When the White House released the US Framework for Climate Resilience and Security in September 2024, it was an important opportunity to highlight the significant impacts of climate change on US national security, economic, and strategic interests. The Framework also emphasized the need for tailored approaches in fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable (FCV) contexts, particularly in managing and allocating resources, as well as ensuring that climate finance addresses conflict drivers.

Climate security is an essential conceptual framework to understand the global interplay of biophysical and socioeconomic forces that threaten our planet. Indeed, it is so important that new currents of science, politics, and advocacy make refining definitions a necessity.

Over the past decade, our understanding of how climate change affects conflict and security has advanced considerably. Yet, how to best address the overlapping challenges of climate change, conflict, and human security remains an open question. In an article published in World Development, I address this topic by examining how climate security discourses inform development policy and, in turn, how the structures of development enable or constrain institutional capacity to address climate security. This research identifies not only the unique barriers the development sector must overcome, but also the ways in which the most common framings of climate change (i.e., as a threat multiplier) limit the scope for policy and programming.

Whether and how climate change drives conflict has driven considerable debate over the past decade. Yet understandings of climate-conflict remain general, and in many respects, unsettled. A recent assessment of potential future directions for climate-conflict research highlights the need to go beyond generalities and deepen insight into the contextual mechanisms that link climate change to conflict. That type of knowledge requires in-depth studies that trace climate-conflict dynamics in particular places and times. In an article recently published in Climate and Development, I examine how climate change alters conflict outcomes and vulnerability in Karamoja, Uganda.  The case offers direct insight into both why the climate-conflict relationship can be so difficult to interpret and also the need to broaden conceptualizations of the climate-conflict relationship.