The much-needed transition to a zero carbon, green economy offers opportunities to contribute to peace, but only if the conflict risks of transition are understood and managed to produce a just and peaceful transition. That means minimizing “backdraft”—the unintended negative impacts of transition that are a key obstacle to that goal.

Earlier this year, the IPPC published yet another report underscoring the fact that rapid climate action is needed to limit global warming and avoid further irreversible, devasting environmental impacts. Over the next decade, the report calls for urgent, unprecedented social and economic transitions to reduce emissions and enable climate resilient development for vulnerable people.

A key pillar of the UNFCCC was a commitment by industrialized nations to cover the incremental cost of climate change mitigation for developing countries. As part of this pledge, they agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020 and maintain that level of funding up to 2025. While there are questions on whether this target has been met, climate finance has undeniably become one of the largest channels of wealth redistribution from developed to developing countries.

In an increasingly unpredictable world of pandemics, conflict, and disasters, climate change is often at the center of conversations about the instability of global affairs. From California wildfires to droughts across East Africa, the role of climate cannot be ignored in any analysis of global unpredictability. And citizens around the world know it. Growing global public support for governments to aggressively act on climate change has led to an increase in policy action on climate issues.

The massive floods, heat waves, raging wildfires, and devastating droughts of 2021 brought the present reality of climate change’s catastrophic impacts on people and ecosystems home to our doorsteps.

COP26 came to a close in Glasgow this weekend, with activists and developing country governments disappointed in the global ambition as laid out in the final agreement text. On the one hand, the final document reflects commitments to cut on methane, doubling of monetary compensation for adaptation measures, and the need for cooperation between the United States and China—the two largest carbon emitters—to set out a roadmap to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, developing countries criticized rich countries for evading the language of loss and damage—compensation that recognizes that the countries most affected by climate change have contributed the least to planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Climate change is a threat multiplier; it is an underlying and exacerbating factor that makes things worse at a level that all actors, including security actors, need to pay attention to, said Geoff Dabelko, Professor and Associate Dean at the George V. Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University and Senior Advisor to the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. He spoke in a recent interview about climate change and security as part of CimpaticoTV’s Climate Adaptation Channel.

In the Global South, natural resource conflict has largely been considered a consequence of poor governance and weak political institutions. The international community’s solution? Build “green” governance capacity as a way to mitigate violent conflict and improve environmental outcomes. For the international development community, this has meant introducing laws, policies, and practices based on international standards of best practice, and training local regulators to adhere to those standards.