The EU’s Triple-Nexus Challenge: Climate, Conflict, Democracy
Publisher: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Author(s): Richard Youngs, Ricardo Farinha, Jasper Linke, and Jeremy Wetterwald
Date: 2024
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Conflict Prevention, Programming
Countries: European Union
The EU’s fragmented approaches to the crises of climate change, conflict, and democracy fall short by not addressing the mutually reinforcing links between them. Brussels needs an integrated strategy to tackle the emerging three-way nexus and mitigate the vulnerabilities it creates.
In the last several years, the European Union (EU) has been understandably preoccupied with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the need to strengthen military defense capabilities. This focus on classical military security may well have been necessary, but has at least partly displaced longer-term and nontraditional security issues from the EU’s external agenda. As the new EU leadership takes office, this trend looks set to extend even further.
Yet, while a tragic war unfolds in Ukraine, other challenges show no sign of abating. Indeed, a more structural, underlying pattern has rooted itself in many of the countries that are high priorities for EU foreign policy: Climate stresses, conflict dynamics, and governance problems have all worsened dramatically in recent years. There is evidence of a fast-accumulating triple nexus between these climate, conflict, and democracy crises.
Current EU policies are not equipped to deal fully with this triple nexus. Changes are needed to improve these policies’ ability to do so, because it will become increasingly suboptimal to address any one of these challenges in isolation from the others. The EU needs ways to integrate its currently disparate climate, conflict, and democracy policies into a seamless whole. This will become an ever more pressing and cross-cutting imperative for EU foreign policy but, at present, risks getting lost from view because of other more tangible, short-term priorities.