Conflict and Climate Change: More Air Conditioning is not the Answer

New York, NY, September 22, 2026 - Check Against Delivery

The Ministerial Week of UNGA is meant to be the moment when the world comes together. Yet today fracture and fragmentation is dominant. Bad faith drives out good ideas.  Hard power makes a mockery of international law.  Even those with shared goals too often operate in silos.

This dynamic is especially dangerous when the world is more connected than ever before. And it is more egregious when the world has more resources than ever before.  We are witnessing a catastrophic collapse of global leadership at the exact moment humanity has all the risks of hyper-connectivity and all the potential of untold capital.

My topic today addresses this dynamic. The twin and overlapping perils of war and climate change are breaking records. Yet political will, financial investment, and media attention have vanished.

When I was Environment Secretary in the UK twenty years ago, there was a fear that discussion of managing the effects of climate change (adaptation) meant going soft on preventing climate change(mitigation). But today, the failures and limits of mitigation mean we have no choice but to seek urgent mitigation and adaptation at the same time.

Adaptation means different things in different places.

This year there has been more coverage, MUCH more coverage, of the need for air conditioning in Europe than of the drought in Afghanistan, or desertification in the Sahel, or food insecurity in Somalia. For the next 25 minutes, I will turn the tables. More air conditioning is not the answer for the people who I want to place center stage today.

For these hundreds of millions of people, the question is not whether a house is comfortable, but whether a family has safe shelter. Not whether the train runs on time, but whether the harvest comes at all. Not whether water use is restricted, but whether there is any safe water to drink. And not simply whether temperatures rise, but how rising temperatures interact with conflict, poverty, and political fragility in ways that destroy the mechanisms people once relied upon to survive.

Overlapping Crises of Conflict and Climate

The threat of extreme heat in Europe is real and has its own death toll. But the facts are that the places most vulnerable to climate change are increasingly the same places afflicted by conflict and extreme fragility. The people living there have contributed the least to climate change. They didn't burn the fossil fuels, but their farms and herds live or die by rainfall in a way that a diesel-and-concrete economy does not.

Yet these are the people who get the least when it comes to funds for climate adaptation. And where there should be common cause of people and planet, there are different movements, different institutions, different funding streams, different systems. That is what we have to put right.

Today, 860 million people, nearly everyone living in a conflict-affected state, also lives in a country ranked in the top quartile of countries affected by climate vulnerability. In 2025 alone, 22 of the 30 countries most exposed to climate disasters were also torn apart by violent conflict. By 2030, climate shocks are predicted to plunge more than 130 million people into extreme poverty; by the same year 60 per cent of the world's extreme poor will be trapped in fragile states and war zones.

These are countries where climate exposure meets the consequences of conflict: weakened institutions, divided land, poverty and massive displacement of people.

In many, agriculture accounts for close to a quarter of economic output, while only a tiny proportion of cultivated land is irrigated. Higher temperatures increase evaporation and dry soil. Rainfall becomesmore erratic. Crop yields decline. Livestock suffers heat stress. Household incomes fall.

Then food prices rise. Assets are sold. Children are taken out of school. Water points and wells dry up. Malnutrition, unsafe water, and food insecurity hit together. So people move. And the coping mechanisms for the next shock become weaker.

Climate change does not mechanically "cause wars." But climate change does alter the environment in which politics, economics, and conflict operate. And the connection between climate stress and conflict has multiple lines of causation in both directions.

Climate change damages agriculture; intensifies competition over land and water; forces changes in patterns of migration and mobility. All of these are conflict multipliers.

And conflict increases vulnerability to climate change, not least by wrecking local economies.

Somalia's recent history provides a clear illustration of the dangers. 43,000 excess deaths from drought in 2022. Then the 2023 El Niño brought flooding, displacing 2.5 million people. And a Super El Nino is threatening Somalia again today.

And compounding the impacts of climate events in Somalia, armed militant groups control significant rural territory and at various times restrict humanitarian access and use control of water as a means of taxation and punishment.

Somalia is not alone. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says that 200 million people around the world live under armed opposition groups. From Sudan to Afghanistan, across the Central Sahel, and in the Lake Chad Basin, the lesson is that conflict undermines people's capacity to survive climate change; and climate change reduces the ability of people to survive conflict.

Yet these countries, the countries with the greatest need for adaptation, receive the least support for adaptation. In that way, the international system is rigged against them.

Adaptation is a Missing Link

Today, total adaptation finance falls significantly short of the UN Secretary General's 50 per cent target of all climate finance, which is itself inadequate. And what funds are available do not go to the poorest places.

Current evidence indicates that the international system spends less than $3 per person per year on climate adaptation in high-intensity conflict zones - significantly less per person than least developed countries overall.

This is the result of a design failure in an aid system split three ways: climate, humanitarian and development. Conflict-affected communities get humanitarian funds. Climate and development money goes to governments. Spending patterns for climate finance default to governance processes and institutions in stable countries rather than highest level of need in fragile contexts.

