“Securitizing climate change is a trap”: Sidney Michelini on Why Treating Climate Change as a Security Threat Fails the Global South’s Fight for Climate Justice

At this very moment, when escalating wars and rising tensions—involving the United States, Israel and Iran, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan—dominate global headlines, our February edition on ‘Conflict and Nature’ could not be more relevant or timely for our readers.

As part of the editorial team of Nature Insights, I am truly honored to feature an interview with Sidney Michelini, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) in Germany and a member of its Research Group on Ecology, Climate, and Conflict. Holding a PhD from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Michelini focuses on the complex relationship between climate change and violence. At this critical moment, his insights bring a much-needed global perspective that our readers demand, helping them connect the dots between natural crises and systems of conflict.

Alkuma Rumi: Thank you for joining us, Sidney. I want to thank you again for so articulately addressing all the questions I sent ahead of our interview. To start our conversation, I’d like to start with a foundational question related to our February theme, ‘Conflict & Nature.’ Could you please share your thoughts on the relationship between conflict and nature?

Sidney Michelini: First, to understand the broad relationship between violence and the environment, I think we must understand that violence is fundamentally a political phenomenon that happens at an entire societal level. Here, I am mainly speaking about organized armed violence. If you think about a civil war or an external war, when large parts of society are mobilized. The political system has to make all sorts of adjustments to engage in combat, which is extraordinarily destructive. So, you have a process of social transformation. This means that due to conflict, all aspects of society change, from how we farm to what people do, and from how we mobilize resources to what type of resources we mobilize. All of these systems that maintain human life are deeply intertwined with what we call our ‘environment or nature.’

Conceptually, instead of viewing it as sort of like "people here" and "the environment over there," we need to understand that humans and their environment are deeply intertwined. I don’t mean this in an idealistic way where we put nature on posters. I mean, you have a water system, a food system, and a transport system all of which are supported by nature. These systems sustain our lives, communities, and states through the specific ways we manage nature.

Since the environment is intertwined with life in all sorts of ways, it makes total sense that violence, which is a fundamental reorganization of political life—would have all sorts of implications on nature. I think that's the conceptual way to think about conflict and nature.

Alkuma Rumi: But, when we think about conflict, we usually focus on human casualties and political outcomes; often, the impact of conflict or violence on nature goes unnoticed. What’s your opinion on that?

Sidney Michelini: I don’t see it as a problem. Violence is political and it tends to cause a huge amount of destruction and suffering. So, focusing on the contested political outcomes and the ‘costs’ of war makes sense both analytically and ethically. However, we have a problem if we fail to see that conflict is often a process involving different groups in society that reshaps all aspects of daily life in profound ways. There are prominent examples of this, such as the concern that Russian missiles would strike a Ukrainian nuclear facility and cause a nuclear disaster. That’s a case where the environmental aspects are obvious.

However, there are also important cases where the ‘environmental’ aspects are less obvious. For example, a colleague of mine, Mahamadou Aroubi, just completed a master’s thesis focused on how ongoing violence in Mali shapes the economy in and around the city of Gao. He showed that because armed groups continuously steal cattle as a way to sustain (and sometimes enrich) themselves, farmers couldn’t keep cattle. This was a serious problem for farmers because it reduced farm yields, undermined their ability to subsist, and forced them to migrate (generally to cities or mining areas), thus making them further exploitable by various armed actors who profit from controlling transportation routes. This is a pretty straightforward example of violence reorganizing political and economic life, where cattle (as well as other plants and animals) are an important part of how society functions.

I just gave a few examples of how conflict reorganized local, region, and sometimes global ecologies. Thus, when human society undergoes processes as transformative and destructive as violent conflict, it’s not surprising that our relationship with the natural world changes in important ways as well.

Alkuma Rumi: Moving specifically to the climate crisis, there is a narrative that climate change is a primary driver of conflicts. How does your research approach this relationship?

