What if water – a resource that is at the centre of many local and regional conflicts – could be utilised for fostering peace? It is this potential that the ‘Water, Peace and Security Partnership’ is seeking to leverage. Dr. Susanne Schmeier, Senior Lecturer at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education of the UNESCO, explains that the partnership has emerged from a call for action sent out at the Planetary Security Conference in 2017, to which governments and organisations responded by creating a set of tools for assessing and responding to water-related security risks.

Small island developing states (SIDS) in the Caribbean already struggle to cope with rampant population growth in its urban centers, and the scarcity of living spaces and resources that comes with it. In this interview, Amilcar Kraudie, Emergency Manager for Latin America at Christian Aid, stresses that climate change has been aggravating the already violent pattern of natural disasters, making them even more severe and destructive, threatening the region's security and development efforts.

In Iraq, climate shocks are deeply intertwined with the country's crumbling security. As a journalist, Peter Schwartzstein could observe how the lack of livelihood options in Iraq's barren, drought-stricken rural landscapes has pushed young men to join terrorist organizations as a means of survival. For him, the sound management of its increasingly scarce waters and more efficient agricultural practices that can cope with a changing climate cannot come soon enough for Iraq.

While translating climate action into reality still poses a challenge for the international community, the security nexus approach might offer a solution. In this interview, Kishan Khoday, Team Leader for Climate Change, DRR and Resilience in the Arab Region for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), explains how the initiative ‘SDG Climate Facility’ is betting on integrative measures to addresses security in crisis countries by tackling the climate and environmental SDGs.