Climate Change and Food Insecurity: The Real Risk Is Conflict, Not Scarcity

The world's food system is cracking under pressure from three directions at once: climate shocks that are shrinking harvests, wars that are strangling supply chains, and trade tensions that keep prices climbing. A new research framework called the Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index has begun mapping where these stresses are most likely to ignite conflict—and the answer is more complicated than simple scarcity.

Severe droughts and extreme weather are already damaging crops across multiple continents. An emerging El Niño pattern threatens to worsen food shortages for millions in the coming year. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has repeatedly destabilized grain markets, and conflict in the Middle East has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, driving up fuel and fertilizer costs that ripple through farming communities everywhere. Hannes Mueller, a researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis and the Barcelona School of Economics, and his colleagues have documented the scale of agricultural decline: hundreds of millions of people now live in regions where harvests are smaller than they were thirty years ago. Australia, Argentina, Moldova, Nigeria, Romania, the United States, and Sudan are already experiencing measurable losses. Northern Africa, Mueller noted, presents a particularly dire picture. Within the next quarter-century, nearly half the world's population could be living in areas where farms produce less food than they do today.

But the research points to a counterintuitive finding that reframes the entire problem. The real danger is not scarcity alone—it is change itself, and the way change creates winners and losers. Climate shifts do not simply make some regions poorer. They also create new opportunities, making land and resources more valuable in unexpected places. In Sudan, for instance, climate change is projected to increase overall food production. Yet within the country, some areas will gain while others lose, creating internal competition and conflict. The same pattern appears in Europe, where major sparkling wine producers are already buying up mountainous land in anticipation of future grape harvests decades away. Local farmers are being displaced as land prices rise and large agricultural companies position themselves for a climate-altered future. Mueller described the mechanism plainly: if you know someone's land will become more productive in twenty or thirty years, you have an incentive to seize it today. That is where negotiations collapse and violence begins.

The research reveals that agricultural change is significantly more likely to trigger conflict in non-democracies than in stable, wealthy democracies. When climate shocks and resource competition hit democratic societies, their institutions force competing interests to negotiate rather than fight. Courts, governments, and local bodies create platforms for resolving disputes. Mueller emphasized that democracies, for all their slowness and apparent inefficiency, function as conflict prevention mechanisms. They make people talk to each other. They provide pathways for constantly finding solutions. Where those institutions are weak or absent, the pressure on food systems becomes pressure on peace itself.

South Asia and the Sahel region represent the most acute warning signs. South Asia, home to approximately two billion people, depends on both vulnerable water supplies and global food markets. The region imports wheat, maize, and palm oil from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, and Malaysia—supply chains that have already proven fragile. Local agriculture faces mounting threats from heat waves, floods, declining soil productivity, and saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels. The Himalayan and Hindu Kush mountain ranges supply most of the region's water for both agriculture and drinking. Climate change is accelerating glacial melt, which in the short term increases water availability but threatens a catastrophic shortage later in the century. The devastating floods that struck Nepal in August 2026 offered a preview of intensifying climate impacts. Abdullah Fahimi of the German Council on Foreign Relations warned that the region could face a humanitarian crisis affecting around two billion people.

As food insecurity deepens, the political consequences multiply. When climate change and resource scarcity force people to seek alternative livelihoods, some end up recruited by terrorist groups, as documented in Nigeria and Afghanistan. In other cases, public anger turns toward governments perceived as failing to protect people's ability to feed themselves. Legitimacy erodes. Frustration escalates into violence. The core challenge, Mueller concluded, is not whether societies can grow different crops or adopt new technologies. It is whether they can manage the redistribution of access to land, water, and jobs. The question that will determine whether climate adaptation succeeds or fails is whether institutions exist to help communities negotiate these new realities. Where they do, shocks may be absorbed. Where they do not, the pressure on food systems becomes a pressure on peace.