From flooding in refugee camps in Sudan, to militants in Somalia controlling scarce water, the intersection of climate and conflict is an increasingly important challenge for humanitarians, and fast becoming a key policy area at UN climate summits.
The second Conference of the Parties in a row – last month’s COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan – held a Peace, Relief and Recovery day, separate from the official UN negotiations, with discussions on a raft of initiatives (more on that lower down).
But in Baku, the climate-conflict policy agenda wasn’t just limited to sideline discussions: A draft text of the COP29’s headline climate finance target, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), mentioned “conflict” six times, and “fragile” three times, in a bid to get more dedicated climate finance to those places.
While those terms didn’t make it into the final NCQG, the fact that they even made it to the later stages of the draft text was “a big change” and politically “huge”, Mauricio Vazquez, head of policy for Global Risks and Resilience at ODI Global (formerly the Overseas Development Institute), told The New Humanitarian in a meeting room at ODI Global’s Baku summit pavilion.
In times of war, climate change will often not be treated as a priority, said Nisreen Elsaim, a Sudanese academic focused on climate diplomacy and peacebuilding. “But ultimately climate change doesn't say, ‘wait, this nation is already having a hard time… It will happen.”
This briefing lays out the state of play in the climate-conflict policy space following COP29 and heading into 2025.
The money question
Policy discussions in Baku focused on trying to secure more climate finance – and associated programming – for fragile and conflict-affected contexts, where humanitarians are also interested in responding to climate disasters. But how much climate finance should specifically go to such settings is hotly debated.
During COP29, a grouping of countries affected by war and fragility that goes by the abbreviation the g7+ reiterated a call for $20 billion per year to come out of the climate adaptation finance pot by 2026.
But this pot is a broad climate finance stream: It also has to help pay for the countries across the global south to adjust to extreme and unpredictable weather, including their infrastructure and food and water systems, and is already severely short of funding. And as Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio pointed out in a joint g7+ letter calling for urgent action on climate financing ahead of COP29, reaching $20 billion would still be “only 60% of what is needed”.
The money is needed because “countries affected by fragility and conflict are among the most vulnerable to climate change in the world”, according to the letter from the g7+, which claims to collectively represent 300 million people.
“We make up 50% of the 25 countries most vulnerable and least ready to adapt to climate risks and… yet, on average, in 2022 they received only one quarter of the finance they need for climate adaptation,” it continued.
Other estimates say conflict-affected and fragile states received even less climate finance, especially compared to need.
While the g7+ position isn’t universally supported among the climate-vulnerable countries of the Global South – some worry it has the potential to divide the delicate coalition needed to negotiate effectively for finance in COP talks – it is gaining increasing recognition.
Climate action without governments
Worrying perhaps for critics who fear the climate-conflict agenda may already be high on noise but low on implementation, policymakers are already turning their attention to its next horizon: climate action in areas controlled by non-state armed groups or by governments sanctioned by major donors.
An increased number of people, now around 210 million – nearly half of them in Africa – live in areas controlled or contested by armed groups, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“In conflict-affected countries and fragile states, governments cannot be the only governing body for climate finance,” because their abilities are weaker and they “are normally part of the conflict”, warned Elsaim.
“I think most of the donors feel more safe to give a think tank in Germany or Sweden the money to do the policy, than to give to some NGOs in Afghanistan or in Sudan or in Congo,” she said, adding that it was important to “change the narrative and try to build the trust that the conflict-affected countries are able to actually implement and have the admin needed”.
This outlook mirrors growing discontent with state-centric solutions to conflict and violence among some peacebuilding experts. In conflicts, “normally people trust other people more” than official institutions, as Elsaim put it.
In the case of sanctioned governments, like the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, there has to be “an agreement to separate climate action or climate-related funds from politics, because it's a shared problem. It's a human problem,” said Samiullah Hamidee, Helmand-based founder of the Organisation for Social and Economic Development (OSED), an Afghan civil society-focused NGO. “Climate change doesn't recognise borders.”
Amid a wave of research on climate change and ungoverned spaces, a recent report by the International Crisis Group on Somalia found the effects of global warming played a key part in the conflict dynamics of the country’s civil war. The paper recommended the government “consider making climate resilience a central part of its efforts to engage [its adversary] al-Shabab in talks”.
How exactly climate finance and programmes should reach areas outside of state control is still very much to be worked out, but advocates are clear on one thing: the importance of prioritising working with local communities.
“I don't think it should be part of the formal [UN climate] process, because [it] normally deals with governments only,” said Elsaim, who is developing a network of civil society groups to focus on the issue. “I don't think that the same methodology of funding will necessarily work for these countries and these realities.”
In Afghanistan, “the only thing that never changed… was the communities,” said Hamidee. “And I think if you anchor [climate action]… in something stable, you are ultimately going to get a very lasting result.”
