At a high-level event in New York marking the release of The Independent’s Climate 100 List, David Miliband has issued a stark warning that the twin perils of war and climate change are breaking records while political will, financial investment, and media attention have vanished. The former foreign secretary, now president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, argued that the world’s most vulnerable communities — those who contributed least to the climate crisis — are being failed by an international system that prioritises air conditioning for Europe over adaptation for conflict zones.
The ministerial week of the United Nations General Assembly was meant to be a moment of global unity. Instead, Miliband told delegates, the world is witnessing a catastrophic collapse of leadership at the exact moment humanity faces hyper-connected risks and possesses untold resources. His message was clear: more air conditioning is not the answer. The real crisis lies where climate vulnerability meets conflict, poverty, and political fragility.
The Overlapping Crises
Miliband laid out a devastating statistic: 860 million people — nearly everyone living in a conflict-affected state — also reside in countries ranked in the top quartile for climate vulnerability. In 2025 alone, 22 of the 30 countries most exposed to climate disasters were also torn apart by violent conflict. By 2030, climate shocks are predicted to plunge more than 130 million people into extreme poverty, with 60 per cent of the world’s extreme poor trapped in fragile states and war zones.
These are places where climate exposure meets the consequences of conflict: weakened institutions, divided land, poverty, and massive displacement. In many, agriculture accounts for close to a quarter of economic output, yet only a tiny proportion of cultivated land is irrigated. Higher temperatures increase evaporation and dry soil. Rainfall becomes more erratic. Crop yields decline. Livestock suffers heat stress. Household incomes fall. Then food prices rise, assets are sold, children are taken out of school, and water points dry up.
Somalia’s recent history provides a chilling illustration. In 2022, 43,000 excess deaths were attributed to drought. The 2023 El Niño brought flooding that displaced 2.5 million people. And a “super” El Niño threatens the country again today. Compounding these climate events, armed militant groups control significant rural territory and at various times restrict humanitarian access, using control of water as a means of taxation and punishment.
Climate change does not mechanically cause wars, Miliband noted, but it does alter the environment in which politics, economics, and conflict operate. It damages agriculture, intensifies competition over land and water, and forces changes in migration patterns — all conflict multipliers. And conflict increases vulnerability to climate change by wrecking local economies.
The Adaptation Finance Gap
Despite the scale of the crisis, adaptation finance falls significantly short of the UN Secretary-General’s target of 50 per cent of all climate finance — a target that is itself inadequate. Current evidence indicates that the international system spends less than $3 per person per year on climate adaptation in high-intensity conflict zones, significantly less than least developed countries overall.
This is the result of a design failure in an aid system split three ways: climate, humanitarian, and development. Conflict-affected communities get humanitarian funds. Climate and development money goes to governments. Spending patterns for climate finance default to governance processes and institutions in stable countries rather than the highest level of need in fragile contexts.
The system waits for livestock to rot, children to starve, and societies to collapse before launching a single emergency appeal. Despite evidence showing early-warning systems yield a 10-to-1 return on investment, and 24 hours of warning before a storm or heatwave can reduce lives and resources lost by around 30 per cent.
Pre-arranged finance remains a tiny fraction of total crisis funding. Fragile states received only 7 per cent of total pre-arranged finance in 2024, and funding for anticipatory action — which pays out before the worst impacts of a climate shock — registered just over 2 per cent of international pre-arranged finance. In 2025, only $120 million was spent on anticipatory action responses out of a total aid budget of $174 billion. Only Germany has set a target of 5 per cent of its humanitarian budget for anticipatory action; the global figure is less than 1 per cent.
Proven Solutions in Conflict Zones
Miliband was careful to reject the narrative that nothing can be done in conflict settings. The IRC has identified four areas where proven adaptation options exist and can be scaled:
Anticipatory action means acting on a forecast rather than waiting until after a crisis has occurred. In Nigeria, anticipatory cash ahead of seasonal floods helped families protect small businesses and avoid selling off assets just to survive. In Somalia, households receiving anticipatory cash ahead of a drought used it to protect pastoralist livelihoods rather than watch them collapse and start over. One rebuilds after the loss; the other prevents it.
