The Ecological Threat Report (ETR) produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace measures the ecological threats that countries are currently facing, providing projections to 2050, to better understand the countries most at risk of experiencing significant deteriorations in peace.
The report covers 3,125 subnational areas across 172 countries and territories, covering more than 99 per cent of the world’s population, assessing their ability to manage their challenges between now and 2050. The research takes a multi-faceted approach by analysing ecological threats at the national, subnational, and city level, while also assessing the threats against societal resilience and levels of peace.
The ETR focuses on four interlocking threats: water risk, food insecurity, the impact of natural events, and demographic pressure, that directly relate to drivers of conflict. These indicators are calculated first at the subnational level and then at the national level.
The calculation of subnational scores involves two steps. In the first step, all indicators are normalised on a 1-5 scale, with a higher score representing a higher threat level. In the second step, the overall ETR score is calculated by taking the mean of the indicator scores and then adding the variance (as measured by half the standard deviation) across the four scores.
This means that a subnational area with scores of 5, 5, 1 and 1 across the four indicators would have a higher overall score than an area with scores of 3,3,3 and 3. This weighting is applied to capture the disproportionate impact of severe ecological threats.
At the national level, a country’s four indicator scores and its overall score are the population-weighted averages of the scores across its subnational areas. These indicator scores are classified from “very low” to “very high” levels of threat.
A rapidly changing environment is creating shocks that threaten the stability of countries, create conditions for mass displacement and exacerbate hunger and water stress.
The ETR can determine which countries, administrative districts and cities have the most severe threats, and the lowest coping capabilities and therefore are most likely to suffer from increased levels of ecological threat-related conflict. The Ecological Threat Report also looks at the future, with projections out to 2050.
Resilience, or the ability of nations to mitigate and adapt to new ecological threats, is important to ensure the stability of political institutions and prevent future social unrest and violence and it’s of great importance to know where help is needed.
The ETR aims to capture human communities’ complex relationships with the natural environment – specifically as they relate to resource scarcity, climatic shocks, and the ways in which growing populations can exacerbate existing stresses. It provides an impartial, data-driven foundation for the debate about ecological threats facing countries and subnational areas and to inform the design of resilience-building policies and contingency plans.
IEP aims to create a paradigm shift in the way the world thinks about peace, by using data-driven research to show that peace is a positive, tangible and achievable measure of human well-being and development.
We do this by developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analysing country-level risk and fragility, and understanding Positive Peace.
Ecological threats tend to interact and reinforce one another. Often, conflict arises as a result of competition for natural resources. In turn, the conflict itself destroys lives, livelihoods and governance, further depleting a region’s ecological resources.
The relationship between peacefulness and food insecurity, water scarcity, and population growth is complex. Adverse changes in the natural environment can lead to increased social tensions and civil unrest if societies do not have the necessary levels of resilience to deal with these threats. Similarly, conflict and uncontrolled population growth have well-documented negative impacts on the environment.
These two dynamics of increasing resource scarcity and conflict can create a vicious cycle where one increases the likelihood of the other, leading to societies failing. Therefore, to understand peace, we need to better understand the factors that drive peace, or hinder it.
It will be crucial in this rapidly changing environment to monitor ecological threats and how they coincide with changes in peace. By understanding the interaction between ecological threats, conflict and peace, countries can be better prepared to deal with the threats and ultimately preserve their levels of peace.
The main finding from the ETR is that without concerted action, current levels of ecological degradation will worsen, intensifying existing conflicts, becoming a catalyst for new conflicts, and increasing forced migration.
A cyclic relationship exists between ecological degradation and conflict. It is a vicious cycle whereby the degradation of resources leads to conflict, leading to further resource degradation. The countries with the lowest levels of peace on average have the highest Ecological Threat scores indicating a higher level of risk.
Furthermore, the ETR 2025 has found that changing rainfall patterns are significantly amplifying conflict risks worldwide. Conflict death rates are substantially higher in areas where rainfall is concentrating into fewer months, compared to regions where rain is spreading more evenly throughout the year.
Western Brazil, including parts of the Amazon, has recorded some of the world’s sharpest increases in ecological threat levels. Temperatures have risen at twice the global rate, triggering drought and wildfires.
Sub-Saharan Africa faces the world’s most severe ecological pressures, with Niger registering the worst ETR score.
Central and Western Europe recorded substantial overall improvements, in part representing a return to normalcy following Europe’s unusually dry climatic conditions in 2019.
This sixth edition of the ETR is the first to include a multi-year time series (2019-2024), enabling a clearer view of year-on-year volatility alongside persistent trends.
Humanity is on the verge of a major turning point, facing unprecedented difficulties and challenges unparalleled in its short history.
Many of these problems are global in nature, such as climate change, curbing emissions, decreasing biodiversity, depletion of the earth’s freshwater, and overpopulation. Such global challenges call for global solutions and require cooperation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
In a hyper-connected world, the sources of many of these challenges are multidimensional, increasingly complex and span national borders. For this reason, finding solutions requires fundamentally new ways of thinking.
IEP will continue to monitor and evaluate ecological threats with respect to their impacts on peace and conflict. This will provide timely measures for policymakers, researchers and corporations to use for effective intervention design, monitoring and evaluation.
