Attachments
The UN Security Council will soon vote on the future of the peacekeeping mission in conflict-hit South Sudan. In this Q&A, Nazanine Moshiri discusses what is at stake and why climate and peace should remain part of the mission’s work.
What is at stake?
On 30 April, the UN Security Council is set to renew the mandate of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), a peacekeeping operation established in 2011 to support the world’s newest country immediately after its independence. Since its creation, South Sudan has struggled with bouts of instability and, as Crisis Group has warned, the country is once again on the brink of full-blown conflict. During a period of wavering backing for UN peacekeeping operations across Africa, and with U.S. funding for them under threat, South Sudan’s precarious condition would likely worsen without the mission’s presence, despite the fact that it has not always been able to staunch the risk of violence.
Rising hostilities in the Upper Nile region highlight the growing challenges for UNMISS in protecting civilians. But it should not be forgotten that this escalation in violence is coming at a time when natural disasters are compounding the population’s immiseration and fuelling instability. The World Food Programme reports that South Sudan is at a “critical tipping point”, with nearly 7.7 million people, half the population, facing hunger because of flooding and conflict, including approximately 3.1 million in the Upper Nile. Severe flooding in 2024 uprooted about a million South Sudanese from their homes, with floodwaters cutting off major roads and contributing to an outbreak of cholera. This disaster has deepened the humanitarian crisis and made it even harder to deliver aid to affected communities.
While much of the violence UNMISS responds to is driven by wrangling among the country’s political elites, the mission’s attention has increasingly been drawn toward a range of conflicts that are intimately connected with extreme weather events, specifically floods and droughts. Even so, this part of UNMISS’s work could come under threat should the U.S. – the Security Council lead on the South Sudan file – use the opportunity of mandate renewal to scale back the mission’s climate-related work as part of President Donald Trump’s general hostility to policies aimed at curbing the emission of greenhouse gases.
Until now, the mission has been at the vanguard of UN peace operations in dealing with the links between climate, peace and security. Since its creation, UNMISS has had to handle the harmful effects of environmental pressures on humanitarian crises and conflict. In 2020, the Security Council recognised the role of extreme weather in worsening instability. By 2023, it had directed UNMISS to assess and report on climate-related risks to peace and security. Its 2024 mandate for the mission includes the strongest UN position on climate issues in both peacekeeping and political missions yet seen, acknowledging the impact of climate change, land degradation, food insecurity and natural disasters on stability and calling for a better understanding of how the climate could threaten peace and security.
Why is the climate issue so divisive on the Security Council?
Achieving consensus among Security Council members for action on climate, peace and security has been an uphill battle, and political divisions continue to bedevil efforts to reach a common position. In 2020, the U.S. threatened to veto a draft resolution on managing the security implications of climate change that Germany (an elected member of the Council from 2019-2020) and nine other states drafted. In 2021, Niger and Ireland proposed a similar text that would have bolstered the UN’s efforts to analyse the linkages between climate change and international peace and security. Russia and India voted against the resolution, and China abstained despite support for the text among the wider UN membership. These three states argued that climate change should be addressed in settings designed for the issue, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, not those focused on international peace and security.
Since then, Council members have gradually incorporated specific climate concerns into the mandates of some UN peace operations. But despite these steps, China, Russia and various elected members have baulked at giving the Security Council the authority to impose climate-related obligations on other states.
Meanwhile, Trump’s return to the White House will likely halt further discussions on the issue. As happened during Trump’s first administration, the U.S. is likely to downplay the significance of climate change, or even its existence, and it could try to limit action at the Security Council and other international fora. The new U.S. stance already became visible in negotiations over the mandate renewal for the UN mission in Afghanistan in March, when Washington insisted on removing the phrase “environmental degradation” from the text; in the end, it agreed to a resolution highlighting how floods and droughts can exacerbate “food insecurity, water scarcity and land degradation”.
Why do connections between climate risks and conflict matter in South Sudan?
While most violence in South Sudan is tied to the transactional deals that political leaders hatch and break, and their effects on extensive patronage networks, climate pressures are making things worse, forcing people to move and putting more strain on land and water, which means that even small disputes over resources can turn violent. South Sudan faces some of the world’s most intense climate-related security risks, with consequences that often shape and aggravate other sources of conflict.
Climate shocks, especially extreme flooding, are the most urgent threat, affecting 1.4 million people in 2024 and displacing 380,000 people. This displacement has fuelled tensions by pushing people off their land and into areas populated by communities that are already struggling with a lack of pasture and fewer water resources, such as in Lakes, Central Equatoria, Unity, Jonglei and Warrap states, where displaced groups seek higher ground to avoid the floodwaters.
