Insights

The figures are stark. Nineteen of the twenty-five most climate-vulnerable countries are also conflict-affected. Yet the architecture of climate finance — its eligibility criteria, absorption requirements, and risk frameworks — is designed for stable institutional environments. It systematically excludes the places that need it most.

In Iraq, this plays out in concrete terms. Communities in Salahadin, Basra, and Kirkuk are managing simultaneous pressures: water scarcity, land degradation, weak service delivery, and the unresolved legacies of displacement and conflict. Climate adaptation is not a separate agenda for these communities — it is inseparable from questions of governance, access, and social trust.

The practical note I contributed to with adelphi and FriEnt in 2024 makes eight recommendations for donors and policymakers. The most fundamental is also the most politically uncomfortable: conflict-sensitive climate finance must reach local communities and grassroots organisations directly, not only through national government channels that may lack the reach, legitimacy, or capacity to deliver in fragile contexts.

Flexibility matters as much as volume. In volatile environments, rigid disbursement timelines and fixed indicators are liabilities. Adaptive programming — responsive to rapidly shifting conditions — is not a concession to weakness. It is a precondition for effectiveness.

The research I co-authored with Dr. Jwan Bakhtyar, presented at the University of Mosul in October 2025, was built on a simple but often overlooked premise: the same climate stressor produces very different outcomes depending on the institutional and social context in which it lands.

We compared two Iraqi communities — Chamchamal in Sulaymaniyah and Midaina in Basra — both experiencing significant climate pressure, but with markedly different social stability outcomes. The differences were not primarily explained by the severity of climate impacts. They were explained by local governance quality, the presence or absence of functioning dispute resolution mechanisms, and the degree of social cohesion within and between communities.

This has direct implications for programming. Interventions that treat climate adaptation as a purely technical exercise — irrigation infrastructure, drought-resistant crops, early warning systems — miss the social and institutional dimensions that determine whether those interventions hold. Water User Associations, for example, are not just management structures. They are governance experiments. Their success depends on whether they can build trust across community lines, manage competing claims, and maintain legitimacy under stress.

The implication for donors and implementers is that climate resilience and social cohesion programming need to be integrated, not sequenced. Building the infrastructure before building the institutional and social capacity to manage it is a recipe for conflict, not adaptation.