Numerous programs aimed at averting violence, instability and extremism worsened by global warming are ensnared in the effort to dismantle the main American aid agency, U.S.A.I.D.
One such project helped communities manage water stations in Niger, a hotbed of Islamist extremist groups where conflicts over scarce water are common. Another helped repair water-treatment plants in the strategic port city of Basra, Iraq, where dry taps had caused violent anti-government protests. U.S.A.I.D.’s oldest program, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, ran a forecasting system that allowed aid workers in places like war-torn South Sudan to prepare for catastrophic floods last year.
The fate of these programs remains uncertain. The Trump administration has essentially sought to shutter the agency. A federal court has issued a temporary restraining order. On the ground, much of the work has stopped.
“They were buying down future risk,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security and a former U.S. intelligence official. “Invest a little today so we don’t have to spend a lot in the future when things metastasize.”
The German government this week released a report calling climate change “the greatest security threat of our day and age,” echoing a U.S. intelligence report from 2021, which described climate hazards as “threat multipliers.”
Some U.S.A.I.D. funding supported mediation programs to prevent local clashes over land or water. For instance, as the rains become erratic in the Sahel region of Africa, bordering the Sahara desert, clashes between farmers and cattle herders become more frequent.
Other U.S.A.I.D. funds supported job training to give young people alternatives to being recruited by terrorist organizations. One such program in Kenya offered motorcycle-repair training. Other programs funded research into crop seeds that could withstand disease and drought, including new varieties of coffee for the global market. Another promoted biodiversity in the Colombia, still recovering from decades of war.
Climate change adds to the pressures facing vulnerable countries. The burning of fossil fuels has raised the average global temperature since the start of the industrial age, and it has supersized extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and storm surges worsened by rising seas. This has, in turn, intensified water shortages, hampered food production and led to increased competition for resources.
The U.S. National Intelligence Council concluded in 2021 that “climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond.”
The report identified specific flash points, including cross-border water tensions, and said some countries could experience instability, including from straining food and energy systems. It identified nearly a dozen particularly vulnerable countries, including Niger, Chad and Ethiopia. “Building resilience in these countries and regions would probably be especially helpful in mitigating future risks to U.S. interests,” it said.
That was increasingly the goal of several U.S.A.I.D. projects — to help people cope with climate shocks.
In Kenya, amid six cycles between 2022 and 2024 of rains that failed to arrive on time, U.S.A.I.D. projects helped local farmer cooperatives get fast-growing seeds that could grow with little water: amaranth, beans, green gram. The orders to stop this work, aid workers said, would be felt immediately.
“People will be measurably less able to cope with climate shocks,” said one aid-agency staff member who asked not to be identified out of concern over retaliation against the aid group. “In some cases, people will die of hunger.”
When a drought was forecast in Ethiopia, U.S.A.I.D. projects helped vaccinate animals and encouraged pastoralist communities to sell their animals while they were still healthy. Several agricultural researchers in American universities received U.S.A.I.D. money to develop more nutritious, higher-yielding seeds that could better withstand heat and unpredictable rains.
Water programs were a big part of U.S.A.I.D.’s climate-resilience portfolio. In Basra, where anti-government riots broke out after contaminated water led to the hospitalization of more than 100,000 people, the agency funded the repair of water treatment plants. In Central Asia, the agency devoted $24.5 million to get five countries to cooperate on their shared water sources.
In southwestern Niger, the agency helped craft agreements on how cattle-grazing corridors and water wells could be managed peacefully. In Benin, a program brought together farmer and pastoralist communities to spread the word about looming dry spells because drought meant herders would sometimes bring their animals to graze on other people’s farms, and conflicts would get out of hand.
Ann Vaughn, a former deputy assistant administrator at U.S.A.I.D., said she was most worried about regions where water insecurity could drive unrest and prompt U.S. rivals to exploit the crisis. “With everything going on in the Middle East,” she said, “you add in things like taps not turning on and you don’t have the right seeds, that creates a lot of tension.”
