Climate change is a global threat to national as well as human security. The resulting risks for sustainable economic development, peace, and livelihoods are increasingly recognized as an important factor in political decision making.
The WorldRiskReport 2015 highlights the urgency of addressing climate change and the compound risk factors it is linked to. These risks have the potential to turn a natural hazard such as drought or cyclone into a disaster. If societies do not mitigate and adapt to climate change, more extreme and more frequent natural hazard events in the future will further increase risks across the globe.
The focus of the 2015 report is the relationship between disaster risk and food (in-)security. “While there is no ‘statistical link’, both reinforce each other”, Peter Mucke, Managing Director of Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft (Alliance Development Works) and initiator of the report, emphasized during the report launch. People are more exposed to natural hazards when food insecurity induces them to migrate to new areas or countries. In order to reduce disaster risk and enhance resilience, agricultural, climate and development policies need to be interlinked, the authors of the report sustain.
The WorldRiskReport is published yearly by Alliance Development Works in collaboration with the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS). It applies the World Risk Index, a composite tool which accounts for both the exposure of countries to natural hazards, as well as for their specific social, economic and ecological conditions. Unstable political and institutional structures, for instance in (post-)conflict settings, impact a country’s vulnerability to natural hazards. Jörn Birkmann, co-author of the WorldRiskReport, highlighted that the issues of governance as well as military conflict influence a country’s capacities for adaptation and disaster risk reduction. The importance of considering state fragility was recently recognized by the G7 Foreign Ministers. In 2015 they committed to making resilience a central foreign policy priority, based on the recommendations of the report “A New Climate For Peace”.
Integrating international efforts in the areas of climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and conflict prevention is a critical path to pursue. The year 2015 has already been marked by several high-profile conferences on these issues – in Sendai, Addis Ababa, and New York, with important new agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals. The outcomes of these meetings, as well as of the upcoming climate conference in Paris, need to be followed up by concrete actions.
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Solutions to the current COVID-19 crisis need to be aligned to those of the climate crisis for a global transformation towards more sustainability, resilience, equity, and justice. Climate diplomacy has the tools to achieve these objectives simultaneously.
In the central Sahel, states are mobilising to combat the impact of climate change as way of reducing conflict. But to respond suitably to growing insecurity, it is important to look beyond a simplistic equation linking global warming and resource scarcity to outbreaks of violence.
Between food losses and critical shortages, COVID-19 and climate change are testing a food system that critics say has lost its resilience to crises.