Sidney Michelini: Conceptually, I use causal inference. This means comparing places with similar socioeconomic, political, and demographic characteristics, where some places experience climate-related extreme events, while others don’t. If places experiencing drought have more conflict deaths than those that do not, then we may be able to say that droughts, which are linked to climate change, have shifted conflict dynamics. Both my research and the literature at large tend to show small effects. It’s true that extreme weather impacts can increase the frequency and intensity of conflicts, though they can also decrease conflict in some cases.

Alkuma Rumi: However, Sidney, much of the discussion over the past decades has focused on how climate change might trigger conflict. But your work flips this idea: you argue that organized violence and conflict can actually drive climate change. Could you explain to our readers how this happens?

Sidney Michelini: The basic way is that conflict involves a large amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Furthermore, maintaining standing armed forces and the infrastructures to support them is resource intensive, which involves significant amounts of emissions.

Alkuma Rumi: That makes sense, but do we have concrete data on it?

Sidney Michelini: There’s very little data on this, and what we have suggests that the size of military emissions varies significantly between countries. For example, in the U.K., military emissions are 1% of national emissions, and they’re around 0.25% in Germany. This is just for emissions from within the military. It counts things like flying a plane, but it doesn’t count the emissions that go into making a plane. I cited in a recent paper, that when you account for the full scope of emissions associated with all aspects of military activity, the figure is around 5% of global emissions.

Here, two things are important to remember. First, that number of extremely provisional because we have very little data came from a think tank that advocates for more action to reduce military emissions. Second, this does not mean that 5% of global emissions do not show up in current emissions statistics. If you build a plane in a factory, that should show up somewhere in statistics for industrial emissions.

Alkuma Rumi: Could you tell us why the research community has historically overlooked the military’s role as a driver of nature destruction?

Sidney Michelini: To be clear, I am able to tell you the story I did precisely because some researchers did good work on military emissions. However, there are several barriers to researching them. The most important thing is that the data is really sparse. Militaries tend not to report much. And so it’s difficult to work on military emissions. Furthermore, military emissions have already been researched to some extent by researchers focusing on other areas. For example, someone working on decarbonizing the power grid or scaling up green steel production is, de facto, working on military emissions because these things contribute to military emissions. Finally, military emissions are relatively small and hard to abate.

Alkuma Rumi: Alright. Now tell us, can war-induced natural degradation increase a region’s vulnerability to climate change? If so, how?

Sidney Michelini: In principle, yes. The most obvious example is landmines; environmental destruction – caused directly by military action – renders land difficult to use, causes local pollution, and creates a significant resource burden to manage. Furthermore, increased risks of floods, wildfires, and other extreme weather events have the potential to resurface mines or detonate mines. More research is needed here, but it’s a straightforward example of what you described.

However, in my view, the systemic destruction is even more critical. Put simply, if you want to reduce vulnerability to climate change, you need to do two things. First, you need to make some changes to the local environment. People in Bangladesh are quite familiar with the challenges associated with building and planning around the increased risks of floods and trying to prepare for the fact that these risks will increase over time. That part is explicitly environmentally focused.

Second, you need to build systems that provide for people’s basic needs. You need a food system that successfully supplies nutritious food, a health system that offers preventative care, and an environment that provides safe and adequate housing for everyone. It's true that reducing vulnerability to climate change means making these things more resilient to e.g. droughts, floods, etc., for many people, the central issue is that these systems either don’t exist or are inadequate.  And violent conflict is often directly destructive of these systems or prevents them from developing as they need to.

Alkuma Rumi: Your concept of 'Green Extractivism' which I got to know from your paper warns that the rush for clean energy minerals triggers violence. We are currently seeing an intensifying conflict in the DRC. As the Global North decarbonizes to save its environment, are we inadvertently fueling a new era of 'resource wars' in the Global South? How can we break the cycle where protecting nature in one part of the world destroys peace in another?

Sidney Michelini: First, I have two corrections. One, ‘Green Extractivism’ is not my concept. It’s often used in academic and activist discussions, particularly (I believe) in Latin America. Second, resources are not the main cause of violence in DRC. That doesn’t mean that resources play no role in the conflict. However, it’s important to remember that natural resource extraction is an important sector in the DRC economy. The economy plays an important role in conflict everywhere. So, when people say resources as driving conflict in one place or another, without specifying how, they’re really just noting that the economy plays a role—which is almost always true.

