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The field of climate and security has matured over the past 15 years, moving from the margins of academic research and policy discussion to become a more prominent concern for the international community. The practice of climate and security has a broad set of concerns extending beyond climate change and armed conflict. Different national governments, international organizations, and forums have sought to mainstream climate security concerns emphasizing a variety of challenges, including the risks to military bases, existential risks to low-lying island countries, resource competition, humanitarian emergencies, shocks to food security, migration, transboundary water management, and the risks of unintended consequences from climate policies. Despite greater awareness of these risks, the field still lacks good insights about what to do with these concerns, particularly in 'fragile' states with low capacity and exclusive political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is expected to have severe consequences on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, but its effects will not be evenly distributed. Africa is thought to be especially vulnerable, given both high exposure to climate change and relatively low community resilience and governance capabilities. With climate change adaptation looming ever larger as an important policy area, understanding where climate vulnerabilities are located therefore has immense practical significance. This article details the methodological refinements made to an existing model of climate security vulnerability, the rationale for the approach, and the findings. The model introduces more fine-grained data and new methods of normalizing the data to retain more granularity, as well as other changes. The vulnerability maps show the Horn of Africa (Somalia in particular), South Sudan, the eastern coasts of Madagascar and Mozambique, northern Nigeria and southern Mali, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Guinea, as well as pockets along rivers and coasts in Egypt and Nigeria to be the most vulnerable. For validation, the model is also compared to maps of climate-related disaster counts, fatalities, and affected populations derived from the EM-DAT International Disaster database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]