Regional Consultation for the South Caucasus--Azerbaijan and Georgia: Co-operation Opportunities for Addressing the Security Implications of Climate Change
Publisher: adelphi
Author(s): Lukas Rüttinger, Pia van Ackern, and Adrian Foong
Date: 2021
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Prevention, Cooperation, Disasters, Land, Renewable Resources
Countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia
Climate change can impact security in a number of ways. While it does not directly cause conflict, it interacts with other pressures including population growth, unequal economic development and resource constraints to influence security landscapes. In other words, climate change acts as a risk multiplier.
Against this backdrop, the OSCE, in partnership with adelphi, has embarked since 2020 on a new extra-budgetary financed project “Strengthening responses to security risks from climate change in South-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia” (Project Number: 1102151). This project builds on the results of an earlier OSCE project “Climate Change and Security in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the South Caucasus”, which was led by the OSCE and implemented together with the Environment and Security (ENVSEC) Initiative partners and with support of the European Union Instrument for Stability and the Austrian Development Agency.
The new project’s overall aims are to (1) identify and map potential climate-security hotspots, (2) develop and implement climate change and security risk reduction measures, (3) raise awareness of the linkages between climate change and security, and (4) conduct a gender analysis of climate security in the OSCE region.