Understanding the climate-security nexus requires framing risks and resilience, which often reflects a negative cycle of fragility, climate vulnerability, and human insecurity. Climate actions, however, can enhance a society’s climate resilience and generate pathways toward improved peace and security. These actions include constructing a tighter continuum from humanitarian assistance to development processes, providing early warnings for food security planning, building local capacity to translate early warnings and climate-informed advisories, climate-smart mapping and adaptation planning, designing adaptive safety net programs, and enabling risk finance to facilitate early action. Additional changes and interventions, such as improving multi-level governance, utilizing climate security evidence, creating conflict-sensitive policy, and linking innovation with resilience, can also help break the cycle between climate and conflict, align climate actions to peace objectives, and thereby contribute to a climate-resilient peace.

Rerouting farming and rural livelihoods to new trajectories can help tackle increasing youth unemployment and failing food systems. While agriculture must be made more attractive by promoting ‘stepping up’, alternative livelihoods based on allied economic sectors must be considered for ‘stepping out’. Actions can be taken to invest in secondary and tertiary rural industries and improve access to adequate financial services and skills, to enhance automation and tools for more efficient development of agricultural activities, to invest in training and re-skilling of the workforce for rural dwellers to engage in agribusinesses and entrepreneurship, and to create safety-net programmes to prevent ‘falling down’ and ‘dropping out’. These actions must be inclusive of both women left behind in farming, and next-generation rural youths who are increasingly disenfranchised and prone to migration.