In South Sudan, climate change is not an abstract threat but an everyday reality. Successive floods and droughts have uprooted families, destroyed livelihoods, and intensified competition over resources. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), flooding has become one of the in the past years, accounting for about 44 per cent of all newly displaced persons between 2021 and 2024. South Sudan is ranked by the in terms of levels of exposure to hazards, vulnerability and coping capacity.
The UN Security Council has made climate, peace and security (CPS) an integral part of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) mandate. The mandate recognizes the impacts of climate change on humanitarian conditions and stability in the country. It commends the activities of peacekeepers to assist flood-affected communities and highlights the importance of providing gender-sensitive risk assessments on the adverse effects of climate change.
Climate-responsive policing in South Sudan
In a country where floods, droughts, and conflict often intersect, the UN Police (UNPOL) plays a vital role in protecting civilians, enabling humanitarian access, and supporting the national police to maintain public safety. Police officers are often the first to respond when disasters strike. Their role includes rescuing civilians, managing evacuations, and preventing tensions from escalating — yet traditional policing models rarely account for climate risks.
To strengthen climate-informed approaches across policing in South Sudan, UNPOL partnered with the UNMISS Climate, Peace and Security unit/Civil Affairs. A joint capacity-building programme was developed — the first of its kind in UN peacekeeping, to equip UNPOL officers with the tools to identify and respond to the security implications of climate change. Between October 2024 and September 2025, 19 tailored trainings and workshops were delivered, reaching 350 UNPOL officers in South Sudan. Nearly one third of the trained UNPOL officers are women.
A specialized workshop was organized with the UNPOL Anti-Cattle Raiding Specialized Police Team, a unit of Ugandan and Kenyan experts deployed to UNMISS in April 2025. This specialized team is tackling one of the region’s most pressing challenges: cattle-related conflicts. In sharing expertise on how to tackle the interplay between droughts, floods and cattle-related violence, officers referred to their experience in responding to flooding and wildfires in their home countries, supporting evacuations and facilitating humanitarian access. Others highlighted their work in addressing environmental crimes such as poaching, illegal mining, and illegal logging. They proposed solutions in relation to fostering climate-resilient livelihoods and ensuring responsible water management to strengthen drought-response systems. The goal? To ensure a more sustainable and peaceful future for communities at the frontlines of climate change.
Grounding CPS training in the local context
The CPS capacity-building programme is built on a participatory approach, ensuring that participants gain practical and actionable skills. As part of this programme, the developed by the Climate Security Mechanism (CSM), UN Women, the One UN Climate Learning Partnership and adelphi, introduced climate, peace and security tools to UNPOL officers before they engaged in the in-person sessions. Structured in an interactive format, these sessions grounded understandings of CPS in the context of South Sudan and allowed participants to reflect on how they could integrate the topic into their daily work.
UNPOL officers described how drought and flooding are reshaping cattle migration routes across their areas of deployment, often setting the stage for clashes between farmers and herders or among pastoralist groups. Officers spoke of women and children in Bentiu walking long distances each day in search of clean water and food, and also noted that the highest-risk areas are often the hardest to reach when floodwaters cut off roads and villages, leaving isolated communities without the support they urgently need. Through these exchanges and a gradual process of shaping and improving the training materials, UNMISS developed a practical syllabus to help include CPS in the actions of UN Police in South Sudan.
Moving from training to concrete action
The next step for UNMISS was to extend capacity building to its national police counterparts. In Lakes State, UNPOL organized a ten-day workshop for national police officers covering a variety of topics including how climate stress can fuel cattle raiding and communal violence. Similarly, in Juba, senior officers of the South Sudan National Police Service (NPS) received training on CPS. In Eastern Equatoria, Police Community Relations Committees (PCRCs) now identify and report on climate-related peace and security risks within their areas.
To sustain momentum, UNPOL leadership worked to integrate CPS into their everyday policing efforts. In February 2025, the Police Commissioner issued a directive, making CPS a formal part of all UNPOL activities, from administration to operations and training. Since then, CPS has been included in work plans, reporting, and induction training for new officers. Another key step was deploying a UNPOL CPS Focal Point in August 2025 as part of the Climate, Peace and Security Unit and later beginning the appointment of CPS focal points in each field office.
Across UN offices in Bor, Torit, Bentiu and Aweil, UNPOL officers now include CPS considerations into patrols, mentoring, and community policing. UNPOL officers promote environmental awareness and support evacuations in flood-affected areas. UNPOL and the Civil Affairs Division conduct joint patrols in flood-affected areas and co-organize local peace conferences to prevent climate-related tensions before and after migration. These initiatives reflect a growing understanding that effective policing in South Sudan must also mean climate-responsive policing.
Looking ahead
The journey does not stop here. But how do you keep the momentum in South Sudan going? Continued training and knowledge exchange with national counterparts, including the national police, wildlife service, and civil defense forces remain essential to work together towards sustainable change. Beyond South Sudan, UNMISS will share its CPS-related experience with the UN Police Division as part of its ongoing revision of the Strategic Guidance Framework for International Policing, which guides the UN’s police component in peacekeeping operations. In doing so, UNPOL and its partners in UNMISS are helping build a policing model that keeps communities safe not just from conflict, but also from the security-related challenges of a changing climate.