IF THE EARTH BURNS, SECURITY TREMBLES

Climate change does not create wars on its own, but it demolishes the rural economy and social cohesion, opening the way for criminal and extremist infiltration where the State is absent. Crop failures and altered transhumance routes trigger clashes over water and land. These local, close-proximity tensions become the ideal recruitment pool for terrorism. Militarized borders do not stop desertification or hunger. The security of the future is guaranteed by investing in agricultural adaptation and the shared management of natural resources.

Traditional geopolitics reads conflicts through the lens of troop movements, military alliances, and ideological claims. There is, however, a progressive dimension that is redefining the maps of global instability: that of environmental threat multipliers. The climate crisis is not limited to altering thermometers or melting glaciers; it acts as a catalyst capable of exacerbating social tensions, eroding territorial governance, and creating fertile ground for violent extremism.

The case of West Africa: beyond military security

An example of how these dynamics operate even before an outright war breaks out emerges from a study conducted between 2024 and 2025 by researchers at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, within the framework of the REJOWA project (Resilience to the Expansion of Jihadist Organizations in West Africa). The research highlights that shifting meteorological calendars and rising temperatures are compromising the yields of staple crops like maize, reducing the availability of arable land, and altering traditional transhumance routes.

In the absence of defined transit corridors, encounters between settled farmers and nomadic herders turn into clashes over access to water points. These local frictions often represent an entry point for extremist groups, who insert themselves into community rifts by offering protection to minorities and alternative forms of justice.

There is no deterministic, direct link between an extra degree on the thermometer and the birth of a terrorist cell; rather, we are witnessing a process of erosion of social cohesion mediated by the failure of environmental governance.

Global vulnerability and dual-risk systems

The framework outlined in West Africa is reflected in international literature, which describes climate change as a structural destabilization factor at a global level. A geopolitical study by International Alert, titled Climate Change, Peace and War, illustrates the map of this vulnerability.

According to the analysis, many countries find themselves in a condition of dual risk: the physical impacts of global warming overlap with pre-existing economic and institutional fragile states. In these contexts, soil productivity loss and water scarcity do not only affect the ecosystem, but they weaken the capacity of governments to provide basic services, increasing the likelihood of armed conflict and institutional collapse over the long term.

Rural instability dynamics in the IPCC report

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), in the chapter on food systems and rural areas of its sixth assessment report, analyzes how rainfall variability and thermal shocks act as accelerators of instability. The report documents that the unsustainability of agricultural models in the face of climate change pushes rural populations into chronic poverty.

When local institutions fail to manage the redistribution of water and land resources, social exclusion and economic marginalization increase. This scenario reduces the opportunity cost of becoming involved in illegal activities or rebel formations, making populations more vulnerable to recruitment by non-state actors.

Resource collapse in the Lake Chad Basin

A historical example of this transition can be traced in the analysis by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and Training for Peace on the Lake Chad Basin. In this area, the combination of rising temperatures and a drastic reduction in water bodies caused the collapse of herding and fishing activities, which formed the basis of the local economy. The resulting forced migration of entire communities generated strong demographic pressures in host areas, triggering tensions with historical residents. In this context of economic deprivation, extremist militias of Boko Haram found a recruitment pool based on material need and the offer of alternative financial subsidies to an agriculture that was no longer viable.

Strategic responses and environmental governance

International evidence indicates that the response to the security risk induced by climate change cannot be exclusively military or focused on border control. Defense strategies and international cooperation plans must integrate environmental adaptation within geopolitical stabilization frameworks.

To prevent the advance of these invisible crises, it becomes necessary to link security funds to the financing of sustainable agriculture, the regulation of transhumance, and the shared management of water resources. At the same time, predictive modeling tools and agro-climatic information must be used by government agencies as strategic assets to anticipate areas at the highest risk of social tension due to food shortages, translating scientific data into preventive interventions on the ground.

Addressing global security while ignoring the climate crisis is an optical illusion that governments can no longer afford. Weapons and the militarization of borders have no efficacy against desertification, the depletion of aquifers, or the collapse of rural harvests. A territory that loses the capacity to feed its population inevitably loses its political stability.

If the international community continues to downgrade the ecological transition and resource protection to purely environmental issues, disconnected from defense policies, it will condemn itself to chasing increasingly vast and unmanageable geopolitical hotspots. In the 21st century, true security doctrine is not measured by the ability to deploy contingents, but by the capacity to guarantee the subsistence of the population and preserve the social cohesion of the land.

Article prepared by Marta Abbà, volunteer at the Italian Climate Network.

Cover image: Pixabay