Seed security programmes work on the same principle — protecting and rebuilding a critical link in livelihoods before fractured institutions can be repaired. In northeast Syria, rather than distributing seeds season after season, the IRC helps build farmers’ capacity to identify, multiply, and share seeds that are more climate-adapted. Yield per hectare has run almost twice the local average, and even through the 2025 drought, held 20 per cent above yields grown outside the programme.
Water safety is another critical area. More than one million people die annually from bad water, and more than 1,000 children per day. The IRC is making in-line chlorination permanent — small, non-electric feeders that dose chlorine automatically. These systems need no power and keep working through the shocks that break everything else. The current programme will reach more than 1.75 million crisis-affected people across Nigeria, Chad, and Somalia, with models projecting safe chlorination for around $1 per person per year.
Energy access is the fourth pillar. Nearly all critical activities require power — clinics cannot refrigerate vaccines without it, and farmers cannot pump water without it. Climate change squeezes supply from both sides: heat spikes demand energy for cooling and strains the grid, while drought cuts hydropower at the exact moment communities need more electricity. The IRC is helping local operators replace diesel pumps with solar, cutting costs and keeping systems running through fuel disruptions caused by conflict and drought. In Somalia, this has cut the cost of borehole water supply from $10 to under $4 per person per year.
Rethinking Finance and Delivery
To realise this vision, Miliband identified four problems that must be tackled. The mindset must shift from fast reaction to pre-emptive action. Delivery requires moving beyond the assumption of a functioning state — civil society, local organisations, and humanitarian actors need to become part of the climate-finance architecture, not as an afterthought but as delivery partners. The World Bank’s new strategy for fragility, conflict, and violence recognises this, and the Green Climate Fund has pledged to drive $2 billion of its funding across 31 fragile and conflict-affected states.
On finance, Miliband proposed three specific tools. First, parametric insurance — the leading edge of pre-arranged finance. The IRC implements a trial in Kenya with UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office support, the world’s first model to apply parametric insurance specifically to protect education continuity. Two insurance payouts for drought have already supported more than 7,600 families with cash assistance and 28,000 with remote education.
Second, debt swaps. Despite 3.4 billion people living in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education, there has never been a humanitarian debt swap. Miliband proposes taking the machinery developed for debt-for-nature swaps and applying it to humanitarian need, mobilising guarantees from multilateral development banks to lower refinancing costs and directing savings to climate adaptation.
Third, support for indigenous private sector activity in conflict settings. British International Investment’s new strategy commits to earmarking 40 per cent of new investments up to 2031 as climate finance, with 25 per cent to frontier markets — potentially leveraging aid for least developed countries in contexts where private capital would not otherwise go.
The Path to COP31
With COP31 in Türkiye approaching in two months, Miliband urged global leaders to move from words to action. The summit offers an opportunity to make climate finance easier to access in fragile countries — to simplify bureaucratic processes, invest in local capacity, recalibrate risk calculations, and incentivise innovation with a focus on outcomes for people.
The UK and the Bridgetown Initiative are working together to increase pre-arranged finance to 20 per cent of crisis financing by 2035. The UK’s G20 presidency next year is an important moment to turn this pledge into reality.
Miliband’s message was ultimately one of possibility, not just lament. The poorest people in the world need action now, not in two months’ time. The tools exist. The evidence is clear. What is missing is the political will to deploy them.
Why it Matters
The climate crisis is not a distant threat for millions of people in conflict zones — it is an immediate, daily reality that is already costing lives. The current system’s failure to deliver adaptation finance to those who need it most is not just an injustice; it is a strategic failure that fuels further instability, displacement, and conflict. As climate impacts intensify and conflict zones multiply, the world faces a choice: continue with a broken model that responds only after disasters strike, or embrace a fundamentally different approach that builds resilience before crises hit. The evidence shows that anticipatory action and pre-arranged finance deliver exceptional returns — both in human lives saved and in economic benefits. The tools exist. The question is whether global leaders will muster the political will to deploy them at the scale required. The communities caught between climate change and conflict cannot wait for the next summit or the next headline. They need action now.