramble for critical resource supplies can destabilize economies, which will drive new dependencies, conflict and human rights violations in many places. The UN’s trade body warns that despite the fact that fragile, conflict-affected and developing countries hold a significant portion of the world’s reserves, these nations will derive little value from the critical mineral demand without local investments in processing and manufacturing capacity.

In Myanmar, for instance, rare earth mining has exploded since the 2021 military coup. This activity now determines the frontlines of a violent conflict between the military regime and the armed resistance groups vying for control over the lucrative resource. The result is that local communities are exposed to catastrophic environmental and social degradation.

Finally, as security pressures increase, states prioritize individual gains over cooperative approaches to tackling shared global challenges. The OECD reported an overall slowdown in climate action in 2024, reflecting a critical “loss of momentum.”

Framing climate security strictly through national defense and strategic competition risks hollowing out the progress that had been made in connecting climate response to peacebuilding ambitions. It also shrinks the space for the genuinely multilateral responses which are critical to building global climate resilience.

Peace-Positive Climate Action As Multilateralism Erodes

In a context of heightened geopolitical rivalry, calls for climate action to be conflict sensitive and peace-positive may not find many supporters. Yet, it is crucial for achieving the kind of resilience needed for stable and sustainable growth.

More than ever, peace-positive and conflict-sensitive criteria must be embedded into climate governance, finance and reporting, and particularly in spaces where these policies intersect with trade, defense and industrial strategy. 

This will require more effective systems of international data collection and knowledge sharing. From relevant policy databases to political protest trackers and conflict monitoring tools, the global evidence base must become more interlinked, so that it better represents the complex ways in which national climate policies are contributing to social unrest, labor exploitation or violent competition.

At a national level, climate and energy targets should be assessed not only against emissions reductions or supply-chain resilience, but also on their global social impacts. Technical expertise and response capacity that can engage climate change and security challenges holistically must be cultivated and supported to bridge policy silos, from trade, industrial and defense portfolios to humanitarian, development and foreign affairs. A culture shift in governments is also needed to ensure that conflict sensitivity reviews carry equal weight to economic and security risk analyses.

Peace-positive climate action will not result from state-focused policy approaches. Without accountability measures, states will continue to externalize the social and security costs of their green transitions while claiming climate leadership. True progress can be expected only if governments are compelled politically, financially and reputationally to account for the harm their climate strategies produce beyond their borders.