Climate Adaptation and Peacebuilding Keep Missing Each Other

In fragile and conflict-affected contexts, climate change and conflict reinforce one another. They do so not in simple or automatic ways, but by interacting with existing political, social, and economic vulnerabilities. Climate impacts affect livelihoods, resource access, and governance systems. Conflict and weak institutions undermine the effectiveness of climate adaptation. 

Addressing this dual burden is not primarily a technical challenge—it is a political one. It concerns power, governance, legitimacy, and how priorities are set in contexts of competing pressures. 

Yet peacebuilding and climate adaptation efforts still largely operate separately. Climate actors tend to focus on infrastructure, livelihoods, and risk management, while peace actors prioritize dialogue, mediation, and stabilization. 

At the launch workshop of a new EU initiative on Policy Coherence for Adaptation and Resilience, practitioners and policy-makers discussed how to move beyond this fragmentation. The EU Action established in late 2025 brings together the Berghof Foundation, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to address the persistent gap between peacebuilding and climate adaptation policy in conflict-affected settings. 

The central message was clear: climate pressures rarely create new conflicts, but they sharpen existing ones. Deliberate alignment between peace and climate adaptation efforts can strengthen resilience, legitimacy, and long-term stability, often more effectively and at lower cost than treating the two agendas in isolation.

Why Aligning Peace and Climate Efforts Matters

Climate change is widely recognized as a risk multiplier that intensifies existing vulnerabilities—including inequality, marginalization, and contested authority. In fragile settings, it can add strain to already weak governance systems. At the same time, weak institutions, low trust, and political exclusion reduce the effectiveness and sustainability of adaptation measures. The result is a vicious cycle: climate pressures deepen instability, and instability limits adaptation. 

Neglecting peace and adaptation links in such contexts is short-sighted, however. Experience from practice suggests that adaptation can generate peace dividends when it strengthens institutions, manages distributional tensions, and builds trust between communities and authorities. The interaction between the two fields presents not only risks but also opportunities for mutual reinforcement.

Moving Beyond "Do No Harm" 

Both communities have made important progress. Peacebuilding increasingly integrates environmental considerations into conflict analysis, while climate and environmental actors apply conflict-sensitivity and “Do No Harm” principles. This is important, but remains limited, as it mainly focuses on avoiding negative spillovers. It rarely shapes shared objectives, coordinated strategies, or joint definitions of success.

Below, we see the range of approaches through which peace and climate adaptation can interact. Over time, there has been a gradual shift from “blind” to “sensitive” approaches. The “sweet spot” may lie in greater alignment between the two fields.

In practice, peace and climate actors continue to operate under separate mandates, funding streams, and institutional logics. Several participants noted that national policy processes such as national adaptation plans (NAPs) and nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are relatively well-established and structured, while comparable planning mechanisms on the peace side are more ad hoc. 

NAPs set out how governments intend to manage the medium- and long-term impacts of climate change, while NDCs outline national climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. Both are increasingly central to how states plan, finance, and coordinate climate action. In fragile settings, this imbalance can lead to adaptation initiatives that overlook conflict dynamics or peace processes that fail to account for climate-related pressures shaping grievances and instability.

Southern Iraq illustrates this disconnect. There, climate-induced water scarcity has intensified disputes between agricultural communities, service providers, and authorities, particularly around access, allocation, and service delivery. These disputes are driven as much by governance failures and mistrust as by physical scarcity itself. While peacebuilding efforts address grievances related to access or governance failures, they often do not engage with adaptation planning that would help manage worsening scarcity over time. Conversely, adaptation responses focused on infrastructure or efficiency gains often overlook local conflict dynamics, contributing to resistance or perceptions of unequal benefit-sharing.

Avoiding harm is necessary—but in interconnected systems of fragility, it is not enough.

What Alignment Means in Practice

Alignment does not require merging mandates or creating new institutions. Rather, it is more of a practical exercise, ensuring that peace and climate adaptation efforts are designed so that they do not work at cross-purposes and, where possible, reinforce one another. In practice, this means understanding how climate and conflict risks interact, aligning goals and priorities across peace and adaptation processes, and coordinating interventions so that they reduce shared vulnerabilities rather than shift risks from one sector to another. 

Over time, this requires strengthening the political and institutional foundations on which both agendas depend, including accountable governance, inclusion, and basic state capacity. These foundations are central to both sustainable peace and effective adaptation. Strengthening them across fields can help reduce climate vulnerability and conflict risk simultaneously.

Established climate policy processes, particularly NAPs, NDCs, and national dialogues or development strategies, offer concrete entry points, particularly in post-conflict settings. Peace agreements may also include provisions on land, water, or resource governance that need to adapt to changing climate realities. Important work by IISD and the NAP Global Network has shown how these processes can integrate conflict sensitivity and support peacebuilding.

Several practitioners noted that peace processes dealing with natural resources, especially water management, could provide a foundation for integrating adaptation considerations into post-conflict governance arrangements

From Concept to Political Practice

Moving toward alignment requires institutional shifts. This includes setting compatible objectives across sectors, strengthening coordination between ministries, and developing monitoring systems that track both climate- and peace-related outcomes. In fragile settings, gaps between national policy, subnational authorities, and local realities are often where climate stress and conflict pressures converge. Sustained engagement with civil society, parliaments, and security actors is therefore not optional, but central to making alignment work. 

Financing is another faultline. Discussions underscored that scale alone is not enough. Participants highlighted the need to invest more deliberately in gender equality, land rights, and equitable distribution of benefits, rather than relying on small, symbolic investments that fail to address underlying inequalities. 

These are not merely technical adjustments. They require political will and sustained cross-sectoral cooperation, as well as acknowledging and managing risk. Both climate policies and security or stabilization interventions can introduce new risks if poorly coordinated. Aligning peace and climate adaptation offers a pragmatic and politically grounded path toward more durable resilience.

This article was written with contributions from Lina Hillert, Alec Crawford, Katharina Schmidt, Janel Galvanek, and Alexander Reiffenstuel