Climate change’s ripples reach every corner of the globe, but nowhere is their geopolitical impact more pronounced than in China’s relations with the United States. This is especially the case as the undisputed security risks posed to both nations by climate change become intertwined with broader arcs of political, economic, and military competition on both sides.

For Earth Day 2023, members of the Agents of Change Youth Fellowship answered this question: What is the biggest environmental or climate change related challenge facing your community today? Their responses reveal a pattern of vulnerability facing the MENA region.

Cairo hoped that COP27 would focus on its stated agenda: climate change adaptation. Yet it was human rights concerns—such as jailed pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah’s hunger strike and rumors of restricted internet access to human rights platforms—that often stole headlines from climate policy or funding pledges. The persistence of human rights coverage demonstrated that Egypt and many other governments fail to recognize that strong governance, human rights protections, and climate change adaptation are mutually reinforcing and have overlapping policy actions.

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.

As climate change worsens, the once-unimaginable power to use technology to cool the planet—a method known as “solar geoengineering”—has quietly entered the realm of possibility. Yet the prospect of developing such planet-altering technologies has launched an intense debate: Can this be achieved responsibly? Should it be attempted at all?

“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.” 

Headlines about India’s pressing security challenges often focus on tensions with Pakistan, border friction with China, and internal interethnic violence. However, the threat of climate change is in fact the paramount security threat to India in the coming decades.