While communities living in floodplains have traditionally adapted to shifting weather conditions, climate extremes disrupt this balance. Rising waters no longer follow familiar patterns but displace people more frequently, making it harder for them to rebuild their livelihoods. Relocation because of severe flooding has already become a flashpoint for conflict. A 2022 relocation from Bor to Mangala led to clashes after the authorities did not consult Mangala residents, who saw the new arrivals as a threat to their scarce resources. The risks are particularly acute in Greater Equatoria, where Dinka resettlement — especially from Bor — has been a source of political tensions since the 1960s and remains a driver of bouts of violence.
Historically severe flooding that began in 2019 has also heightened the effects of conflict. Floods in the country’s western plains, for instance, shaped the struggle between President Salva Kiir and Akol Koor, then his intelligence chief, as they fought for influence among the Dinka communities there, intensifying blockades of territory and worsening the conflict’s humanitarian fallout. By the end of 2020, the UN found mass starvation in several communities affected by the violence. Disaster-related displacement, food insecurity and livelihood losses have, in turn, exacerbated sexual exploitation and violence against women and girls.
These climate-related strains on communities have since been compounded by displacement from the civil war in neighbouring Sudan. More than one million people have fled into South Sudan since that conflict started in April 2023 – heaping additional pressure on security, resources and humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, some South Sudanese have joined opposing sides in the Sudanese conflict – raising fears they could return home armed to a country suffering higher levels of hunger and beset by the problems of relocating displaced people.
South Sudan’s government, for its part, has been unwilling or unable to respond to climate threats. UN officials estimate that South Sudan needs $50 billion to mitigate and adapt to climate change, but it has received a tiny fraction of that amount. In March, the Green Climate Fund, based in South Korea, promised an initial $7 million to boost future climate investment in the country by the end of 2025. Even if the money flows, South Sudan’s government lacks the capacity to implement meaningful adaptation efforts. Donors also know that funnelling funds through state institutions would result in much of it being lost to corruption, just as vast sums of humanitarian aid have sustained South Sudan’s kleptocratic elite. Some local authorities are willing to act, but they have almost no resources and receive little support from the Juba government, leaving many communities to fend for themselves.
How is UNMISS helping South Sudan respond to climate challenges?
UNMISS is, in some ways, already aligning parts of its mandate with the need to respond to South Sudan’s climate shocks, though its role remains limited. With almost 18,000 peacekeepers, the mission often steps in where local authorities cannot. For example, heavy rains and Nile flooding have repeatedly breached flood defences in Bentiu, home to nearly 150,000 displaced people. In 2022, UNMISS troops discovered a dyke failure late at night. The gap widened rapidly, threatening thousands. Hundreds of peacekeepers and camp residents worked to contain the damage. UNMISS engineers have since reinforced more than 96km of dykes, raising them to 4m, although officials warn they may not hold against future floods.
UNMISS has also taken steps to incorporate better analysis of climate security. It is the only blue-helmet operation with a dedicated climate adviser, funded by Ireland through the Climate Security Mechanism. It also has two additional staff members, supported by Norway. The team assesses how flooding, drought and other pressures drive local conflicts and then helps UN peacekeepers to respond. For example, in September 2024, UNMISS’s climate peace and security unit supported a peace dialogue in Yirol, Lakes State, as floods displaced cattle herders from Unity State, straining resources and stoking tensions. UNMISS has also sought to bolster the role of women and of youth, two groups particularly affected by resource-related tensions, in peaceful conflict resolution.
What happens if UNMISS’s climate work is weakened or eliminated?
UNMISS’s ability to build climate risks into its security planning depends on clear leadership and operational support from UN headquarters, member states and troop-contributing countries. Regardless of how dire conditions in South Sudan may become as a result of climate shocks to a war-torn country, without the Security Council’s explicit backing it is doubtful whether these three will continue to support the mission in responding to such emergencies. This possible retreat reflects a broader trend. As the U.S. once again steps back from international agreements on combating climate change, the existing resistance from permanent members of the Security Council has become a more general threat to global cooperation on the issue. Among the plethora of things at stake is the fate of long-term international commitments and funding to address the ways climate crises aggravate armed conflict.
If the Security Council weakens or altogether strips references to climate from the UNMISS mandate, backsliding will become more likely in other cases. Seven UN missions in Africa mention climate security, and four of them have dedicated climate advisers. Losing the references to climate in South Sudan could weaken UN efforts to address climate-driven instability continent-wide at a moment when the number of Africans displaced within their own countries has tripled in fifteen years, driven in large part by war and climate shocks. The UN, for example, says 9.1 million Somalis, almost half of the country’s population, have been either displaced or had their livelihoods affected by conflict, floods, drought and disease outbreaks. The Somali militant group Al-Shabaab also uses access to water and other natural resources to levy taxes and fees on herders and farmers, as well as to punish communities that resist its control. In Cameroon’s Far North region, to take another example, conflicts over scarce water resources have displaced herders, farmers and fisherfolk.
