Scientists agree that many countries in tropical, subtropical, and arid regions should expect changes to water availability and supply from climate change. The U.S. intelligence community has likewise warned of water-driven challenges not only for countries directly affected by water changes, but indirectly to various U.S. national security interests. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the popular literature has been quite clear about prophesizing wars over water.

In 2012, the U.S. National Intelligence Council judged that within the next 10 years, water problems would be a major contributor to instability in “many” countries that are of interest to the United States. South and Southeast Asia, with its many transboundary river basins, large populations, and geopolitical flashpoints, is one among a number of hotspots where such instability could occur.

In March, the Trump Administration released a new budget proposal that would cut funding to the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development by 28 percent. The proposal also reduces funding to the United Nations for ongoing climate change efforts. At the same time, the White House is publicly considered withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, with a final decision anticipated any day. Critics both outside the administration and within have pointed to the drawbacks of these moves, but the sum of the policy changes could have an even greater impact than the individual parts.

In a recent article for New Security Beat, Colin Walch made the case that the abandonment of some communities in Mali to deal with climate change on their own has created “fertile ground” for jihadist recruitment. In a similar argument, Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger in a report for adelphi asserted last month that “large-scale environmental and climatic change contributes to creating an environment in which [non-state armed groups] can thrive and opens spaces that facilitate the pursuit of their strategies.”

In 1981, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen noted that “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” Sen was referring to the idea that hunger is not always related to food supply; even in places where ample food exists, many people do not have regular access to it. Yet, more than three decades later, research into the effects of agriculture on armed conflict is still focused much more on the former than the latter.

The epicenter of violence in the unstable country of Mali has historically been in the north, a contested region from where Touareg separatist and jihadist armed groups launched an insurgency against the state in 2012. But over the last two years, there has been a marked shift in communal and anti-state violence to the central region, and climate change may have played a role.

Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram have been dominating the headlines since 2013.  Both groups have gained international notoriety for their ruthless brutality and their rise is posing new challenges for national, regional, and international security. Such non-state armed groups (NSAG) are not a new phenomenon. Today, however, we can observe an increasingly complex landscape of violent actors with a range of hybrid organizational structures and different agendas that set them apart from “traditional” non-state actors and result in new patterns of violence.