Climate impacts are growing more frequent and severe as global temperatures rise. Weather-related disasters have seen a five-fold increase over the past half-century. In many cases, these calamities are already testing the adaptation capabilities of vulnerable communities across the world. If emissions follow the trajectory set by current country targets, the chance of temporarily overshooting the 1.5 °C target in the next five years is 48 percent.

This failure would have implications for the global economy and international security. Yet despite the fact that climate change shapes geopolitics, climate risk itself has rarely been featured in international geopolitics and diplomacy.

Which nations are most at risk of catastrophic outcomes due to intensifying ecological threats? The third edition of the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)’s Ecological Threat Report (ETR)—released on October 20, 2022— applies a lens of societal resilience to predict the hotspots most likely to suffer from instability and conflict in the future, and provides projections of ongoing trends to 2050.

We need minerals to build the solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies that will decarbonize our economies—and we need a lot of them. The World Bank estimates that demand for lithium, cobalt, and graphite could jump by as much as 500 percent by 2050. Yet mining for these resources has had a fraught history, and it continues to be associated with a hefty list of human rights and conflict risks, including  violence, child labor, poor working conditions, land rights abuses, environmental damage and pollution, and a lack of community participation.

2022 was a summer of climate extremes across the globe. Multiple heat events simmered across China and Europe, also in regions that are not “supposed to be this hot,” such as the United Kingdom. The western United States also baked in unusual heat, but perhaps the most damaging episode of the season occurred when extreme precipitation caused major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. This untimely deluge exacerbated a pre-existing water infrastructure crisis in that city, leaving its 150,000, predominately black, residents without access to safe water for days. 

Diplomacy between cities, counties, states and regions is critical to ensuring that diplomatic doors between countries are left open throughout changing political cycles at the national level. Such efforts are more important now than ever, especially for the climate crisis. As we head into COP27 with the message “from ambition to implementation,” cities have a critical role to play as the venues where many of the policies discussed at international climate negotiations will play out.

This article, by Sharon Guynup, originally appeared on Mongabay.

In August, I traveled aboard the icebreaker Kinfish to the Svalbard archipelago, north of the Arctic Circle. Invited to the bridge as we cruised fjords near the 80^th parallel, I was transfixed by towering blue glacier walls, but was confused by the map displayed on one of the ship’s screens. It showed our vessel sailing across a non-navigable frozen sheet.