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Nexus25 SIPRI Conference Workshop: Leader or Left Behind? The EU in a Euro-Mediterranean Polycrisis
By Siena Cicarelli, Luca Cinciripini, and Chiara Scissa
From May 12-14, the Nexus25 team attended the 2025 Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. This year’s forum focused on “Rethinking Peace and the Future of Security,” with sessions dedicated to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Sudan, enhancing youth engagement, avenues for dialogue in the Sahel region, advancing gender equity, and more. As part of these discussions, Nexus25 hosted a session entitled “Leader or Left Behind? The EU in a Euro-Mediterranean Polycrisis,” a combined panel discussion and scenario exercise focused on the EU’s response to converging risks in its immediate neighborhood.
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Risks of Response: Climate Security, Climate Policy & Farmer Protests in Europe
By Siena Cicarelli and Erin Sikorsky
While much climate security analysis focuses on the direct and indirect security risks of climate hazards themselves, there is a third category of risk that receives comparatively less attention but has profound implications for the future of climate action. This category can be termed “risks of response” or the security dynamics of the ways in which governments and societies respond to the challenges posed by climate change. Both positive (policies to curb emissions) and negative (xenophobic policies to block climate-driven migration) responses to climate change can contribute to instability and security risks.
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BRIEFER: How the United States Can Prevent the Weaponization of Climate Migration in a Warming World: A Humane Approach
By Katelin Wright, 2021-22 Climate Security Fellow
The views expressed in this briefer are those of the author and do not represent the position of the Center for Climate and Security or the Council on Strategic Risks.
In the summer of 2021, several European Union (EU) countries began to see an influx of irregular migration from neighboring Belarus. Migrants, including children, from throughout the Middle East, Africa, and some as far away as Cuba, overwhelmed border officials in Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland as they attempted to enter the EU. The ensuing humanitarian crisis was not spontaneous but rather a well-calculated act of retaliation on behalf of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. In response to EU sanctions placed on Belarus over its repression of protests against a fraudulent presidential election, Lukashenko used vulnerable migrants and refugees as political pawns. Deploying a combination of misinformation and disinformation, Lukashenko encouraged people considering migration to come to Belarus as a means to enter the EU. The case of Belarus demonstrates how weaker states can employ unconventional tactics to fight against stronger nations. Although portrayed by the media as a new precedent, countries have weaponized migrants before. Cuba, Turkey, and Morocco, to name a few, have used similar tactics in the past. While weaponized migration might not be entirely new, it is likely to become increasingly common as intensifying climate change contributes to further human displacement and migration. In this context, nations, including the United States, should get ahead of the phenomenon by changing their approach to climate migration – through policies that recognize and address the role climate change plays in decisions to migrate.
This briefer explores the complex and multicausal drivers of migration–from escaping violence to displacement caused by climate change–and suggests how the United States can reform its immigration policies to mitigate the risks of weaponized climate-driven migration.
Water and Sabotage in Paradise: Greece’s Hidden Climate Conflict
Greece’s islands might seem like unlikely settings for a wild years-long sabotage campaign, but the explosions tell a different story.
In late July, a person or persons unknown detonated a bomb alongside the undersea Salamina-to-Aegina water pipeline in Greece, leaving nothing but traces of a fuse and leaking freshwater.
Two years earlier, in January 2020, other – or possibly the same – suspects punctured that pipeline in dozens of places with a drill. On that occasion, they set back the completion of the then-under construction project by more than a year.
On Mykonos, Paros, and a good number of other idyllic islands, desalination plants and other forms of water infrastructure have suffered repeated and ‘inexplicable’ breakdowns in recent years. Though impossible to prove malicious intention in many instances, desalination technicians say that not even subpar maintenance can explain away this volume of problems.
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