Climate security across scales

Addressing growing needs of cooling: a multi-scale hierarchical cooling framework Extreme heat has become one of the fastest growing stressors on both power systems and human health. Conventional adaptation has centered on expanding air-conditioning (AC) capacity, yet this approach amplifies peak electricity demand, strains grids during heat waves, raises energy costs, and leaves large portion of populations vulnerable to outages. In the last few decades, building science has produced isolated advances- from urban shading and reflective envelopes to passive and localized building solutions and personal cooling devices but these remain fragmented. We aim to integrate these scattered domains into a multi-scale hierarchical cooling framework that links interventions across scales—from urban design and building resilience to room-level and personal strategies. Through collaborations with U.S. and international researchers, we are exploring this framework. Ten questions concerning thermal resilience of buildings and occupants for climate adaptation. https://lnkd.in/gVs76ctK Cooling people, not spaces: Surmounting the risks of air-conditioning over-reliance. https://lnkd.in/gt-rHKrt Thermal resilience of buildings and communities: A multi-stakeholder review of metrics and approaches. https://lnkd.in/gmxe6aKd City scale - Cooling Los Angeles. coming ... City scale - Mapping Heat Vulnerability in Cities: A Tale of Two California Cities. https://lnkd.in/gc9WF-Uj District scale - Quantifying the Energy Impact of Heat Mitigation Technologies at the Urban Scale. https://lnkd.in/gJxmNux6 Building scale - Assessing Thermal Resilience of an Assisted Living Facility during Heat Waves and Cold Snaps with Power Outages. https://lnkd.in/g-rMQuQS Room scale - Cool Rooms for Indoor Heat Resilience: Evaluating Affordable Cooling Strategies in Heat-Stressed California Homes. https://lnkd.in/g2Dw2hwg Cooling shelter - Evaluating indoor thermal resilience of passive and low-power cooling shelters for outdoor workers in India Human scale - A prototype cooling blanket for mitigating occupant overheating risk in a hot indoor environment: Modeling and assessments. https://lnkd.in/gS2XAXye Mat Santamouris, Jeetika Malik, Kaiyu Sun, Max Wei, Yilin Jiang, Wanni Zhang, Amanda Krelling, Dorit Aviv, Da Yan, Yi Wu, Ashok Gadgil, Hui Zhang, Nathaniel Jones, Roberto Lamberts, Christopher Perry, Yujie Xu

Recently Independent Evaluation Unit, Green Climate Fund published the Health and Wellbeing, Food, and Water Security (HWFW) Result Area which reflects a profound truth embedded in climate action: Health, food, and water security are essential components of human survival and foundational pillars of any equitable, resilient, and thriving society. Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities, disrupts livelihoods, and undermines fundamental human rights to health, nutrition, and access to safe water. Without targeted action on these fronts, sustainable development will remain a distant dream. The Paris Agreement and the #SDGs enshrine the global commitment to tackle climate change while ensuring human dignity. The HWFW Result Area operates at the nexus of these priorities, addressing the immediate impacts of climate change to enable systemic, paradigm-shifting change across sectors. The GCF's investments in climate-smart agriculture, access to potable water, and disaster resilience have saved lives and sustained livelihoods in vulnerable regions, such as by introducing drought-resistant crops and building resilient water infrastructure, water conservation and early warning systems. Yet, as the evaluation report reveals, we are faced with both progress and essential challenges that demand urgent, collective action. Enhanced and diversified climate financing is critical for driving transformative change in food, water, and health systems in vulnerable communities. With nearly USD 7 billion already committed to HWFW-tagged programs and significant co-financing leveraged as catalytic investments, it's clear that innovative financing models—through equity investments, de-risking approaches, and blended finance—can unlock much-needed resources to reach the target for USD 1.15 trillion per year. Building donor confidence and strengthening future programming calls for collective action. Governments and global stakeholders must prioritize integrated approaches that link health, food, and water systems while adopting rigorous tracking indicators to drive accountability. Embracing co-benefits such as gender inclusion and social impact, and ensuring sustained, predictable donor funding are not just strategic imperatives—they are moral responsibilities. Let's unite to build resilient, climate-smart systems that safeguard lives and livelihoods around the world. Full report is here https://lnkd.in/gDvp_ajG #climateaction #watersecurity  #foodsecurity  #climateresilience  #globalsustainability  #healthandclimate  #adapttoclimatechange  #climatesmartagriculture  #biodiversityconservation  #genderequality  #healthyplanet  #climatejustice  #communityresilience  #greenfinancing  

