Why Climate Change Hits Hardest Where Conflict and Social Fragility Collide

The paper shows that climate shocks hit fragile, conflict-affected, and violent countries much harder than stable ones, while these same settings also suffer from weak social inclusion, low trust, and poor institutional legitimacy. It argues that without addressing these social foundations, climate action risks deepening fragility and conflict instead of building resilience and peace .

Produced by researchers from the World Bank’s Social Policy Global Department and the University of California, Los Angeles, the Policy Research Working Paper explores how climate change interacts with fragility, conflict, and violence through a critical but often neglected channel: social sustainability. Rather than asking only whether climate change causes conflict, the paper focuses on how climate shocks affect the social foundations of societies, trust, inclusion, resilience, and institutional legitimacy, especially in countries already struggling with instability. The study is part of the World Bank’s broader analytical work on the peace and social dividends of climate action and responds to growing concern that climate policies can unintentionally deepen social and political fractures if these dimensions are ignored.

Why Social Sustainability Matters

The authors argue that development depends not only on economic growth and environmental protection, but also on social sustainability, how societies hold together under stress. They define social sustainability around four pillars: inclusion, cohesion, resilience, and process legitimacy. Inclusion reflects whether people can access markets, services, and opportunities fairly. Cohesion captures trust and the absence of widespread violence. Resilience refers to people’s ability to cope with shocks such as food shortages or income loss. Legitimacy concerns whether institutions are seen as fair, lawful, and free from corruption. In fragile and conflict-affected contexts, these pillars are often weak, making societies far more vulnerable when climate shocks strike.

Climate Change Hits Harder in Fragile and Conflict Settings

Using data from 2019 to 2024, the paper shows that climate impacts are consistently more severe in fragile, conflict-affected, and violent (FCV) contexts than in more stable countries. While floods and droughts do not always occur more frequently in FCV settings, their human consequences are far worse. When adjusted for population size, deaths and the number of people affected by climate disasters are significantly higher in FCV countries, especially during droughts. Droughts emerge as particularly damaging, affecting far more people per capita than floods in these settings. The analysis also reveals variation across types of FCV contexts: violent but non-war settings experience frequent floods, fragile states suffer heavily from droughts, and deaths from floods are concentrated in areas with national or subnational armed conflict.

Social Sustainability Is Weaker Where Fragility and Violence Persist

The paper finds a strong and consistent relationship between FCV contexts and poor social sustainability. Across all four pillars, financial inclusion, food and financial security, trust, exposure to violence, rule of law, and control of corruption-FCV countries perform worse than non-FCV ones. People in these settings are less likely to have bank accounts, more likely to experience hunger, less likely to trust others, and less confident in public institutions. Importantly, these weaknesses are not limited to active war zones. Fragile states without large-scale fighting often show equally low or even lower levels of social sustainability, highlighting that fragility itself poses deep social challenges that complicate climate adaptation and development efforts.

Do Weak Social Systems Worsen Climate Impacts?

When the authors examine whether low social sustainability directly translates into more severe climate impacts, the results are mixed. Outside of violence, most dimensions of social sustainability, such as inclusion, trust, or legitimacy, do not show strong or consistent links with population-adjusted climate losses. Countries with higher or lower social sustainability often experience similar per-capita impacts from floods and droughts. Violence stands out as the exception, reflecting the close overlap between violent environments and climate vulnerability. As a result, the paper confirms that climate impacts are worse in FCV contexts and that social sustainability is lower in those contexts, but it finds less clear evidence that weak social sustainability alone explains higher climate damage.

What This Means for Policy and Climate Action

Climate change and conflict are deeply intertwined, and their interaction is shaped by social conditions that determine who bears the costs and how societies respond. Ignoring inclusion, trust, and legitimacy can create a vicious cycle in which climate interventions unintentionally fuel grievances and instability, such as when land is taken for conservation or carbon projects without local consent. For institutions like the World Bank, the implication is clear: climate adaptation and mitigation in fragile and conflict-affected settings must go beyond technical solutions. Policies need to strengthen social inclusion, reduce violence, and build trust in institutions if climate action is to support resilience and peace rather than undermine them