The climate-migration-conflict nexus lacks direct causality. Climate change is recognised as a “threat multiplier” but the relationship between climate change, the advent of conflict and migration is complex and nonlinear. While the link between conflict and migration has a wide empirical basis in the Mediterranean (and beyond), there is less clarity regarding climate change’s impact on the advent of conflict. State capacity, socioeconomic development and foreign meddling or intervention are generally recognised as the primary drivers of conflict and migration in the Mediterranean Basin.

The relationship between climate change and security is best understood in terms of the climate’s disproportionate impact on human security (and its relationship with the environment, i.e., planetary security). This framing can assist in providing more holistic understandings of the nexus while not losing track of pre-existing challenges derived from non-climatic variables (i.e., politics, governance, and social contracts) which also have a bearing on the incidence of conflict and migration.

Multidisciplinary approaches to the climate change-conflict-migration nexus are therefore best placed to capture the complexity of the phenomena, addressing climatic and non-climatic variables with a relevance on conflict and migration as well as related capabilities to implement mitigation and adaptation mechanisms.

The breadth and diversity of variables (political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, security, etc.) evolving under the influence of globalisation and digitalisation across the Mediterranean Basin, along with the broad time frame needed to test the interrelationships, present methodological complexity in addressing and testing the climate-conflict-migration nexus in the Mediterranean Basin.

The legacy of colonialism, foreign interventionism and geopolitical divides across Mediterranean Basin states create impediments to region-wide policy approaches or genuine multilateralism in the Mediterranean. Ultimately, the recognition of a linkage between climate change and security should also acknowledge the destabilising impact of lifestyles in the Global North and thereby contain a dimension of burden sharing and climate justice.

Securitized approaches to the climate emergency can raise awareness and resources but risk distracting from pre-existing non-climate variables linked to governance and the social contract. Moreover, such approaches to climate change are a by-product of a broader securitized turn in developmental literature which followed 9/11. In a similar fashion, the current emphasis on the climate-migration nexus is at least partially driven by securitized policy priorities in Europe to externalise migration flows across the Mediterranean. Such prioritisation risks skewing policy priorities and should be coupled with a broader emphasis on global climate justice to better tackle the asymmetries across Mediterranean Basin states and neighbouring regions.

Future scenarios linked to accelerated climatic disruptions may well provide more direct correlations for the climate-conflict nexus in the Mediterranean, with repercussions likely also extending to migratory flows. This latter point serves as the underlying rationale for much of the analysis contained in this report.