Weathering Risk Climate Security Risk Assessment Methodology - Guide and Tools

By Lukas Rüttinger, Janani Vivekananda, and Alexandra Steinkraus

Introduction

The climate crisis is one of the most serious risks to global peace and stability in the 21st century. Failure to understand and address interacting climate and conflict risks will undermine the sustainability of both peace and climate policies. The first step to reduce these risks then is to understand them through a thorough climate security risk assessment. This allows international organisations, practitioners and policy makers in multiple sectors to then prioritise entry points for action to promote sustainable peace and prevent the emergence and escalation of conflict linked to climate change impacts. This note sets out guidance and tools on how to do this.

The methodology and guidance were developed as part of Weathering Risk, a multilateral initiative that aims to facilitate risk-informed planning, enhance capacity for action and improve operational responses that promote climate resilience and peace. The first iteration of the Weathering Risk methodology consisted of five integrated steps to enable and guide our own risk assessments. However, not all of those steps were intended to be replicable. Based on two years of field testing through over twelve Weathering Risk assessments on the ground from the Pacific to the Levant, we adapted the original approach to make it easier, replicable and usable.

This approach builds upon other assessment methodologies, in particular the existing approaches that are used for climate impact, vulnerability and resilience assessments as well as peace and conflict analysis.

Aims and Use Cases

The Weathering Risk methodology and approach allow users to:

• Identify and understand current and future climate-related security risks;

• Assess and understand current and future dimensions of resilience against climate-related security risks;

• Identify possible entry points and response measures.

While our methodology focusses on understanding and addressing localised climate security risks, it can be applied at different scales from the local to the regional and global. To this end this document outlines a comprehensive climate-security assessment methodology. It combines state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative methods in an innovative way. Specifically, this assessment methodology:

• Integrates quantitative and qualitative methods to climate-security analysis;

• Includes high resolution climate impact data, conflict analysis and scenario methods;

• Is flexible in application in terms of geography and depth of analysis and

• Is forward looking.

The approach was specifically developed to build upon existing analysis and work even when climate data availability is limited. Valuable risk and resilience building entry point insights can still be ascertained with limited, macro-level or patchy climate data using this methodological approach.

The approach is specifically targeted at the following use cases and user groups:

1. Enabling and informing national, sub-national and international policymaking for climate security of for example national ministries or international organisations.

2. Supporting UN analyses and planning processes such as the Climate Security Mechanism (CSM) assessments, Climate Change Risk Management Framework and Common Country Assessments.

3. Adding climate dimensions to peacebuilding and humanitarian interventions and informing peace programming.

4. Anticipating conflict, informing preventive action and adding a peacebuilding dimension to climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA/M), resilience and development programming.