“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. 

As the humanitarian community responds to the Covid-19 pandemic, other long-term pressing priorities persist and require innovative solutions. The dry zone which extends across Central America encompassing parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua and a 10-year drought has left 1.4 million people in urgent need of food assistance. The impact of climate change, which includes extreme drought, poses an ever-increasing risk across Central America and contributes not only to food insecurity but also to migration issues that have plagued the continent in recent years.

The number of migrants traveling from Central American countries (particularly El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) destined for the United States has rapidly increased in recent years. In 2018, 87 percent of Central American immigrants came from those three countries, which account for most of the migrants at the U.S. southern border. Their numbers will likely only increase considering the Trump administration’s plan to cut around $700 million in aid to these three countries. The absence of aid will reduce countries’ ability to confront the violence, crime, and government instability within their borders—which act as some of the more notorious drivers of the movement north.

After four months of political unrest and more than 250 deaths, the calls for Nicaragua’s embattled president Daniel Ortega to step down are escalating. One of political demography’s most robust statistical findings tells us that countries where an authoritarian government rules a youthful population, any change in regime typically yields an autocracy or at best, a partial democracy. Only very rarely has a liberal democracy emerged immediately after a rebellion in a youthful country (one with a population with a median age under 26 years). Given this, if Ortega is ousted from office, what type of leader should foreign affairs analysts expect to replace him?

In the first half of last year, 26,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended by U.S. law enforcement trying to cross the southern border. Most came from Central American states like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Such displacement is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of migration in the region. Many more are moving from rural to urban areas and into neighboring countries seeking opportunity and fleeing violence.

“Climate work is practical, common-sense, good development,” said Carrie Thompson, deputy assistant administrator at the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education, and Environment at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “It’s prevention, and we all know that preventative medicine is the best medicine.”

The government of El Salvador took a truly extraordinary step in an attempt to control the rapidly spreading Zika virus last week by asking its citizens to avoid getting pregnant from now until 2018. Yes, you read that right.