The global community is still struggling to manage the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that has spread throughout the world, and nations bordering the South China Sea have not been spared. The health crisis arrives in a region where climate change, nuclear developments, and existing strains on security are increasingly converging, raising new and potentially unprecedented risks.

The Working Group on Climate, Nuclear, and Security Affairs ranked this part of the globe, and more specifically, the Philippines and Indonesia, as hotspots for the intersections of these issues: whatever transpires in the Philippines and Indonesia will have an outsized influence on tensions either rising or falling in the greater region. The Council on Strategic Risk’s latest briefer, “Climate & Nuclear Security in the South China Sea: The Cases of Indonesia and the Philippines,” written by Andrea Rezzonico and Christine Cavallo, spotlights the climate, nuclear, and security risks unfolding in these two countries while taking into consideration the wider geopolitical dynamics.