Geophysical Impacts & Political Instability are Accelerating
U.N. Climate Change negotiations are happening as impacts & wider destabilizing dynamics play out around the planet. Negotiators need to work with urgency to accelerate climate action.
In June 2025, as the Parties to the U.N. Climate Convention (197 nations plus the European Union, with member states among the 197) meet in Bonn, Germany, for the 62nd round of negotiations among the Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), we are seeing grave political and geophysical disruptions across the world. Geophysical impacts, proliferating cost and risk, industrial-scale disinformation, and political violence, are feeding a cycle of destabilization.
In Nigeria, we have seen recently in the farm market town of Mokwa catastrophic floods due to torrential rains. Hundreds are confirmed dead, with hundreds more missing. Nigeria is also experiencing ongoing violence from armed extremist herders, who killed more than 100 people in Benue state, in what is ostensibly a conflict over light rights and livelihoods, in recent days. The conflict is inflamed by desertification in northern rangelands, which compels the herders to move into agricultural lands, disrupting life across the wider region.
In the United States, June 14 was a day of tragic and far-reaching violence, even as millions joined peaceful protests calling for a defense of democracy and human rights.
In Minnesota, a leading state lawmaker was shot and killed, along with her husband.
Another lawmaker and his wife were critically injured, but are recovering.
The attacker reportedly kept a list of at least 70 targets at the state and national levels.
At least two other apparent mass killing or assassination plots were foiled (in Chicago and Salt Lake City).
In two additional incidents, individuals drove vehicles into crowds.
This violent extremism is driven by industrialized disinformation, both from foreign "active measures" intelligence operations and from a non-stop scorched earth campaign by anti-democracy interests to vilify public servants working for the public good. The multi-billion-dollar pro-business disinformation effort is oriented in part toward slowing decarbonization and in part toward disrupting the efforts of government to prevent unaccountable harm.
One of the many costly and dangerous effects of this disinformation effort is the slowing of climate crisis response measures more broadly. Not only are efforts to prevent pollution slowed and disrupted; so are efforts to invest in adaptation and resilience, and to protect communities, cities, and even the industries behind the disinformation, from dangerous climate change impacts.
This coincides with rapidly worsening climate disruption and degradation across the U.S. Last week in San Antonio, Texas, more than 6 inches of rain fell in a few hours—an all-time record—killing 13 people and shutting down much of the everyday economy. During the storm 4 inches of rain fell in just one hour—more than may places receive in a month. Texas Public Radio reported the victims were mostly adults, both men and women, between the ages of 28 and 67.
We increasingly see a need for citizens, communities, public agencies, and commercial entities to have access to reliable data, including early warning systems, in order to plan for and avoid disaster. The worsening war on access to factual information, driven in part by the industrial effort to obstruct climate action, is undermining the ability of societies in all regions to plan for and respond effectively to crisis events.
The information deficit created by "flooding the zone" with false, misleading, distorted, and deliberately confusing disinformation undermines trust and contributes to the sense among people vulnerable to radicalization that they are "on their own". This exacerbates existing rivalries and divisions and sows the seeds of political violence and armed conflict.
Chronic underinvestment in basic services and critical infrastructure, even in industrialized economies like the United States, contributes to this breakdown in trust. While right-wing political extremists bent on subverting democratic systems may not claim to be motivated by these vulnerabilities, the overall breakdown in trust, opportunity, safety, and resilience, situates them in conditions more conducive to fear-based thinking and motivational rage. As climate impacts worsen and become more frequent, they also drain resources from budgets, in both the public and private sectors, that would support improved conditions, safety, opportunity, and resilience.
As the United States Department of Defense has noted in its Quadrennial Defense Reviews and other strategic assessments, since at least 2010, climate change is a "threat multiplier" and an "accelerant of conflict". This is due, in part, to the life-threatening and desperate conditions climate shocks (both sudden and those that build over time, like prolonged drought) impose on those affected. That effect is worsened by disinformation.
The 198 Parties gathered in Bonn are actively discussing these issues, even if most are not keen to take responsibility for underinvestment in stakeholders' insights and empowerment. Last week featured one of the longest and most detailed rounds of discussions in the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform process. The negotiations increasingly feature open dialogues and workshops involving stakeholders affected by depletion of ecosystems and biodiversity, and who face the harshest rapid-onset vulnerabilities from climate breakdown in their regions.
While the mandate remains abstract and elusive to many negotiators, the ongoing commitment—under the Paris Agreement and the UAE Consensus—to safeguard "the integrity of all ecosystems, including in forests, the ocean, mountains, and the cryosphere", implies a need to learn from, work with, and invest in the livable future conditions of people affected by risks associated with degradation of those ecosystems. For the first time, we are hearing about organizing national climate policy and economic development around activities that do nor generate harm to watersheds and the marine environment, and not only in discussions focused on the ocean.
In our report on climate progress after the COP29 negotiations, and again in our brief to the SB62, we noted the need to treat information as a right, in service of a zero-harm standard for successful climate-resilient development, writing:
Not only should all people have access to factual information, but communities and nations should benefit from informed decisions based on the best information in existence being applied with genuine interest in everyone’s wellbeing. Without this, all nations will see rapidly worsening climate impacts, costs, and disruptions. Disinformation not only hurts the vulnerable; it also weakens entire nations and undermines leaders’ and negotiators’ ability to secure the best outcome.
Midway through the first week of the SB62, it is clear that more fine-grained detail and local context is needed to ensure global decisions translate into real-life local transformation and improved living conditions and ongoing opportunity. In each area of the negotiations, from just transition to mitigation ambition, funding for adaptation, to ocean action and food systems, negotiators should strive to prioritize more open flow of factual information, more local participation, and more emphasis on preventing harm to vulnerable communities.
As the much-admired U.S. senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone liked to say, we all do better when we all do better. By ensuring the most vulnerable are protected, we will reduce risk and increase resilience and opportunity for everyone else. It's time to start meeting that higher standard.