Understanding Climate Security at the Frontier of Research

Understanding Climate Security: Insights from the Frontier of Research

Climate change is reshaping the conditions under which communities survive, move, cooperate, or fall into conflict. Across fragile settings, environmental pressures intersect with political instability, displacement, inequalities, and weak institutions in ways that defy simple explanation. Making sense of these interactions is at the heart of climate–security research.

These themes emerged clearly in our recent podcast conversations with:

• Nina von Uexkull & Jürgen Scheffran (listen here)
• Tilman Brück & Antonio Scognamillo (listen here)

Their insights show how far the field has come, and where it is going.

Climate Security as a System of Interactions

A shared understanding across discussions is that climate–security risks do not stem from a single cause, but from the interaction of ecological, social, and political systems. Conflict, too, is shaped by processes that vary greatly at the subnational level. This heterogeneity is central to understanding how climate stress manifests. Differences in institutions, resource access, livelihoods, and social norms all influence how communities respond to environmental pressure. As the field advances, analyses increasingly move from broad correlations to more mechanism-focused explanations.

Data: Essential, Imperfect, and Often Missing

The field now operates with climate and environmental datasets of high spatial and temporal resolution. Remote sensing, reanalysis products, and global climate databases allow researchers to capture environmental variation with unprecedented detail.

In contrast, social and economic data remain uneven. Household surveys are infrequent, administrative data are incomplete, and many indicators related to human security, perceptions, trust, coping strategies, are inconsistently measured. As Nina von Uexkull noted, “Ideally, we want high spatial and temporal resolution over long periods… but we often lack good social science data, and even key surveys like DHS are facing funding cuts.”

Where mechanisms such as aggression, cooperation, or resilience are concerned, researchers increasingly turn to primary data collection, qualitative work, and mixed methods to understand community-level processes.

Bottom-Up and Micro-Level Perspectives

Another central insight is the growing recognition that climate–security dynamics must be examined from the bottom up. Large-scale models reveal global patterns but often miss the local processes linking climate stress to vulnerability or cooperation. As Jürgen Scheffran observed, local conditions matter. Communities respond differently to stress, and whether they move toward cooperation or conflict depends on these bottom-up interactions.

Tilman Brück added a methodological rationale: at the macro level, conflict, climate stress, and economic decline reinforce one another, creating strong endogeneity. At the micro level, however, “we have a methodological opportunity because most people are not conflict actors.” Households experience climate and conflict shocks as external hazards, enabling clearer analysis of behavioural responses. Yet even here, communities face overlapping pressures, a polycrisis environment where hazards interact and amplify one another.

Complexity, Nonlinearity, and System Dynamics

Researchers are increasingly documenting nonlinear climate–security pathways. Many shocks appear manageable until they reach critical thresholds that trigger rapid livelihood collapse or displacement. Institutions may buffer stress until resilience breaks down abruptly. As  Jürgen Scheffran put it, “We must go beyond linear correlations to understand how systems evolve under stress and how behavior changes across contexts.”

Integrating systems thinking, agent-based modelling, and nonlinear approaches with econometrics is helping explain why similar shocks lead to divergent outcomes.

Endogeneity and the Challenge of Causal Inference

Climate impacts, conflict, food insecurity, migration, and market dynamics often influence each other simultaneously, complicating causal inference. As Antonio Scognamillo highlighted, “econometrics doesn’t remove endogeneity entirely, but it gives us a toolkit to approximate causal reasoning under real-world constraints.”

He also emphasized that the pursuit of perfect causal identification should not delay action. In anticipatory contexts, robust correlations and consistent signals may carry high operational value. The challenge is balancing rigorous causal studies for long-term policy with timely evidence for prevention and crisis response.

Looking Ahead: Priorities for Future Research

1. Understand complexity, mechanisms, and interactions through interdisciplinary collaboration
   Climate–security risks emerge from interconnected systems. Progress depends on integrating econometrics, political science, climate science, sociology, anthropology, and systems modelling within a polycrisis lens.
2. Distinguish lived conditions from intervention effects
   A central priority is to distinguish between the conditions we observe in people’s lives and the specific effects generated by an intervention. Evaluating peacebuilding, anticipatory action, social protection, and climate adaptation requires isolating what interventions actually change, including intended and unintended effects. Yet rigorous evidence on these mechanisms remains surprisingly limited, underscoring the need to understand which processes interventions activate, for whom, and under what circumstances.
3. Adapt research to a world changing at accelerating speed
   Climate variability, conflict dynamics, migration patterns, and global market shocks are all evolving rapidly. Research designs and data systems must be able to capture these shifting baselines, emerging risks, and new forms of vulnerability.
4. Strengthen social peace amid institutional erosion
   Many contexts face a centrifugal pull: social cohesion is weakening, institutions are under strain, inequalities are rising. Understanding how to preserve or rebuild social peace, amid accelerating climate pressures, is one of the most urgent research and policy challenges.
5. Improve data representativeness and measurement
   More robust and representative data on perceptions, trust, cooperation, and livelihoods, linked to geospatial information, are essential, especially in fragile contexts.
6. Develop forward-looking evidence and anticipatory analysis
   Beyond explaining past dynamics, the field must generate projections and scenarios that support early action and preventive policy planning.

Conclusion

Climate–security research has moved beyond simple narratives linking climate change and conflict. Yet the complexity of real-world dynamics demands new tools, interdisciplinary collaboration, and diverse evidence sources. As climate pressures intensify and institutions weaken, understanding how people adapt and how peace can be sustained is increasingly urgent.

Our conversations with Nina von Uexkull, Jürgen Scheffran, Tilman Brück, and Antonio Scognamillo underscore both the challenges and opportunities ahead. The task now is to build the knowledge needed to help societies reduce risk, strengthen resilience, and sustain peace in a rapidly changing world.

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program (CASP) and the CGIAR Food Frontiers, Security (FFS) Science Program and Gender & Inclusion (GEI). We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/.