Event Summary: Berlin Climate and Security Conference 2025 (BCSC 2025)

The seventh Berlin Climate and Security Conference (BCSC) 2025 explored how to navigate climate, conflict, and cooperation in a turbulent era, highlighting the urgency of integrating climate security into responses to today’s geopolitical, humanitarian and development challenges.

On 23 October, the climate security community convened in Berlin and online to exchange practical insights and identify solutions for coordinated action on climate issues and conflict reduction. Participants addressed the most pressing issues in climate and security, including increasing resource scarcity and rising demand for critical raw materials, effective climate finance models and risk management in fragile contexts, and new opportunities for collaboration and collective action.

Conference highlights: 

1. Climate risks are already rewriting security realities on the ground, yet institutional architectures remain stubbornly segmented. Effective strategy requires embedding climate analysis where decisions actually happen – in defence budgets, economic planning and operational doctrine – not relegating it to environment ministries alone.
2. Climate action demands unprecedented cooperation, precisely when geopolitical fragmentation makes it least likely. As major powers weaponise climate disinformation to polarise societies, building resilience requires diplomacy robust enough to maintain cross-border security coordination, even amid strategic rivalry.
3. Innovative finance mechanisms – blended finance, pre-arranged funding, climate insurance – exist and show promise for fragile contexts, yet remain boutique experiments rather than standard practice. The bottleneck isn't invention but scaling: translating pilot success into systemic change that matches the magnitude of need in conflict-affected states.
4. Effective action requires shifting decision-making authority to those closest to the problem. This means moving beyond consultation toward genuine resource control for local actors, women, and youth – a shift that challenges institutional comfort zones but proves essential for interventions that communities actually want and sustain.

With 16 sessions, the conference brought together a diverse range of high-level political actors, climate security experts, international organisations and practitioners at the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin.