As the world’s climate grows ever more unpredictable, new research and mounting evidence point to a stark reality: climate change is no longer just an environmental concern—it’s a direct threat to peace, security, and the stability of entire regions. The Institute for Economics & Peace’s 2025 Ecological Threat Report (ETR), released on October 29, 2025, delivers a sobering assessment: roughly two billion people—one quarter of humanity—now reside in areas where rainfall patterns are becoming more extreme, with shorter, more intense wet seasons and longer, drier spells. This shift is not just changing landscapes; it’s amplifying conflict and driving millions from their homes.
According to the ETR, conflict death rates are four times higher in regions where rainfall seasonality has intensified compared to those where it has decreased. The link is clear: as rains become less predictable and more concentrated, the competition for land, water, and food escalates, particularly in vulnerable regions. In 2024 alone, natural hazards triggered a staggering 45 million short-term internal displacements across 163 countries—the highest figure since at least 2008, as reported by the Institute for Economics & Peace.
Sub-Saharan Africa stands out as the epicenter of this crisis. With Niger recording the worst ETR score worldwide, the region faces the most severe ecological pressures. The situation is particularly dire when rapid population growth converges with increased rainfall seasonality. As described in the report, the Karamoja Cluster in East Africa exemplifies this dangerous combination. While total rainfall has remained relatively stable, its timing has become erratic, leading to both droughts and floods. Since 2019, these shifts have coincided with a resurgence of pastoralist violence after years of relative calm. Only 2% of cultivated land in East Africa is irrigated—far below the global average of 20%—leaving communities highly exposed to rainfall shocks.
Steve Killelea, Founder & Executive Chairman of the Institute for Economics & Peace, underscored the urgency: "Rainfall seasonality is becoming a powerful conflict catalyst. Where rains are increasingly concentrated into fewer months, conflict deaths rise sharply. In sub-Saharan Africa, rapid population growth amplifies this effect, turning unpredictable seasons into competition for land, water and food. The issue isn't water scarcity—it's our failure to capture and distribute it. Only 2% of Sub-Saharan African farmland is irrigated, compared to 20% globally."
Water inequality is at the heart of the crisis. The world’s renewable freshwater supply is finite and increasingly unevenly distributed. The ETR identifies 295 subnational areas facing very high water risk and another 780 with high risk, affecting nearly 1.9 billion people. While high-income nations have managed to reduce per capita water use by about a third since 2000, many low-income countries are seeing rising total withdrawals and decreasing per capita availability as populations outpace supply. In sub-Saharan Africa, per capita water use has dropped from 113 cubic meters in 2000 to just 89 in 2022—less than one-fifth of the global average. The report highlights that irrigating 34 million hectares would require only 6% of the region’s annual renewable water resources, yet the infrastructure gap remains vast.
Despite popular fears of looming "water wars," the ETR finds that no interstate conflicts have been fought exclusively over water in the modern era. In fact, at least 157 international freshwater treaties were signed in the second half of the 20th century, providing models for pragmatic cooperation. As Killelea noted, "COP30 must prioritise investment in climate-resilient water systems as a foundation for sustainability and peace. Just as nuclear treaties reduced the risk of annihilation, international cooperation on water can reduce the risk of ecological collapse. Both demonstrate that survival depends less on dominance, than on shared responsibility."
Yet, as the climate crisis intensifies, the risks of miscalculation and instability grow—especially in regions where natural systems cross political borders. Nowhere is this more urgent than in South Asia. As highlighted in a recent analysis by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Pakistan and India share not only rivers and mountains but also an airshed that traps pollutants over hundreds of kilometers. In May 2025, India placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, disrupting a decades-long framework that had provided predictability around shared water flows. The timing couldn’t have been worse: as the monsoon advanced in June, extraordinary rains, high mountain runoff, and upstream reservoir operations combined to swell rivers, force evacuations, and heighten anxiety downstream in Pakistan’s plains.
As the SDPI’s environmental scientist explained, "In a warming world, lawful but opaque actions on shared resources can magnify insecurity unless they are accompanied by verifiable data and pre-agreed operating procedures." The same logic applies to air quality. When industrial emissions and residue burning spike, smog doesn’t stop at the border—public health and productivity suffer on both sides. "In such conditions, inaction or under-action in one jurisdiction becomes a cross-border security problem in the other—not because anyone fires a shot, but because every child’s lungs and every worker’s productivity are placed at risk by choices that could have been coordinated," the SDPI report observed.
With COP30 on the horizon, the call from Pakistan is clear: treat climate as a traditional security threat and mobilize accordingly. The proposed climate security cooperation package would rest on four pillars. First, verifiable water cooperation—countries sharing resources should publish time-stamped, independently auditable data on reservoir levels and operations, conduct joint flood corridor stress tests, and pre-clear humanitarian channels. Second, clean air diplomacy—harmonizing monitoring and seasonal measures and providing public dashboards to ensure transparency and accountability. Third, rapid, debt-light finance as security assistance—grants and concessional loans triggered automatically by climate events, arriving within days to support early recovery without sinking vulnerable states into debt. And fourth, hard accountability for promises—recording every climate finance commitment, setting milestones, and publicly flagging delays, so that pledges translate into real protection on the ground.
The stakes are high. After Pakistan’s 2022 floods, nearly $11 billion was pledged by donors, but by mid-2025, only a small fraction had arrived—undermining trust and leaving frontline authorities under-resourced. The SDPI’s expert argued, "If the world can track military readiness with exacting metrics, it can track climate delivery with the same discipline." Regional measures must be embedded in the broader COP30 agenda, prioritizing grants, transparent reporting, and rapid disbursement to provinces, cities, and communities—where adaptation happens in real time.
Domestically, Pakistan is urged to match its diplomatic push with visible action: aligning national plans, improving early warning systems, investing in flood-resilient infrastructure, enforcing air quality standards, and providing practical services to farmers and communities. The SDPI’s scientist put it bluntly: "Treat climate as a traditional security threat and resource it accordingly. Build verifiable cooperation on water and air so that seasonal hazards do not become strategic leverage. Tie pledges to delivery so that families...see protection before the next storm, not promises after it."
As the world approaches COP30, the message from both the ETR and South Asian experts is unmistakable: climate extremes are amplifying old security risks and creating new ones. Only through disciplined, transparent, and cooperative action—locally, regionally, and globally—can we hope to turn the tide. The real test will be whether leaders can move beyond rhetoric to deliver the resources, rules, and resilience that a hotter, more volatile world demands.