On the issue of mining specifically, I believe that there is a serious need for international cooperation (both North-South and otherwise) to try to improve the safety and environmental standards around mines everywhere, but particularly in the Global South. Mining is often destructive and comes with environmental costs, but European mines have fewer (not “no”) environmental costs than those in e.g. Zambia, where there was a recent mining disaster, because Europe has better environmental standards. I don’t work on the political economy of mining, so I cannot offer many solutions here.

Alkuma Rumi: Finally, looking at cases such as Gaza and the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, where conflict has not only displaced people but also transformed landscapes — straining water systems, forests, and already fragile environments. What do these cases reveal about how modern conflicts spill over into borders and ecological disaster?

Sidney Michelini: Both cases you cited are examples where the ICJ may very well find a state in violation of the Genocide Convention. This is crucial because the environmental harms are not a new type of harm or a new aspect of the conflict. The environmental destruction is integrated into these processes of mass violence and warfare and, at least in the Palestinian case which I know better, colonialization. There has been a significant amount of research on how the Israeli state’s control of water resources prevents Palestinians from using their own water resources in ways they see fit, as well as deprives them of an equal share of the regions water resources. This environmental inequality and environmental damage is directly caused by the fact that the Israeli state’s military advantage creates a massive power imbalance between the Israeli state and the Palestinian authority as well as Palestinian society in general.

And so, it’s absolutely crucial when thinking about the relationship between violence and the environment to understand that the environment is a part of all of the various infrastructures that make human life possible. We must then think about how violence changes, shifts, and sometimes destroys these systems and their relationship with the natural world.

Alkuma Rumi: Looking back at the 12-Day War in 2025, when the United States and Israel carried out strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, there were also concerns about attacks on oil and energy infrastructure. From an environmental perspective, how should we understand the potential ecological consequences of such military strikes? (Note: This interview was conducted before the recent 2026 U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran.)

Sidney Michelini: I’ve been on record criticizing the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. I haven’t seen estimates of the scale of the environmental damage caused by the strikes on the oil facilities. If you have seen credible research, feel free to link the readers to that.

Alkuma Rumi: Aside from a few news portals suggesting potential environmental consequences of the attacks, no credible information has surfaced yet. However, as we near the end of our interview, is there anything you would like to add to our discussion today? Perhaps one message you want to leave with our readers especially those in the Global South who are living on the front lines of both climate change and these systemic injustices?

Sidney Michelini: The big one for me is that: Securitizing climate change is a trap.

It is very tempting for leaders in the Global South to frame climate change as a security threat. Securitizing climate change—emphasizing the security aspects—will not help leaders from the Global South achieve the goals most of their citizens have. If you say, “Northerners are causing climate change,” which is mostly true, complicated but true, and that this is leading to conflict in your societies, you are hoping you will get more resources for sustainable development. It seems much more likely to me that what you will get if you frame climate change as a ‘security issue’, you will get "securitized" policies from Northern states—more borders, more military interventions, and more surveillance.

It is important to emphasize that climate change is an act of massive global environmental injustice. And that citizens of southern states in particular, are bearing the brunt of that. However, framing this as a security issue is not likely to help achieve the goals of citizens. It may occasionally achieve the goals of governments, but it won’t lead to better lives for citizens.

There's always a temptation to talk about security aspects because they make it sound important, immediate and salient and they bring sort of attention to the issue. But it will not lead to the better relations, more resources and better engagement from the Global North that citizens of Southern countries I know are deeply hoping for. I'm just telling you: securitizing climate change will not get you there. This does not work. And I think that that's really important that both readers and policy makers, sort of broadly speaking, around the world understand.

Alkuma Rumi: That is a striking and thought-provoking perspective to end on. This is precisely the kind of unique, critical insight we aim to bring to our readers. Thank you so much for your time, Sidney. We truly appreciate your time and the depth you’ve brought to this conversation.

Sidney Michelini: You’re welcome. Good luck with the magazine.