Caribbean countries have long suffered from the destructive impacts of natural hazards. Climate change is projected to make them worse. Its impacts are adding to population and urbanisation pressures, limited land, food, water and energy resources, resulting in environmental degradation, rising unemployment, inequality and poverty. This risk brief identifies three critical pathways that link climate change to fragility in the Caribbean.

With the Paris Agreement, countries committed to collectively limit global warming to well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels. However, there is currently no commonly agreed effort-sharing mechanism to determine the contribution of each country. The Pledged Warming Map provides an assessment of global warming when all countries follow the ambition of a given one, reconciling the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement with its top-down warming threshold.

The latest issue of the European Security and Defence Union Journal looks into the security challenges brought by climate-related impacts. The issue addresses climate change as a risk multiplier in fragile contexts. Environmental stress, the weaponization of water, monitoring technologies and the role of armed forces are some of the topics.

Access it here.

This paper maps out the relevance of the SDGs to foreign policy. Taking the six SDGs under review at the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) in 2018 as entry points, we analyse how progress on specific SDGs may support or undermine progress on foreign policy priorities, especially SDG 16: peace.