ClientEarth Communications
27th March 2026
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Oil and gas prices soaring, global conflict, energy vulnerability... the headlines of 2026 are all pointing in the same direction – war is exposing the fragility of our energy systems, and breaking out of fossil fuel lock-in is an essential step for all our security and safety.
But what exactly is meant by ‘energy security’? How does global conflict affect having reliable access to energy? And what do we need to do to be more secure?
We explore below.
The concept of energy security is having access to reliable and affordable sources of energy. If you have access to both, you are energy secure.
Fossil fuel markets are highly volatile, politicised, and conflict-prone. Fossil fuels usually end up traded and exported rather than being kept for local use. Relying on fossil fuels – no matter where they come from – is bad for energy security.
We live in a world still largely reliant on fossil fuels like oil and gas. Most countries are net importers of their energy and are heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels to meet their energy needs.
Fossil fuel price volatility and vulnerability to supply shocks are all too clear from recent conflicts. For example, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw gas and oil prices soar. And most recently, the 2026 war in the Middle East caused, according to the IEA, "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”. It is also causing fuel rationing in south-east Asia, with people not being able to work as well or as many hours due to lack of air-con.
Put simply, the faster and further we transition away from fossil fuels, the more energy secure we will be.
Renewable energy is generally much less affected by conflict, particularly when it is based around a decentralised model where a significant amount of energy is generated by a network of smaller-scale, geographically-distributed infrastructure – from solar panels on rooftops to community-owned wind power.
Renewables make us less dependent on energy from other countries
As we have seen in the news with the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el Mandeb Strait, conflict causes disruptions, delays and destruction in the energy supply chain, meaning the fossil fuels we are currently relying on can’t reach us when we need them. Countries which produce their own energy through renewables are far less exposed to these kinds of fallouts.
Renewables make the energy we use more secure economically
As described above, fossil fuel costs are dependent on the international market and largely out of our control. That’s why we’re seeing the dramatic inflation of oil and gas prices as a result of the 2026 conflict in Iran.
More renewables can decrease exposure to volatile fossil gas prices. The price of renewable electricity is currently closely linked to fossil gas price volatility, and therefore there’s an opportunity to better orient energy markets to avoid this by incentivising more renewables to be connected to the grid instead. In other words, the faster we transition towards renewable energy, the more stable prices should become.
Conflict and war is often driven by scrambles for control over finite resources such as fossil fuels, and increasingly also by climate change. This creates a ‘vicious circle’ where continued fossil fuel dependence leads to more conflict and climate change, which in turn lead to further disruption to vulnerable fossil fuel supply chains and more energy crises and price spikes.
Renewable energy can be decentralised
With a decentralised renewable energy network, we remove more ‘single points of failure’, which make it harder for us to lose energy even if the national grid or individual power stations are compromised – both in and outside of conflict zones, and by physical or cyber-attack. This is especially relevant for infrastructure providing lifesaving care.
Energy communities are one type of such decentralised system. Energy communities let people produce and share renewable energy locally. They lower bills, strengthen resilience, and keep energy closer to home. There are already over 8,000 energy communities across Europe.
Renewables strengthen the grid
While fossil fuel infrastructure, like oil and gas shipping terminals or pipelines are highly centralised and exposed to attack and destruction, it’s very hard to destroy a decentralised network of solar panels or wind turbines in the same way. Renewable infrastructure that is distributed across countries makes its energy supply harder to target.
Renewables enable longer-term job security
So long as shifts to renewable energy are done fairly, with proper support for workforce transitions, these more sustainable energy sources will offer longer term job security as demand for fossil fuels in Europe continues to decline.
Renewables contribute far less to the climate crisis
While renewables must undergo their own rigorous environmental impact assessments to protect local ecosystems and human rights, they ultimately mitigate harmful climate change, helping to stop increasingly more extreme weather events around the world.
Not only do extreme weather and climate change cause numerous harms to people and the environment, they also threaten to damage energy infrastructure, meaning the less our energy system contributes to exacerbating climate change, the more secure we are.
In addition to shifting to a decentralised renewable energy system, it's also critical that we audit our energy use to avoid waste and avoid energy being drained unnecessarily across a range of harmful and polluting areas – from petrochemicals and plastics production to leaky homes, car dependency and data centres.
This has started to happen in many countries in the wake of recent energy price shocks, for example the series of ambitious measures undertaken via the REPowerEU initiative to reduce overall energy demand and fossil gas consumption. However, we need to go much further and ensure that energy use is delivering the maximum societal benefit rather than serving the narrow interests of certain powerful industries.
Some companies and governments are publicly saying that even if we do commit to transitioning to renewables, it would be prudent to keep exploring new sources of oil and gas as a type of ‘insurance policy’ for the future.
It's true that small amounts of fossil fuels may be needed in future to act as a back-up, but it's clear that they cannot be the main energy source in a sustainable future, contrary to what many fossil fuel companies would have us believe.
There are numerous reasons why we need to avoid locking in more fossil fuels:
1. New oil fields are never ‘just in case’.
Expanding supply of fossil fuels ‘locks in’ their use for decades and even drives up demand. There are big economic, political and even legal barriers to closing fields early.
2. Fossil fuels are enormously damaging to people and planet
Extreme weather events, ecosystem collapse, health conditions related to extreme heat, pollution and zoological diseases, food shortages, water contamination – the list of harms caused by our changing climate is long and evolving, and fossil fuels are the main culprits. In other words, carbon lock-in guarantees a less secure, more disrupted future.
It’s not just about harm to the planet. The highest court, the International Court of Justice, clarified in its recent Opinion that a healthy environment is also a precondition to the enjoyment of human rights, and called out continued fossil fuel production as a part of what needs to stop.
3. Because of the harms fossil fuels cause, we have committed to legally binding climate goals
As per the Paris Agreement, we committed to limiting global temperature increase to 1.5C, and that requires a categoric phase out of fossil fuels – no new projects.
The amount of fossil fuels we already have in the pipeline, if used, will already cause us to overshoot the 1.5C goal we committed to.
4. It would be a bad financial investment
New oil and gas projects are at high risk of becoming ‘stranded assets’, investments that are no longer viable as demand falls away, and as the market shifts towards greener alternatives.
Continuing to rely on fossil fuels in the future means continuing to rely on an energy source with highly volatile pricing and supply dynamics, exposing us to more price shocks and supply disruption like we’re seeing at the moment. These kinds of pain points can feel especially acute for small businesses and lower income households.
We’re removing barriers so that energy communities can take root across Europe, promoting home-grown and resilient generation that directly benefits the communities in which they are based.
We’re challenging the unsustainable build-out of new power-hungry data centres, which would strain already stressed power grids and lead to new fossil gas generation.
We’re challenging the German government’s plans to subsidize new fossil gas power plants, which would lock the already heavily gas-dependent country further into a fossil fuel future.