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- This month’s Climate Summit hosted by the United Nations secretary-general will focus on raising climate ambition from countries otherwise distracted by new global conflicts and power politics.
- With the world currently on track for a global temperature rise of 2–3°C by 2100, future warming could likely destabilize geopolitics further.
- Three areas to watch as the world rapidly warms include growing climate impacts to energy security, rising migration and border insecurity, and faltering earth systems as we approach potential planetary tipping points.
World leaders are meeting in New York this month at the request of the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to discuss the state of global ambition on climate change. Faced with flagging public attention and slowing momentum around climate action, Guterres’s Climate Summit 2025 on September 24 will call on governments to pledge new national emissions reduction plans under the Paris Agreement. With the world on track for an increase in global temperature of about 2°C by 2100 if governments fulfill all their pledges for future mitigation, and over 3°C of warming if they continue with current policies, efforts to ratchet up climate commitments and their implementation are more critical than ever.
Yet even more than in years past, this Climate Summit comes at a moment of increasing geopolitical instability, fracturing international cooperation, constrained budgets, and rising global conflict. Fossil fuel consumption and energy-sector emissions are hitting all-time highs, while political hostilities to the global energy transition and a renewed focus on energy security throw doubt on national promises to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Against this backdrop of stalling action and diminishing consensus, it is time to take a hard look at the course the climate is on and the projections for an increasingly unstable world.
Reaching 2–3°C of temperature rise by the end of this century is a rapid trajectory that few governments, businesses, or institutions have fully accounted for. Even in the near term, this pace of warming will stress many energy, food, and water systems and wreak havoc across financial systems due to widescale insurance losses. And in the medium to long term, the new normal of climate instability will create increasingly uninhabitable regions and exacerbated hotspots of geopolitical contestation. Three potential flashpoints not likely to make it onto the Climate Summit agenda but that may come to define the future of global climate politics are energy system threats, migration and border conflicts, and planetary tipping points.
Energy System Threats
With most climate advocacy focused on stemming greenhouse gas emissions from energy, the sector’s vulnerability to the climate crisis itself can often be overlooked. Energy supply, demand, infrastructure, and reliability are all affected by more frequent and severe extreme weather, and these impacts become even more severe on longer timescales with higher emissions trajectories. The International Energy Agency finds that by 2100, 95% of refineries in low-lying areas could experience an over 0.6 meter seal-level rise, and 10% could see an over 1 meter rise. Coal, gas, oil, and nuclear power plants are threatened by tropical storms and drought conditions, while hydropower faces increased variability in both maximum and minimum precipitation extremes.
And the IEA estimates that rising temperatures and demand for cooling could “trigger a 7–17% increase in energy consumption by 2050,” putting increasing demands on systems already strained by those same weather conditions.
These growing impacts come at a time when electricity demand is already increasing rapidly due to electrification, AI, and data center demands as well as population growth. But perhaps more critically, these stressors are occurring in a period of renewed struggles between nations over energy resources. The confluence of climate and geopolitics can be seen with water-stressed Egypt’s and Somalia’s bitter opposition to Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam, or Russia’s 2022 cut-off of gas supply to Europe, striking at the same time that historically low water levels diminished nuclear and hydropower production. Climate change’s growing impacts to energy supply and demand will be compounded by political realities to create increasingly tense energy contestation across borders.
Migration and Border Conflicts
As regions across the world face an onslaught of more extreme weather, it won’t just be economic or political factors that drive populations from their homes. Today, most people will migrate within their home countries following natural disasters or drought, as has been seen with the more than 4 million Somalis internally displaced by drought, floods, and insecurity since 2020; the 8 million Pakistanis displaced by historic floods in 2022; and the millions of Pakistanis and Indians displaced again this month due to catastrophic monsoon rains and floods. Increasingly, displaced populations in low-income countries will look to remove themselves from continued environmental peril and migrate across borders to Europe, North America, or Australia.
Despite more attention to cross-border migration in recent years, countries still have not agreed to a legal regime governing the movement of peoples displaced by either sudden weather disasters or slow-onset environmental causes. And with the existing refugee regime consensus already fracturing under rising numbers of migrants and political backlash, views toward migrants are increasingly hostile. Negative attitudes toward climate-induced migrants in receiving countries has been found increasingly to be a driver of interstate conflict, with the likelihood of those conflicts increasing with rising temperatures and extreme precipitation. And it is not just migration that is intensifying border conflicts—climate changes along the India-China and Greece-Turkey border regions are contributing to increased military confrontations and resource tensions.
Planetary Tipping Points
Most of today’s historic weather disasters pale in comparison to what climate scientists find a 2–3°C warmer world could incur: the breakdown of earth systems central to the regulation of the planet. These “climate tipping points” are so-called because once certain thresholds are breached, the damages are likely irreversible and cascading. Recent research shows that many of these tipping points could be surpassed this century on current warming trajectories, from the dieback of the Amazon rainforest to the collapse of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the thaw of northern boreal permafrost, and the die-off of global coral reefs. Each of these systems, once gone, would trigger “feedback loops” of sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and natural emissions, further elevating the projections for extreme weather, infrastructure loss, and food insecurity across the globe.
These tipping points are slow to enter mainstream climate negotiations let alone security discussions, but their implications are so widespread that avoiding them could come to dominate the global agenda as our warming trajectory nears the lower bounds of each threshold’s uncertainty ranges. Geoengineering, which could include techniques such as reflecting sunlight away from the planet by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or creating sea walls to prevent warm water from flowing to Antarctic ice sheets, represents a broad category of potential responses. But as yet untested, each of these techniques would likely necessitate its own global research program and negotiation stream before implementation—and their development is already politically fraught.
One can imagine a not-too-distant future in which the climate political squabbles among governments are not focused on emissions reduction pledges but instead on who gets to dominate increasingly stressed energy systems, who gets to escape climate disaster zones or control cross-border resources, and who will govern geoengineering interventions at a regional or planetary scale. For now, these topics remain tangential to the discussion and absent from the top concerns of security leaders globally. But if the secretary-general’s push for faster and bolder climate mitigation action is ignored by countries caught up in pressing geopolitical concerns, they will soon find those concerns dangerously multiplying.
