Advocates for climate action in fragile and conflict-affected states saw out the COP29 summit by calling for a greater focus on areas controlled by non-state armed groups. A year on, the climate, peace, and security agenda is stuttering as COP30 hosts Brazil have placed the focus elsewhere, but the problem isn’t going away.
Around 204 million people live in territories controlled by non-state armed groups, according to a 2025 Red Cross estimate (down from 210 million in 2024). Climate change is still going to hit them, and experts are urgently flagging the lack of government capacities to respond in these areas.
The rub is that the UN climate process works through state engagement, rather than through engagement with the groups the states are fighting. In places like Nigeria’s Borno State or rural Colombia, for example, such groups can control large territories that are being gravely impacted by the climate crisis.
For humanitarians and policymakers, the problem is the confluence of two major and seemingly intractable crises, present in different forms around the world. Climate impacts – only set to increase – cause particular damage in places without sufficient governance to prepare, respond, and recover from disasters.
Meanwhile, non-state armed groups – organisations of many different stripes with a capacity for violence – have become a permanent presence in conflicts that have expanded and become more entrenched in recent years. The Red Cross has estimated there are “more than 380 armed groups of humanitarian concern globally” and “non-state armed groups…now constitute 36% of all tracked groups, representing the highest proportion in the survey’s history”.
Africa is of particular concern: The continent not only deals with among the harshest impacts of climate change, but it is also “the fulcrum of armed group activity globally”, according to the Red Cross, whose research says Africa is home to 41% of all armed groups of humanitarian concern (158) and 111 million people living under their full or partial control.
In the coming years, armed groups are likely to become an ever more direct problem for climate policymakers (who are not conflict specialists), especially if, as some researchers have suggested, they continue to take over key energy resources – both fossil fuels and critical minerals.
From ethnic revolutionary movements in Myanmar to jihadists in the Sahel to narcocartels in Mexico, armed groups take a range of forms, while the experts dealing with them tend to work in a separate world from climate policy. Calls are growing for all that to change.
To help unpack this intersection, The New Humanitarian spoke with Kheira Tarif, a researcher in the Climate Change and Risk Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Additions in parentheses below were added by The New Humanitarian to provide more context on certain points.
The New Humanitarian: What does climate change have to do with non-state armed groups?
Kheira Tarif: There are four main, interconnected factors:
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Climate change can worsen people's livelihoods. Smallholder farmers, fishing, and rural communities who rely on the availability of common resources like pastures and water have all been affected by changing seasonal patterns, extreme weather, droughts, and floods. This affects people's resilience, as their economic security is impacted and limits their choices, making them more vulnerable to armed group recruitment.
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Climate change can displace people or force them into making different migration choices. This can lead to vulnerability, recruitment, or conflicts, like between pastoralists and farmers in the Sahel. (Others have suggested increased climate migration could increase the demand for human smuggling, controlled by armed groups.)
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Climate change can affect the tactics and behaviour of armed groups. This can happen both as a result of sudden onset climate disasters, but also in the context of pressures on livelihoods.
- Elites can exploit the effects of climate change in ways that increase inequalities. This can underlie, influence, and exacerbate a lot of the other dynamics. For instance, a lack of governance or state response to a climate disaster which leaves an opening for an armed group, or occupying the land of people displaced by a climate disaster.
There’s an important need for nuanced analysis, because you can't really separate out those things. It's not necessarily useful to say that climate change is the thing that is changing conflict dynamics – but it is one of the things. And if climate change affects conflict dynamics, leaving it out of the analysis means that you have an incomplete conflict analysis, and that's not going to be helpful.
The New Humanitarian: Farmer-herder conflicts are well studied. But are there any other examples of how climate migration and armed groups interact?
Tarif: In Honduras, declining coffee harvests – caused partly by a climate-related fungal infection in the beans – contributed to young men migrating to cities like Tegucigalpa. There, they were vulnerable to recruitment by gangs, who threatened them, or offered an alternative source of income. These gangs cause secondary displacement too, having been cited by many people as reasons why they have decided to flee to the US.
There's also been research from Somalia, which is looking more at how people who have been displaced by climate impacts into camps have been targeted by al-Shabab, an extremist group, for recruitment.
In Mali, climate displacement led women to forage in forests, where they were harassed by armed state conservation rangers, hired to protect the area’s biodiversity. There was no involvement of communities for how biodiversity could be protected, causing a perception the state was attacking them for using what they believed were common resources. This conflict was then capitalised on by armed groups, who offered people a way to fight back against an injustice, recruiting young men into their operations against the Malian government.
There’s also an interesting flipside: Demobilising armed groups requires livelihoods for would-be former members. Reintegration into farming or fisheries or pastoralism just isn't going to be the same because of climate change, and potentially is challenging for people who want to leave armed groups and to develop a civilian life.
The New Humanitarian: How does climate change affect the behaviour of armed groups?
Tarif: A key way is positioning themselves as alternative service providers. When governments have not responded properly to disasters, armed groups have offered humanitarian assistance and support to communities. That’s improved their image and presented them as an alternative to the government in areas where people don't have a very strong relationship with state institutions.
