This essay was edited and structured with the assistance of Claude, an AI writing tool. The research, analysis, and arguments are my own.
There's a debate happening right now about whether Europe's defense spending ramp-up should also tackle climate change. Front-line nations say yes. Defense ministries say: tanks first.
I want to offer a data point from the ground.
In Mali, I managed a $76M agricultural and climate resilience portfolio. The work was technical — better seed varieties, water management, soil conservation. But the operational reality was something else entirely. The communities we were working with weren't experiencing "climate change" as an abstract future threat. They were experiencing it as a present-tense crisis: shorter growing seasons, unpredictable rainfall, livestock dying, young men with no harvest income and nothing to do.
That last part is not a development footnote. That is a recruitment pipeline.
The security analysts who say climate is a "risk multiplier" are correct, but the framing still keeps it at arm's length — as if climate were sprinkling extra instability on top of an otherwise manageable situation. What I watched in Mali was more direct than that. Climate stress was eroding the economic foundation that kept communities coherent. When that foundation goes, everything else follows faster than any intervention can respond.
I'm not saying defense budgets should fund soil moisture sensors. That's not the point. (Honestly, I do think it would be a better use of funds than invading another country, but no one bothers to ask me)
The point is that the artificial separation between "hard security" spending and "soft development" spending has always been conceptually wrong — and in fragile states, it's operationally wrong too. You cannot buy enough tanks to stabilize a region where agricultural systems are collapsing and young people have no economic future. We've tried that approach. It doesn't hold.
GIZ managing director Ingrid-Gabriela Hoven told Devex, on the sidelines of February's Munich Security Conference, that development cuts "will haunt us in the future." She's right. But I'd push further: the haunting has already started. We're just arguing about the budget line while the compounding interest metastasizes.
The rebel position isn't to mourn the cuts. It's to name what they actually cost and to insist that the climate-security conversation be built on evidence from the people who ran programs in the places where this compounding is already visible. The Administration dismantled USAID. It didn't dismantle the pattern. What the Mali portfolio saw is still happening, I've seen it in Libya, Niger, and across the Sahel. The people who know how to see it are still here, still talking, without the resources to address the root causes.
What are you seeing in how your organizations are — or aren't — integrating climate risk into security planning?