When Climate Meets Conflict

The sweltering April heat is more than a discomfort; it is a warning. In the Philippines, rising temperatures are the traditional heralds of the typhoon season—a cycle that is becoming faster, fiercer, and more frequent. We must recognize a chilling reality: in our country’s most fragile corners, a storm is never just a storm. It is a political earthquake. For decades, we have treated disaster response as a technical exercise—a matter of rubber boats, rice packs, and relief funds. This is a mistake. In conflict-affected areas, climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It doesn’t just knock down houses; it knocks down the fragile peace we have spent years building. 

The Anatomy of a Disaster  

Look at the map of our recent tragedies: In 2012, Typhoon Pablo (Bopha) tore through Eastern Mindanao, an area historically outside the typhoon belt. It didn’t just kill 1,900 people; it decimated the ancestral lands of the Lumad, leaving them vulnerable to displacement and exploitation. A year later, Yolanda (Haiyan) forced the national government to pivot so violently toward reconstruction that other vital priorities were left in the dust. Then came Odette in 2021 and Paeng in 2022, the latter submerging parts of the newly formed Bangsamoro. These aren’t just entries in a weather log. These typhoons hit places where the state’s presence was already thin, and the trust was already shaky. When a storm hits a conflict zone, it recalibrates power. 

The Political Economy of Relief

In a conflict ecosystem, aid is never neutral. When the state is slow to deliver, when aid is bottlenecked by bureaucracy, or when distribution feels biased, the vacuum is quickly filled. If a father in an agriculture-dependent community loses his entire livelihood to a flood, and the state is nowhere to be found, who does he turn to? Often, it is non-state actors or armed groups who are waiting in the wings to provide “protection” or alternative governance. In these moments, legitimacy isn’t won at the ballot box; it’s won in the mud. Delays in aid don’t just cause hunger—they cause grievances. And in places like the BARMM or the mountains of Mindanao, grievances are the primary currency of recruitment for those who wish to see the peace process fail. 

The Invisible Frontline

Climate change reshapes security through less visible, systemic effects. It forces the government to redirect funding away from peace-building and “catch-up” development to pay for emergency repairs. Every peso taken from a long-term development project to fix a bridge destroyed by a “climate-shocker” is a win for instability. Furthermore, environmental degradation—often accelerated by extractive industries—intensifies the fight over land. For Indigenous communities, a disaster isn’t just a temporary evacuation; it is a permanent loss of ancestral identity and increased exposure to armed actors on both sides. 

Climate Response is a Peace Policy

We must stop viewing disaster risk management as a separate “department” of governance. In the Philippines, climate response is peacebuilding. 

If we want to protect the Republic, our disaster response must be “conflict-sensitive.” This means: 

• Performance as Legitimacy: Trust in government is built through performance in a crisis. A fast, fair, and inclusive relief operation is the best counter-insurgency tool we have. 
• Empowering the Local: We must strengthen local governance so that the first responders are the people the community already trusts, not a distant office in Manila. 
• Climate Equity: Adaptation must focus on the marginalized—the Lumad, the small-scale farmer, the coastal fisherman—who are the most likely to be pushed into the arms of conflict by a single bad harvest. 

Without this shift, our natural hazards will continue to act as catalysts for instability. We can no longer afford to ignore the fact that a warming planet leads to a heating polity. To ignore the climate is to undermine the peace. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Jennifer Santiago Oreta is the Dean of the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG). She is an expert in security governance and peacebuilding, having served as Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP).