The primary findings of this desk study highlight that climate change in Southeast Asia is much more than an environmental crisis, but rather a systemic crisis that will likely transform the region's geopolitical and economic landscape and reshape human-environment relationships across geographic scale. The scale of climate change-related impacts in Southeast Asia and its reverberation within strategic competition has the potential to be massive. Climate change threatens Southeast Asia's increasingly fragile political and social stability as tens of millions of livelihoods will be impacted, water and food insecurity will likely increase, and social and political stability will be challenged. In this sense, climate change can be understood as a "threat multiplier" in Southeast Asia, and we aim to identify and detail the specific threats and their associated multiplication factors in this desk study.
Publication Information
Henkin, Samuel D. and Madeline Romm. 2023. Climate Security, Great Power Competition, and Adversarial Geopolitics in Southeast Asia. College Park, MD: START.