When Climate Meets Conflict: Designing Finance and Development for Fragile Settings
About the session
Climate change does not simply cause conflict.
Drought does not automatically produce violence. Flooding does not inevitably destabilize a country. Food insecurity does not mechanically lead to political unrest.
What climate shocks can do is intensify pressures that already exist.
When livelihoods disappear, resources become scarcer, people are displaced, institutions are weak, and mechanisms for resolving disputes are absent or mistrusted, climate stress can make already fragile situations considerably harder to manage.
And that creates a difficult contradiction for climate action:
Some of the places that most urgently need adaptation investment are also the places conventional investment finds hardest to reach.
Fragile and conflict-affected settings often combine enormous climate exposure with precisely the conditions that make funders and investors nervous: political instability, weak institutions, limited data, uncertain regulation, currency risk, disrupted infrastructure, and the possibility of renewed violence.
Conventional risk frameworks respond rationally by demanding greater certainty.
The communities living there do not have the luxury of waiting for it.
Sudan offers an extreme example. A devastating humanitarian crisis is unfolding alongside environmental and climate pressures affecting agriculture, water, displacement, and livelihoods.
Syria presents a different set of questions about what rebuilding institutions, civil society, and economic opportunity looks like after years of conflict and upheaval.
Across fragile and frontier contexts in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, decisions about where climate and development capital goes are inseparable from questions about power.
Who controls the resources?
Who gets consulted?
Which institutions receive the money?
Who is considered sufficiently trustworthy to manage it?
And who gets excluded because they do not look investable to institutions thousands of miles away?
The organizations closest to communities navigating climate stress and conflict are often local civil society organizations, women-led groups, community institutions, and informal networks. Yet these can also be among the hardest organizations for international finance systems to fund directly.
That makes climate adaptation in fragile settings more than an engineering problem.
It is an institutional and political one.
Climate-proofing a community may require stronger infrastructure, better water systems, more resilient agriculture, or new sources of energy. But resilience also depends on whether people trust the institutions making decisions, whether resources are distributed fairly, whether disputes can be resolved peacefully, and whether communities have meaningful power over the choices affecting them.
So what would climate finance look like if it were designed for fragility rather than treating fragility as a reason not to invest?
And what could happen if the people working on climate, peacebuilding, humanitarian response, development, and investment started designing those systems together?
Discussion Group Leaders
Kevin Melton is CEO at Pax Strategies, strengthening organizations to navigate complexity, build trusted partnerships, and translate ideas into practical, lasting impact.
Peter van Sluijs is Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention Expert at CSPPS / Cordaid, advancing locally led approaches to peacebuilding, conflict prevention, and more inclusive responses in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
Tiffany Duque is Global Head, MotherStrong at EinStrong Foundation, advancing support and opportunities for mothers and families through community-centered initiatives.
Khalid Ali is MD at The Proximate Fund Sudan, advancing investment, reconstruction, and systems change across Africa and fragile contexts, particularly Sudan.
Mark Waddington is Chief Executive at Hope and Homes for Children, advancing systemic change in humanitarian and international development approaches to improve outcomes for vulnerable children.
What to expect
A cross-disciplinary working conversation grounded in experience from fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
Participants will examine two questions together: how climate stress interacts with conflict, governance, inequality, and political grievances, and what that means for the practical design of finance, development, adaptation, and civil society support.
The aim is not to collapse climate and conflict into a single problem. It is to identify where the systems built to address them separately are failing communities experiencing both simultaneously.
Who this is for
This session is for climate finance professionals, development practitioners, peacebuilders, humanitarian organizations, conflict prevention specialists, civil society leaders from conflict-affected contexts, investors working in fragile and frontier markets, and people working on climate or development who need to understand the political and conflict dynamics surrounding their work.
What you will get out of it
A more nuanced framework for understanding how climate stress can interact with governance, inequality, displacement, resource pressures, and existing conflict dynamics
Ground-level perspectives on what development and civil society building look like in fragile and conflict-affected contexts
Practical questions for designing climate finance and investment where conventional approaches to risk can exclude the communities most exposed to climate shocks
A clearer understanding of why adaptation depends on institutions, legitimacy, participation, and power as well as physical infrastructure
Connections across climate, peacebuilding, humanitarian response, development finance, and investment communities that too often approach the same places through separate systems