Numerous programs aimed at averting violence, instability and extremism worsened by global warming are ensnared in the effort to dismantle the main American aid agency, U.S.A.I.D. One such project helped communities manage water stations in Niger, a hotbed of Islamist extremist groups where conflicts over scarce water are common. Another helped repair water-treatment plants in the strategic port city of Basra, Iraq, where dry taps had caused violent anti-government protests. U.S.A.I.D.’s oldest program, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, ran a forecasting system that allowed aid workers in places like war-torn South Sudan to prepare for catastrophic floods last year.
The fate of these programs remains uncertain. The Trump administration has essentially sought to shutter the agency. A federal court has issued a temporary restraining order. On the ground, much of the work has stopped.
“They were buying down future risk,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security and a former U.S. intelligence official. “Invest a little today so we don’t have to spend a lot in the future when things metastasize.”
The German government this week released a report calling climate change “the greatest security threat of our day and age,” echoing a U.S. intelligence report from 2021, which described climate hazards as “threat multipliers.”
Some U.S.A.I.D. funding supported mediation programs to prevent local clashes over land or water. For instance, as the rains become erratic in the Sahel region of Africa, bordering the Sahara, clashes between farmers and cattle herders become more frequent.
Other U.S.A.I.D. funds supported job training to give young people alternatives to being recruited by terrorist organizations. One such program in Kenya offered motorcycle-repair training. Other programs funded research into crop seeds that could withstand disease and drought, including new varieties of coffee for the global market. Another promoted biodiversity in Colombia, still recovering from decades of war.
Climate change adds to the pressures facing vulnerable countries. The burning of fossil fuels has raised the average global temperature since the start of the industrial age, and it has supersized extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and storm surges worsened by rising seas. This has, in turn, intensified water shortages, hampered food production and led to increased competition for resources.
The U.S. National Intelligence Council concluded in 2021 that “climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond.”
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