That design failure has an additional twist: money is spent late. The system waits for livestock to rot, children to starve, and societies to collapse before launching a single emergency appeal. Despite evidence showing early-warning systems yield a 10-to-1 return on investment and 24 hours of warning before a storm or heatwave can reduce lives and resources lost by around 30 per cent.

The Global Commission on Adaptation estimates that investing $1.8 trillion globally in five major areas of resilience, including protecting mangroves and making water resources more resilient, could produce more than $7 trillion in net benefits. Roughly four dollars returned for every dollar invested.

It doesn't have to be this way. The vision for adaptation reverses this cycle: build resilience before the crisis hits, deliver an economic dividend, and in the process protect communities against the worst impacts of climate shocks. The World Bank also identifies a potential peace dividend, which would be a much-needed bonus.

To realize the vision, we need to tackle the four problems that are holding us back:

Mindset: We need to add pre-emptive action to the humanitarian imperative of fast reaction.

Delivery: We need to remove the excuse that it is impossible to deliver in conflict situations.

Programs: We need to bust the myth that there are no proven adaptation options for complex conflict settings.

Finance: We need to debunk the claim that we can't afford it and find new sources of finance as traditional aid declines.

Adaptation Action

I start with mindset deliberately. It shapes everything. At IRC we pride ourselves on being fast. Within hours of a missile strike in Ukraine, we are on the scene with mobile health care. In Lebanon we were distributing cash within days of the war starting.

But speed is only possible where planning and preparation have been diligent. We know climate disasters will occur, and we have no excuse for waiting for the crisis to hit. If we can see a shock coming, we should not require people to lose everything before releasing the money.

IRC's "Follow the Forecast" approach uses long-range seasonal forecasts to identify where climate hazards are most likely and links those forecasts to early action.

In Somalia, this approach combined drought forecasting, cash assistance and disease surveillance-identifying cholera hotspots and rehabilitating water systems before conditions deteriorated as well as giving households cash assistance to provide for basic needs.

In Chad, we combined flood forecasting with cholera monitoring to trigger earlier water, sanitation, and public-health interventions.

Yet pre-arranged finance is only 1.2 per cent of total crisis finance; fragile states got only 7 per cent of total pre-arranged finance in 2024; and funding for anticipatory action, which is pre-arranged and pays out before the worst impacts of a climate shock is even lower, registering only just over 2 per cent of international pre-arranged finance in 2024. That is despite some studies showing that anticipatory action yields $7 in avoided losses and added benefits for every $1 invested.

Currently, only Germany has a target (5 per cent) for the amount of its humanitarian budget dedicated to anticipatory action. The global figure is less than one percent. So just $120 million was spent on anticipatory action responses in 2025, out of a total aid budget of $174 billion.

This is the mindset that has to change - with every donor setting and meeting targets for anticipatory action to support adaptation.

The approach to delivery also needs to shift.

The traditional climate-finance architecture assumes a functioning state and government. But many of the people most vulnerable to climate change live where the state authorities cannot-or sometimes will not-reach them.

That is why civil society, local organizations, and humanitarian actors need to become part of the climate-finance architecture. Not as an afterthought, but as delivery partners.

This means the World Bank and other multilateral financial institutions need to move from a highly restrictive approach-where only the UN or ICRC can receive funding independent of government to deliver services directly to communities -to a commitment to work with any organization best-positioned to reach people and deliver results. The Bank's new strategy for fragility, conflict, and violence recognizes this issue, and I believe there is leadership commitment to move this forward.

This also means that donors need to shift to a far more transparent, outcome-oriented approach to aid flows, with accountability for delivering sustained change as the metric, not endless box-checking of program inputs.

Also, it is very positive that the Green Climate Fund has pledged to drive $2 billion of its funding across 31 fragile and conflict-affected states. Civil society can be its delivery partner.

When it comes to programs, it's just not true that nothing can be done. There are many examples that show impact and have the potential to scale. They focus on what is actually happening in conflict zones, are co-designed with local communities, and tailored to the specific challenges of crisis contexts and the most at-risk groups -going beyond adaptation alone.

Here are four examples of what we have seen work and how it can scale:

• Anticipatory action means acting on a forecast, not waiting until after a crisis has occurred. In Nigeria, anticipatory cash ahead of seasonal floods helped families protect small businesses and avoid selling off assets just to survive. In Somalia, households receiving anticipatory cash ahead of a drought used it to protect pastoralist livelihoods rather than watch them collapse and start over. That's the difference between response and anticipation: one rebuilds after the loss, the other prevents it.

• Our seed security program works on the same principle - moving towards protecting and rebuilding a critical link in livelihoods before fractured institutions can be repaired. In northeast Syria, rather than distributing seeds season after season, we help build farmers' capacity to identify, multiply, and share seeds that are more climate-adapted themselves, so communities can keep farming even when institutions fail. Yield per hectare has run almost twice the local average, and even through the 2025 drought, held 20 per cent above yields grown outside the program. It rebuilds the underlying system rather than substituting for it - reducing dependency on aid and restoring local ownership of seed security.

