When we look at climate-related insecurity, it’s usually in the context of poorer parts of the planet. And there’s generally good reason for that focus. Regions such as the Sahel and the Middle East are where the most––and worst––conflict of this nature plays out. And, for the most part, poorer countries are also the places least equipped to manage climate impacts and their effects on stability.

But lost, it has sometimes seemed, with that limited geographic scope is an intimate grasp of climate change’s increasing impact on insecurity in richer parts of the world. As these stresses and governance failures intensify at “home” too, it’s well past time to examine our own acute vulnerabilities.

In the first assessment of climate’s contribution to crime and political instability in Europe, I have tried to do just that in collaboration with Sabrina Kaschowitz—a researcher at the FES Regional Office for International Cooperation. Based on considerable new on-the-ground research, as well as a thorough examination of local media reports, A Distant Problem No Longer explores some of the many manifestations of related insecurity across the continent.

Rural Crime Rising in Step with Rural Discontent

The first section of our report looks at largely low-level rural crime, including water theft, theft of cash crops, and crimes of opportunity amid more extreme weather events. We found that almost every one of these offenses was increasing in line with intensifying climate impacts in rural areas, which are particularly powerful due to residents’ dependence on climate-vulnerable agriculture––and the sense of abandonment that many feel in their depopulating, under-serviced communities.

Our assessment takes an in-depth look at Greece’s agricultural heartland, where the use of dangerous––and, crucially, much cheaper––illicit pesticides and fertilizers has surged following devastating floods in 2023 which pitched farmers deep into debt. With less cash on hand, fewer farmers are willing or able to pay for tried and tested products. Criminal organizations have noted the opportunity, providing sometimes-toxic alternatives from other parts of the world.

Water Tensions Rising Within and Between Countries

Rising water tensions, a fixture of many politically fragile regions, are at the center of the second part of our report. Across Europe, tensions over water access are increasing interpersonal violence, troubles between water consumers (i.e. agriculture vs tourism), and friction between urban areas and rural areas, among other cleavages. Though there’s seemingly minimal chance of an inter-state conflict connected to water on the continent for the foreseeable future, it’s an emerging bone of contention between European nation states as well.

For instance, Greece and Bulgaria momentarily struggled to renew a water-sharing agreement earlier this year, with populist politicians in the latter country accusing their government of ‘selling out.’ Many European countries have little history of negotiating over water––and so are apt to trip over one another’s sensitivities, while plenty of others may feel compelled by unrelated domestic political considerations to opt for ‘muscular’ rhetoric over transboundary rivers.

Examining the experience of Sicily brought much of this dynamic home. In parched communities across the island, we found that years of drought and decades of water mismanagement have left many people divided among themselves, embittered with neighboring municipalities, and furious at authorities as thirst intensifies. Some of this friction came to a head in late 2024 when officials and residents of Troina, a hilltop town alongside a reservoir that supplies much of central Sicily, stole into the dam’s valve room and severed all water connections but their own. The water levels were simply too low to sustain other communities, they maintained.

Opportunists Driving Fake News to Deepen Cleavages

The final section builds on the previous findings in our report. It looks, in brief, at the impact of climate change on Europe’s social fabric, with a particular emphasis on how foreign and domestic actors are weaponizing climate to sow confusion and further undermine state legitimacy. Russia, China, and a range of homegrown extremist forces have been quick to appreciate the ease with which these crises might be harnessed to sabotage the standing of mainstream parties. For example, online disinformation largely linked to Russian accounts spiked by up to 300% during intense flooding in central Europe in 2024.

Our conclusions are founded upon more than broad observations. The examples that we discuss, which range from southwest Germany to post-flood Valencia, are but a small sample of the kinds of instrumentalized chaos that may await the continent in a warmer world.

The Knowledge Gap

A Distant Problem No Longer was conceived, in part, as a bid to address a significant hole in the literature. While compiling this report, we found it notable, even jarring, how little work had previously been done on this subject in Europe.

More than that, though, our hope is that the report might help get climate security back on the agenda of the EU and many of its Member States for more or less the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By illustrating that climate change is already fueling violence on the continent, rather than just ‘over there,’ the report is designed to ‘localize’ the issue at a time of increasing European insularity.

To that end, our recommendations that European institutions plan, coordinate and act upon these issues try to straddle the often-fine line between the necessary and the politically and economically feasible. Launched on the sidelines of last week’s Berlin Climate and Security Conference, the early reception has been encouraging.

Our report is very broad and heavily anecdotal, but there are good reasons for both approaches. First, A Distant Problem No Longer is intended as much more of a preliminary overview than a comprehensive accounting of all of climate’s contributions to European insecurity. Indeed, the hope is that it will form a basis for further, much deeper work on this topic.

Secondly, our report had relatively few alternative data points to draw from. Climate security risks are hard to identify everywhere in the world (wrapped up, as they almost always are, with other drivers of instability). They might be extra difficult to parse in Europe for reasons including the largely low-level nature of most climate-related offenses and the corresponding disincentive to explore their underlying causes. As a consequence both of that limitation, and of a desire to put together an easily comprehensible and hopefully compelling work, we’ve settled on a series of snapshots of “climate-insecurity-in-action.”