Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace have recently released their eighth annual Failed States Index for 2012. The index scores countries across the globe on their level of stability, assessing twelve key variables: demographic pressures, refugees/IDPs, group grievance, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized elites and external intervention.

Though measuring “natural resource security,” including water, food and energy, might be a useful addition to this index for the future, it would still be very interesting to look at how projected climatic changes in these states, whether stable, failing, or failed, might impact each of the twelve variables, and thus effect a nation’s overall stability.

Stay tuned for more.