Climate risks don’t act alone, especially in vulnerable regions. They combine with political tensions, livelihood stress, and weak institutions to create complex, fast-moving challenges for peace and human security. And so, we need tools that can answer critical questions faced by practitioners today: 🔹 Where is climate amplifying conflict and insecurity? 🔹 How do shocks to food, water, and livelihoods drive tension? 🔹 How can we integrate community knowledge with data for early warning? 🔹 What gaps in policy or institutions stall effective response? This is why my colleagues and I developed the Integrated Climate Security Framework (ICSF) - a tool to inform real-world decisions in fragile and climate-vulnerable settings. So what can our integrated framework do in the field? ✔️ Help target interventions in climate-security hotspots ✔️ Profile vulnerable groups with layered socio-economic and exposure data ✔️ Understand how food and nutrition insecurity mediates conflict risk ✔️ Reveal policy and institutional gaps that shape (or stall) adaptation ✔️ Build shared understanding across stakeholders—from local to national The ICSF was applied in many countries across the globe, but was designed to be adapted. If you’re a practitioner, implementer, or policymaker working on climate and security, it may offer a useful structure for your context too. 📄 We published the framework on PLOS Climate. Read here: https://lnkd.in/e8djSPUG

We often talk about climate change as a threat multiplier for conflict. But we rarely discuss how violent extremism actively destroys climate adaptation efforts. A vital new report from Dylan O'Driscoll and colleagues maps exactly how this vicious cycle plays out on the ground in northeastern Kenya. Based on extensive fieldwork in Garissa and Wajir counties, the authors identify 11 distinct linkages between climate stress and violent extremism (VE), which cluster around four core elements: ⏩ Livelihood Destruction: Recurrent droughts and floods wipe out pastoral economies, making desperate individuals vulnerable to VE actors who step in to offer food, wages, or loans. ⏩ Altered Mobility: Climate-forced migration pushes communities into remote, insecure areas where state presence is weak and VE groups operate and exploit vulnerabilities. ⏩ Breakdown of Social Systems: Widespread asset loss destroys traditional community safety nets, creating isolation and a loss of status that extremist groups exploit. ⏩ Governance Voids: Climate shocks overwhelm weak public services, fueling state-directed grievances that VE actors use to build legitimacy by filling the void. Crucially, the report shows that the presence of extremist actors makes it nearly impossible for the state to deliver adaptation programs. Security isn't just a byproduct of climate adaptation; it is a prerequisite for it. Excellent, field-driven research by Fathima Azmiya Badurdeen, Joel Busher, Wilson Ndenyele, Dylan O'Driscoll, and Sheila Ronoh. What do you think? Where else are we seeing climate adaptation projects fail because they ignore underlying security and governance voids? #ClimateSecurity #ClimateAdaptation #Governance

Climate change is not going away. But the risks need to be read together with geopolitical insecurity, and the solutions seen through the lens of resilience capital. The Financial Times reports today that 60% of the US is in drought — the highest since records began. Nebraska lost 640,000 acres to wildfire in March. Snowpack across the west is critically low. Only a third of winter wheat is in good condition. A hot summer is forecast. Read the article and you find a line that deserves much more attention: US farmers are already contending with rising fertiliser and fuel costs as a result of the Middle East war — and this despite the US producing around three-quarters of its own fertiliser. A third of global seaborne fertiliser trade normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping transits have dropped by over 95%. Urea prices have surged 50% in six weeks. The FAO has warned of 15–20% higher fertiliser prices through the first half of 2026. American farmers are the world's largest importers of urea, and they are making their spring planting purchases right now, at the worst possible moment. So read the drought story again with that context. You have: a climate-driven collapse in water and soil conditions across the agricultural heartland. A fire season already underway. A geopolitical shock cutting off the primary input for food production. A spring planting window closing. And a food commodity stress signal that markets have not yet fully priced. The question for capital allocators is no longer just whether to price physical climate risk — but whether they can read compound risk and invest in climate resilience. This is what systemic insecurity looks like in practice. It is not just a single catastrophe, but a compound failure — where physical climate stress and geopolitical disruption hit the same systems, at the same moment, with no buffer between them. Attaching the FT article in the comments. Would be curious how others are connecting these dots across climate, food, water, energy and geopolitical risk right now. #ClimateRisk #ResilienceCapital #EnergyGeopolitics Earth Security