The Conversation on Climate Adaptation and Conflict is Reaching New Audiences. Can it Unlock Real Change?

For years, interconnected communities of practice working on environmental peacebuilding, climate adaptation, and conflict sensitivity have been converging on a similar argument. Climate shocks intensify resource competition, displace populations, and compound fragile governance — the evidence for that is substantial. Conflict-sensitive approaches to natural resource management can interrupt and positively transform those dynamics — the evidence for that is growing.

What we’ve been seeing in our organizations’ work across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and beyond is that this climate adaptation-conflict sensitivity argument is starting to resonate with new audiences.

Last week, our organizations co-hosted a side session at the 2026 World Bank Fragility Forum in Washington, DC: “Local Approaches to Conflict Sensitivity and Climate Adaptation.” Structured as an interactive practitioner roundtable, it brought together World Bank staff working on the Bank’s updated Fragility Conflict Violence (FVC) strategy, civil society representatives, researchers, and program implementers grappling with these challenges across fragile and conflict-affected settings. The conversation moved quickly from sharing individual examples to something closer to a shared structural diagnosis covering time horizons, donor incentives, and the fragmentation of vocabulary across the climate, fragility, and development sectors that makes collaboration structurally difficult even when organizations are working toward the same thing.

Evidence from Practice

One of the evidence anchors for that conversation was Mercy Corps’ work in the Sahel. Research on Ben ni Baara, a multisectoral human security program in Mali, surfaced a finding that’s difficult to set aside: participants in combined climate adaptation and governance/peacebuilding activities were 20–25 percentage points more likely to reject violence than the control group, while participants in climate adaptation alone — without the governance and peacebuilding components — were more likely to support violence. Not diminishing returns — a backfire. Mercy Corps’ response was to design the Justice and Stability in the Sahel (JASS) program around that lesson: governance and peacebuilding foundations first, with climate adaptation and livelihoods deeply integrated with these institutions. That evidence reframes the integration question from “does it add value?” to “what does deployment without foundations actually risk?” — and it’s a question that belongs in every conversation where climate finance is being designed and allocated.

The other key case study informing the conversation was engagement of CDA and Local Capacities for Peace International (LCPI) with the newly formed Ethiopia Conflict Sensitivity Hub. As a locally driven initiative hosted by Mercy Corps, the ECSH brings together organizations navigating Ethiopia’s complex context of conflict, climate, and development. A national-scale ECSH baseline survey found that nearly 90% of organizations identified a need to better integrate conflict sensitivity into their work, while only 8% felt they were doing so — even as climate change was widely recognized as a tightly intertwined challenge, as well as an opening for strengthening social cohesion. What the hub model offers is connective tissue: knowledge sharing and expertise relevant at hyper-local to Horn of Africa levels, to equip early warning and coordinated action across organizations currently operating in parallel. That’s a systems response to a systems need in a dynamic ecosystem, and it scales if the field invests in it.

In both the Sahel and Horn of Africa work, the evidence is from the ground up, the methods place-based, and the impact locally-led. Paired with climate science and predictive analytics, there is evidence to act and invest.

New Audiences

What the Fragility Forum session confirmed for us is that this argument is arriving in new institutional spaces. The Environmental Peacebuilding Association, ECCP, and partners across this network have been building and holding this agenda for years. What’s shifting is that the argument is now reaching the institutions where financing decisions get made, including the World Bank, with the architecture of the FCV strategy, and the systems it influences. Our interest is helping those processes, which impact millions of global communities, be led by the priorities of local leaders, organizations and the practitioners closest to the work.

The gap that remains is climate finance itself. The path from evidence to practice to policy to investment at the scale these contexts require runs through breaking down language barriers across sectors, extending time horizons beyond donor cycles, and building accountability structures that move from frameworks into practice. This requires bridging communities: local actors at the frontlines of these dynamics, the practitioners and researchers who have built the evidence base, and the institutions now starting to engage this agenda. That bridging is not supplementary work. It is the case-making.

Gaining Ground

Ruth is heading to Ottawa this week for the Environmental Peacebuilding Conference, bringing this conversation back to the communities of practice where many of these ideas took root. The questions arriving at that convening are different now: not just how to design integrated approaches, but how to translate them for institutional audiences starting to engage this agenda, and how to sustain coherence across the different spaces where it is gaining ground.

We’re all continuing the work — through Mercy Corps’ forthcoming practitioners guide on implementing integrated programming at the intersection of climate and conflict, through CDA’s ongoing action research on environment, fragility, and peace, and through the partnerships we’re building across this network with groups like the ECSH and LCPI, positioned to scale reach and lasting impact. Ottawa is the next leg of a journey we’re taking together — and we’d welcome your voice in it.

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