With barely a month’s notice, Chile canceled plans to host the annual United Nations climate summit as fiery protests against austerity and widening inequality engulfed the country for a third week. Chile’s neighbor, Brazil, had initially been slated to hold the 25th Conference of the Parties, or COP25. But after years as a climate champion, South America’s largest country elected far-right ideologue and climate science denier Jair Bolsonaro as its new leader in November 2018. One of his first moves was to withdraw as host. Chile’s announcement sent the United Nations scrambling Wednesday to secure a new location for the highly choreographed gathering of the world’s leaders. The debacle also raised an unsettling question: If unrest is already destabilizing middle-income countries, how will the world work together in the decades to come as the effects of climate change worsen? “It’s a warning,” said Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Washington-based nonprofit Center for Climate and Security. “We’re in trouble from a security perspective, and the window is closing.”

Edgard Garrido / Reuters A demonstrator dressed as a ghost holds a Chilean flag with the legend "ghost democracy" during anti-government protests in Santiago, Chile.

The climate alarms are blaring now. In March, an unusually powerful cyclone destroyed 90% of Mozambique’s second-largest city. In July, scientists at the World Meteorological Organization registered the hottest month in recorded history. In August, the Greenland ice sheet expelled 11 billion tons of melted glacier into the ocean in a single day. None of these milestones is directly fueling unrest in South America. But as still-surging carbon emissions heat the planet, countries south of the equator face most of the gravest forecasts about the effects of climate change: extreme weather, mass displacement and disrupted supplies of food and water. Those conditions will be highly likely to inflame the existing tensions over inequality and breed distrust in political systems that failed to avert catastrophe. In Brazil, the contrast between impoverished favelas and so-called “Brazilianaires,” coupled with a harsh economic downturn, set the stage for Bolsonaro. Then he surged in the polls after the leading presidential candidate, popular former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was jailed on a politically driven corruption conviction. In Chile, a 4% fare hike to ride the capital city’s metro ignited a populist protest that, as Vox reported, many failed to predict in a country hailed as one of the region’s most business-friendly. Half of Chilean workers earn less than $550 per month, according to a recent study by the Santiago-based think tank Fundación SOL. The United Nations estimated in 2017 that the richest 1% of the population nets 33% of Chile’s wealth, making it the most unequal member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the 36-nation club of developed economies. Forbes pegs President Sebastián Piñera’s net worth at $2.8 billion. “The fact that this COP would be held in Latin America and the Caribbean would have given us an excellent opportunity to discuss the challenges the region has in the face of an unfair system that deepens climate change effects while driving profound inequalities,” said Alejandro González, a senior adviser on climate change in Latin America for the British-based relief agency Christian Aid.

We’re in trouble from a security perspective, and the window is closing. Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security