The first Planetary Security Conference was held in 2015 and hosted by the Dutch Foreign Ministry. This year the Netherlands was joined by five European and one American think tank in hosting and organizing: adelphi, Clingendael, the Center for Climate and Security, The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, the Institute for Environmental Security, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The tenor of the conference was decidedly uneasy. Over the past two years, there have been major international commitments to addressing global environmental problems and humanitarian disasters, including the Paris climate agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, New Urban Agenda, World Humanitarian Summit, Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, and Platform on Disaster Displacement. But there has also been a resurgence in populist politics that threatens international cooperation and a decline in trust of multilateral institutions.

“The growing impacts of climate change together with the rising number of conflicts and refugees, together with growing geopolitical rivalry is creating a deeply unsettling new normal,” said Lukas Rüttinger of adelphi in an interview.

Rüttinger was one of several authors of a report setting the tone for the conference, Towards a Global Resilience Agenda, based on the 2015 New Climate for Peace report that the Wilson Center contributed to and was produced at the request of the G7 foreign ministries. He said we have seen many of the problems outlined in A New Climate for Peace, from food insecurity to freshwater shortages, play out around the world. The international community is able to adapt to these challenges, as demonstrated by the various multilateral agreements of the last two years, he said, but following through on those commitments requires sustained political will and support.

Bert Koenders, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, said at the opening plenary that addressing climate and environmental security issues, which so often cross international borders, could be a valuable way to encourage cooperation in a “world full of antagonism and disagreement.” But he was concerned that “policy, politics, and action are lagging far behind.”

Former Obama White House advisor Alice Hill, who developed the Presidential Memorandum on Climate Change and National Security announced in September, said, “We are developing science, but it’s not systematically considered by those developing policy that guides our nations.”

Indeed, there seemed to be a tension throughout the conference between further defining environmental security problems and moving on to solutions. As one speaker put it, “Everything that is too simple is wrong, and everything that is too complicated is useless.” The problem is clear, said Oli Brown of UN Environment, but the solutions are diffuse; you need to do everything, which makes it hard to prioritize.

Amina J. Mohammed, the Nigerian minister of the environment, described how climate change is exacerbating security problems in her country, from Boko Haram to the Niger Delta, and pleaded for “no more pilot projects.” We need climate projects that can scale up and help many people, she said. “This is about our humanity, about shared values.”

Monique Barbut, the executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said that nearly all the illegal migrants that have caused so much political upheaval in Europe are from drylands, implying a connection to climate change (though plenty of desertification occurs absent climate change too). Taking steps to build resilience in origin areas and reduce the need to move is much cheaper than resettling people, she said, and certainly much cheaper than military action to shore up unstable governments.

Ernst Peter Fischer of the German Foreign Office urged attendees – who ranged from government policymakers and practitioners to military officers, non-government experts, and academics – to focus on taking concrete actions, then learning and adapting from there. “You don’t need to solve everything at once,” he said.

Smaller working groups did produce more discrete discussions reflecting a broad range of experiences and roles: Is it better to have explicit climate programs or to mainstream climate interventions across the whole of government? How do you “prove” a conflict has been avoided? What is the role of the United Nations Security Council in climate-security issues? How do you build the capacity of non-government adaptation efforts without eroding government legitimacy? What can be learned from the nuclear non-proliferation effort? How do you at the very least avoid exacerbating existing conflicts? How do you encourage the positive, adaptive aspects of migration?

Representatives from Mercy Corps, an international development NGO, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an East African trade and development bloc, spoke about innovative efforts to reduce vulnerability to drought in the Horn of Africa and improve resource management.

Foreign ministry representatives from Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands promised that their countries would work together to put climate change on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council during their rotations, which start January 1, 2017. One of the main themes for the Netherlands will be “finding innovative solutions to water- and climate-related security challenges,” said Koenders. Sweden’s State Secretary for Development Cooperation Ulrika Modéer said her country is pursuing a “feminist foreign policy” and will put an emphasis on women and peace as well as climate change during their term on the Council.

The discussions over two days of meetings were remarkable for the varying personal and political contexts but shared general objectives. The mosaic of attendees in some ways reflects the state of global climate policy. Pascal Delisle of the European External Action Service, the European Union’s diplomatic arm, likened it to the early stages of an impressionist painting: “We have elements that are starting to form a full picture… We’re getting toward more coherence, more alignment; we’re still working on steering.”

Next year the organizers say they plan to expand global representation (as one might expect, attendees were mainly from Europe), involve the private sector more, and possibly draft some kind of public declaration. What the global political landscape will look like then is anyone’s guess. But the diffusion of the effort to prepare for and address environment-related security problems may be a positive aspect in some respects. As states become less important in terms of shaping world affairs, as many believe is the case, their leadership may become less crucial too, with multilateral and mixed public-private partnerships increasingly filling the void.