• The climate crisis is also a water-safety crisis: floods contaminate the sources people drink from, droughts push them onto unsafe options, and most humanitarian chlorination is temporary, tied to a single outbreak or project, and stops once the funding stops. We know more than 1 million people die annually from bad water, and more than 1,000 children per day. In-line chlorination is one of the most cost-effective interventions against diarrheal disease and cholera that exists. So IRC is making it permanent: small, non-electric feeders that dose chlorine automatically. These systems need no power and keep working through the shocks that break everything else. Our current program will reach over 1.75 million crisis-affected people across Nigeria, Chad, and Somalia, with current models projecting we can safely chlorinate water supplies for around $1 per person per year, moving to scaled delivery through public, camp, and community-managed water supply systems.

• Nearly all critical activities require power - a clinic can't refrigerate vaccines without it, and a farmer can't pump water without it. Climate change squeezes that supply from both sides: heat spikes demand energy for cooling and strains the grid, and drought cuts hydropower at the exact moment communities need more electricity to pump groundwater. Conflict adds a second failure point for those using diesel power - fuel shortages that shut a system down with no warning. And that reality hits places already excluded from the energy transition: 730 million people worldwide still lack electricity, 80 to 85 per cent of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa. This isn't a technology problem - solar is mature and cheaper than ever. It's a systems problem: thin markets, weak infrastructure, funding cycles built to pay for a diesel generator today, not an enduring power system for years to come. That's why IRC is helping local operators replace diesel pumps with solar, cutting costs and keeping systems running through fuel disruptions caused by conflict and drought. In Somalia, this initiative has cut the cost of borehole water supply from $10 to under $4 per person per year. And using solar here is more than mitigation - it's the sustainable, localized, economically viable choice, which is what makes it adaptation too. 

The final area for action concerns finance. We need to flip the model and ensure that the majority of adaptation finance is going to the most climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected communities.

World Bank data suggests that up to a third of the formal economy in certain conflict-affected communities is aid-based, compared to fractions of one per cent in more stable middle-income settings. At IRC we have argued that at least 60 per cent of traditional aid should go to fragile and conflict-affected states, mirroring the proportion of the world's extreme poor who live in these places.

This deployment of traditional aid must be paired with other resources too. At IRC we believe we have to prioritize three specific tools to realize change.

First, parametric insurance, which is the leading edge of pre-arranged finance.

The IRC implements a trial in Kenya with the support of the UK FCDO. It is the world's first model to apply parametric insurance specifically to protect education continuity. When a pre-agreed trigger is reached, cash is delivered to households and remote learning and protection support is provided to ensure children don't lose key foundational skills like literacy and numeracy. Two insurance payouts for drought already supported over 7,600 families with cash assistance and 28,000 with remote education. This needs to be scaled massively.

The UK and the Bridgetown Initiative are working together to increase pre-arranged finance to 20 per cent of crisis financing by 2035. The UK's G20 Presidency next year is an important moment to turn this pledge into reality.

Second, debt swaps.

There is now a long, albeit contested, history of environmental debt swaps. The basic idea is simple: buy out high-interest, low-value debt and, using the lower interest rate generated by a political guarantee, direct the savings to environmental causes.

Yet, despite the fact that 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education, there has never been a humanitarian debt swap. This needs to change.

We propose taking the machinery developed for debt-for-nature swaps and applying it to humanitarian need: mobilizing guarantees from multilateral development banks and development finance institutions to lower refinancing costs and partnering with governments and civil society to ensure the resulting savings are directed to humanitarian priorities, including climate adaptation. One could also consider climate-resilient debt clauses, which allow debt repayments to be paused following certain natural disasters.

Third, support for indigenous private sector activity in areas affected by conflict.

Investments aren't easily attracted to local businesses in conflict settings, but aid is used by development finance institutions to unlock private finance through de-risking, negotiating deals and technical support. British International Investment's new strategy commits to earmarking 40 per cent of new investments up until 2031 as climate finance. Combined with a commitment of 25 per cent to "frontier markets" this has the potential to leverage aid for least developed countries but needs to be directed to contexts where private capital wouldn't otherwise go.

Conclusion

My message today is not just that in a world that is fractured, where the news cycle is seized with air conditioning for Europe, we must do better. It is that we can do better. There is not just a lament about what is wrong, but to highlight the ideas to do better.

In two months' time, global leaders will come together at COP31 in Türkiye. COP31 offers another opportunity to identify ways of making climate finance easier to access and deliver in fragile countries. It is vital to move from words at global convenings to action year-round. We have declarations and statements from Dubai and Baku to build on with practical steps to simplify bureaucratic processes, invest in local capacity, recalibrate risk calculations, and incentivize innovation - with a focus on outcomes for people.

We have no time to lose.

Most importantly, the poorest people in the world need us all to make up for lost time now.