For example, after flooding in Pakistan, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) militant group stepped in to provide people with humanitarian aid because the Pakistani government had not. There have been similar stories from Somalia, where al-Shabab had provided people with humanitarian assistance during drought when the government had failed to do so.
(Armed groups have also harmed communities under their control during climate disasters: Al-Shabab also destroyed water infrastructure during Somalia’s 2020-2023 drought. Other research Tarif flagged showed that climate disasters can also weaken non-state armed groups.)
Armed groups have also played an environmental protection and governance role – though sometimes for self-interested reasons: For example, bans on deforestation could be motivated by a desire for cover. The FARC in Colombia were very strict about not destroying the forest resources, they presented it as being about credentials, as part of the community. Deforestation skyrocketed after the peace agreement.
Perhaps the same is true of al-Shabab in Somalia. It's very possible that they want to preserve the natural environment in the areas that they control so that farming will be more successful and they'll have better income. But it's also very possible that they want to hide from drones.
(Researchers have also pointed to the emphasis on environmental governance by other armed groups, particularly in Myanmar and Kurdish-controlled regions.)
The New Humanitarian: Is climate change the only reason for the growth of armed groups in conflict?
Tarif: Climate change intensifies and exacerbates some existing conflict dynamics. The root causes are often related to the political economy of natural resource management, and the strength or relative weakness of the institutions that are supposed to regulate fair access to those resources.
It's a really complex picture, and we're not arguing that climate change is going to automatically increase recruitment into armed groups because people are naturally inclined to do that when it's hotter.
What we're trying to point to is that the effects of climate change touch so many different elements of human life – especially in societies where people still strongly rely on access to natural resources to support their livelihoods and local economies – that it is going to have an impact on people's financial resilience, relationship to the state, relationships to each other, and their ability to withstand impacts without using desperate measures to protect themselves and their families.
But climate change doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a very political process, really, and it is actually impacting the existing economic, social, and cultural dynamics that are already at play, and that are already a source of inequality and marginalisation and conflict.
The New Humanitarian: So is climate change a threat multiplier or new conflict dynamic?
Tarif: I wouldn't say that climate change is a threat multiplier, because I think it doesn't just multiply threats – it also creates new ones.
It changes things in very fundamental ways, such as the concept of tipping points, where entire ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest, are beyond repair. That would be a new dynamic that climate change is introducing.
But climate change doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a very political process, really, and it is actually impacting the existing economic, social, and cultural dynamics that are already at play, and that are already a source of inequality and marginalisation and conflict.
The New Humanitarian: Why does it matter to have a conflict analysis that takes climate into account that aid workers and policymakers can use?
Tarif: You need a complete picture to get the best chance of resolving conflicts. In Somalia, there's been an overwhelming focus on counter-terrorism as a means of resolving the conflict there. That omits the conflict dynamics between clans at the local level over access to pasture and water.
That kind of omission means that while trying to resolve a political conflict over the constitution of Somalia, between this armed group [and the state], you're forgetting that there is a layer of violence that is not necessarily political in the big sense, and not necessarily politically motivated, like al-Shabab is. But it still affects the livelihoods of people who live in Somalia, and still affects the peace process overall and has to be addressed to end conflict in the country.
The New Humanitarian: So what can be done?
Tarif: There are both policy and programmatic initiatives.
Somalia’s third NDC [Nationally Determined Contribution climate plan] has specifically pointed to addressing conflict dynamics and supporting peacebuilding while doing climate adaptation, which is a really interesting and positive step.
(TNH understands other African governments are expected to eventually take similar policy steps but not until after the delayed publication of the African Union’s Common Position on Climate Peace and Security – a policy paper intended to represent a unified African position on similar themes. It is not clear when that paper will be published.)
There are also practical initiatives going on – it’s possible to support communities to adapt to climate in ways that strengthen people's livelihoods, economies, and limit desperate coping mechanisms.
The International Organization for Migration is co-funding community adaptation projects in Somalia around water infrastructure, livestock markets, and solar power, which bring together clans that have previously been in conflict. It incentivises different groups to work together and benefit mutually from the process.
The idea is to give people more space for how they choose to adapt to climate change so they’re not stuck in a place where their options are displacement, or supplementary income from an armed group, or being forced to make bad choices.
The New Humanitarian: Why should scarce finance and political will be dedicated to this fiendishly difficult policy area?
Tarif: This confluence of climate change and conflict is really increasing humanitarian needs. It is increasing the burden on humanitarian organisations who are basically the only actors left doing any work in those areas.
The problem is complex and is going to increase in complexity over time. There are so many things about climate change that we haven't even discovered the worst impacts of, and all of the science suggests that we are further along in this process of climate change than previously anticipated.
We have absolutely no concept, I think, of the scale of the challenges that we will face in the coming years.
Because of the lack of funding for support and climate adaptation, there’s an emphasis on narrowing the focus to the most difficult, the most intractable conflict settings, which inevitably means that you will be dealing with multiple armed actors.
That means that there needs to be a plan for how to work in those areas, and address those dynamics.
The world needs to be focused on this because the impacts are not isolated: You can't just abandon one corner of the Earth to the horrible effects of climate change and conflict and just assume that this will not have consequences for its neighbouring countries and regions. We don't live in isolation in that way.
Edited by Irwin Loy and Andrew Gully.