What is needed, said Elsaim, is an “alternative governance structure for climate finance to be able to arrive – you really need to study the community.”
The barriers Elsaim has encountered in trying to persuade donors to fund climate finance in these settings will also be familiar to localisation-focused humanitarians: a lack of trust driven by legal, administrative, and delivery concerns.
Succeeding and building community resilience would have “very restorative effects”, said Hamidee. “People will start believing in the humanitarian system again, because it would have responded to a problem at the right place and the right time.”
Are existing promises being kept?
The climate-conflict policy agenda shot to prominence at COP28 in 2023, when hosts United Arab Emirates held the first Peace, Relief and Recovery day. It launched the eponymous COP28 Declaration, highlighting the problems thrown up by climate change and conflict and calling for more dedicated money to fix them.
The declaration was signed by 94 governments or groups representing countries, and 43 multilateral bodies, UN agencies, and other organisations. Many signatories made commitments to adapting institutional policies, programming, or funding.
Of the declaration’s commitments, two pledges stood out:
The UK highlighted a pre-existing pledge of £150 million ($190 million) per year to “scope a separate fund of up to 15% of our [£1 billion annual] humanitarian provision to allow us to build resilience and adaptation alongside the delivery of humanitarian relief”. It put £50 million ($63.3 million) into a new Resilience and Adaptation Fund at the G20 Leaders’ Summit November 2024, as part of the UK’s entrance into the Brazil-led Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty.
The status of the remaining £100 million pledged for 2024 is unknown.
The Islamic Development Bank pledged to “provide over $1 billion in climate finance to support its member countries affected by fragility and conflict during the next three years.” It is unknown when that money will be delivered, and the bank did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The New Humanitarian.
The opaqueness of those big commitments – among others – has prompted worries about how well the Declaration’s promises are being kept.
ODI Global’s Vazquez said he was “frustrated”, and he called for better monitoring and tracking of pledges, adding that COPs otherwise risked becoming platforms for making new pronouncements rather than leading to real change.
Some institutions, like the African Development Bank and the Green Climate Fund, have been taking their commitments seriously, according to Vazquez.
But elsewhere, he said, making good on pledges is “lagging and [institutions are] hiding behind the processes and trying to see what is the minimum viable product to have good PR rather than actually do the organisational change that is required”.
Multilateral madness
To add to the uncertainty, the climate-conflict agenda splintered at COP29 into a dizzying proliferation of initiatives, each with their own, sometimes overlapping, multilateral ecosystems. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the main ones:
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The Baku Call: Described by ODI Global researchers in a message to The New Humanitarian as “a political statement of intent around the intersection of climate change, conflict, and a series of issues: peace, water and food security, and land degradation”, it was purportedly the main official initiative to follow the COP28 Declaration. The governments behind it are Azerbaijan, Egypt, Italy, Germany, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
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The Baku Hub: “A coordination platform to deliver on pledges,” according to Azerbaijan, who will host the secretariat of the Hub in Baku. ODI Global highlighted “some overlap between the Call and the Hub – both have been described as coordination or cooperative platforms; both also seek to integrate [previous COP commitments]... concrete activities have not yet been articulated.”
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The Common Principles for Effective Climate Finance and Action for Relief, Recovery and Peace: Programming guidelines written by members of the Environment, Climate, Conflict and Peace Community of Practice, which includes NGOs, officials, and other policymakers.
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Climate Security Mechanism (CSM) at the United Nations and Group of Friends on Climate and Security: The CSM provides support to the UN’s various teams. It also has links to other key climate organisations, including the Green Climate Fund – which announced a $100 million investment in Somalia earlier this year – and the UN Peacebuilding Fund (PBF), which is undergoing a review in 2025.
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The Network of Climate-vulnerable Countries Affected by Conflict and High Levels of Humanitarian Need: A new grouping of crisis-affected governments organising to advocate for their climate finance needs, particularly to put pressure on multilateral development banks, which are also undergoing wide-ranging reform outside the COP process. The Network is likely to target regional development banks because “a big chunk of their balance sheet and shareholders are conflict-affected countries”, said Vazquez. Unlike the World Bank, which some perceive as stalling on this agenda, regional banks “need to service” conflict-affected countries – “it's their mandate,” said Vazquez. So far, the Network’s members include Burundi, Chad, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Timor-Leste, and Yemen – some of whom are also part of the g7+.
Other institutions in the international climate architecture are also likely to become involved in the climate-conflict agenda as it gathers pace. For instance, humanitarian agencies like OCHA are encouraging the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage to work in fragile and conflict-affected areas.
Despite the wide range of activities and initiatives on show during COP29’s Peace, Relief and Recovery day, much of what took place was a “distraction” and a “missed opportunity”, according to Vazquez. “They took a lot of energy and attention from actually focusing on doing things.”
Additional reporting by Menducha Addae.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
