What NATO Can Learn from Nigeria’s Complex Crisis

The world faces an ever-expanding set of complex crises. As humanitarian needs, food insecurity, extreme weather events, and global inequality continue to spike, multilateral institutions have found themselves underfunded, understaffed and often politicised for electoral gain. Considering these trends, NATO has faced increasing pressure to integrate non-traditional security challenges into their planning, while expanding their mission set to support humanitarian and multilateral efforts alongside the ongoing work of more traditional actors like the European Union. As NATO considers a definition of security that includes human security, a climate security approach offers a framework through which the Alliance can reduce silos, better incorporate the many drivers of insecurity, and develop a unified response to modern threats. While policymakers and military leaders already intellectually understand that climate change, conflict, food security, and migration combine to drive security risks, previous efforts to reduce silos have faced significant challenges. This is in part due to NATO’s historically narrow mission set and structures but can also be attributed to a broader lack of tools and training to integrate such a perspective – particularly case studies that connect current examples of complex crises to the Alliance’s mission set and priority theatre. In short, defence institutions have not yet made the jump between an academic understanding of “the climate-security nexus” and its operational application, the “so what”. This research paper begins to establish such an evidence base – using Nigeria as a case study of a complex political environment where climate change, security, and instability intersect, with potential spillover effects for transatlantic institutions and their security interests.