Data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre puts the figure of internally displaced Africans even higher, at 35 million – up from 11.6 million in 2009. Even so, UN officials in Nairobi told Crisis Group that they are under internal pressure to change language in documents and programming from “climate or environment” to vague references to “vulnerabilities linked to natural resources”, a move intended to appease the U.S.
In South Sudan, meanwhile, troop-contributing countries already have a lower risk appetite, making UNMISS reluctant to engage in the most unsafe parts of the country. Removing wording on climate from UNMISS’s mandate would make its ability to tackle climate-related security risks even harder to sustain, particularly by hindering UNMISS’s case for getting funding to continue these efforts. As part of its 2024-2025 budget, UNMISS requested funding for more than 35 different capacity-building exercises, community dialogues and studies about climate, peace and security. Member states that are suspicious of the mission’s climate-related efforts would likely attempt to strip out these initiatives during the budget negotiations in June, should the Security Council cut references to climate concerns.
How can UNMISS prepare itself?
UNMISS should focus on protecting civilians and easing rising ethnic tensions, South Sudan’s most acute and immediate threats to peace. To this end, the mission says it is engaging with key national forces and working alongside international and regional partners, including the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (a regional body aiming to promote development and peace), heads of state and the UN Security Council.
Nothing precludes the mission from seeking to incorporate environmental considerations into its peacekeeping efforts, even if references to the word “climate” are stripped from its mandate. There are various ways it can do so. First, peace dialogues facilitated by UNMISS to tackle resource-based violence may require that the mission follow up to ensure that climate resilience projects are completed. These dialogues can still make progress despite the conflict, and should be a first step in setting up projects such as improving drainage – helping floodwaters recede while protecting traditional livelihoods that depend on seasonal floods. Development partners and local authorities can see these projects through once they are agreed upon.
Critics say these dialogues fail to address elite control of land and resources, which drives a large share of the tensions between communities by feeding disputes over territory, grazing routes or water. Peace dialogues also fail when they exclude the leaders of armed youth groups – without them, any agreement becomes cosmetic rather than a basis for lasting solutions. Still, these dialogues have some value. While they are unlikely to change South Sudan’s entrenched political competition – the real engine of violence – they may help mitigate flare-ups of conflict related to water and land in the short term.
Secondly, UNMISS should ask for donor-backed technical support in flood and drought forecasting, providing for more systematic climate security analysis and scenario exercises. Long-term flood preparedness will require partnerships with scientific agencies like the IGAD’s Climate Prediction and Applications Centre, which is working with the South Sudanese government to improve forecasting. There is a dearth of hydrological and weather data in many regions of South Sudan.
Thirdly, although UNMISS peacekeepers and police do not need to become climate experts, they should seek to understand how floods and droughts shape organised violence and their operational responses. They should provide training on basic climate risks for new personnel. The mission’s engineers should also, where possible, assist in flood responses while improving the ways in which disaster operations pay heed to local conflict patterns. Infrastructure decisions, such as where to build dykes or repair flood defences, can shape population movements and disputes over land and resources. If the mission’s climate security adviser remains, he or she should support consultations with local communities to assess the risks that flooding may worsen conflict as well as how to plan relocations of people to avoid triggering intercommunal tensions. The government and its partners should strive to relocate displaced people only to areas where they have social ties and a receptive local community.
Finally, UNMISS should assist humanitarian and development organisations operating in climate-affected areas wherever possible. Without UN patrols or security escorts, aid groups struggle to reach at-risk populations, leaving communities for the most part to manage the effects of climate crises alone. The mission should expand patrols and provide escorts for aid convoys, particularly in flood-affected states such as Unity, Warrap and Jonglei, and strengthen cooperation with local responders. If security conditions allow, the mission should also commit to monthly expeditions to specific high-risk areas. Doing so would enable local groups to coordinate their work in partnership with these patrols, allowing humanitarian relief to reach the country’s most vulnerable people.
Across South Sudan, floods are cutting off access to hard-hit areas, displacement is fuelling tensions and armed groups are exploiting resource shortages. Even if the UN Security Council removes an explicit focus on “climate” as part of UNMISS’s mandate, the mission’s goal of shoring up stability in South Sudan makes it unavoidable that peacekeepers continue to tackle the ways that climate shocks are making the country more unsafe.