On the night of April 14, 2014, a group of militants attacked the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria. They kidnapped 276 female students, ranging from ages 15 to 19 years. An armed group called Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.

“One of the challenges of responding to climate risks is that climate’s impacts and how those impacts interact with existing systems on the ground are so varied and specific to a given place,” said Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program, at a recent PeaceCon conference panel on climate change, violence, and migration in Central America. “But there is also an opportunity in how we respond to develop more agile, just, and sustaining programs and policies that go beyond a singular focus on responding to climate change and instead build the overall resilience of communities.” 

“There is a growing recognition that climate change is going to affect security and it’s increasingly shaping peoples’ decisions about where to move, where to live, and how to plan their futures, but how migration, climate, and insecurity connect and drive risks is not always as clear cut as the headlines would have us believe,” said Cynthia Brady, Global Fellow and Senior Advisor with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, at last month’s International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. The roundtable discussion, “Environmental Change, Migration, and Peace in Central America’s Northern Triangle” drew on the Wilson Center’s framework to improve predictive capabilities for security risks posed by a changing climate, developed in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Applying the framework to the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—panelists discussed complex challenges and proactive approaches for building climate resilience and adaptive capacity. 

Thirty-four years ago, Burkina Faso’s president, Thomas Sankara, was murdered. Only now are his alleged assassins on trial. Had he survived, the arid, landlocked country of more than 20 million people might well have taken a far different path to development.

According to a recent poll, young people are deeply concerned about the world they will inherit, want to be more engaged in meeting the development needs of their communities, and are helping to lead democracy or social justice protests in their countries. At the same time, new research shows a large decline in trust and admiration for democratic governance. According to Freedom House, for the first time in decades, authoritarian leaning regimes outnumber democratic leaning ones, with a majority of the world’s population now living in authoritarian leaning countries.

Secretary of State Blinken is right to focus on climate change and democracy during his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. At the top of his and everyone else’s mind should be the question: will democratic backsliding in countries like Benin make it more difficult to deal with the effects of climate change? Even more worrisome: will it worsen conflict hotspots, such as the West African Sahel, where climate change is playing a role? All eyes should be on coastal West Africa as countries such as Benin deal with violent insecurity and climate pressure creeping down from the Sahel. My ongoing research in Benin suggests that the country’s democratic local institutions, despite all their faults, are the country’s best defense against the breakdown in rural governance that has befallen Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso. 

“The world’s least resilient countries—when faced with ecological stress—are more likely to face civil unrest, political instability, social fragmentation, and economic collapse,” said Cynthia Brady, ECSP Global Fellow and Senior Advisor, at an event hosted by the Alliance for Peacebuilding. These “vulnerabilities are clearly mutually reinforcing, but some of the solutions are mutually reinforcing too,” said Brady. The critical challenge now is to bridge the gap between traditionally siloed communities of practice in conflict prevention and conservation.