A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

Climate Security and Canada’s Promises to NATO  (Global News) 

As a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Canada has been influential in the integration of climate change policy with the alliance’s mission. It supported the development of NATO’s Climate Change and Security Action Plan aligning with the alliance’s core tasks of deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. Following the Canadian proposal 2021, Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defense jointly lead NATO’s Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence (CCASCOE) to research and identify best practices to address climate change and security-related challenges.  

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a keynote speech at his nation’s embassy during the recent NATO Summit. He laid out Canada’s climate policy achievements, but also shared concerns about climate security risks including growing competition in the Arctic Circle to drought, famines, and flood events. “Climate policy is good economic policy,” he observed, “but it is also good security policy.” Trudeau added that the end of a long era of relative global peace means NATO must take proactive action for climate impact mitigation and adaptation. 

Canada’s climate action has not deflected concern about its defense spending commitments. Trudeau noted that Canada’s spending significantly increased during his term, from 1% (to 1.4%). Its government also announced that defense spending will increase to 1.76% in 2030. Yet in a time of accelerating global conflicts, especially Russia’s war on Ukraine, member states remain disappointed in the total outlay.  

LISTEN | An Interview with NATO’s Paul Rushton on the Alliance’s Climate Security Efforts 

Supporting Pregnant Women to Cope with Extreme Heat (BBC) 

Research increasingly suggests that the physiology of pregnant women and their unborn babies—an overlooked and vulnerable population—are severely affected by extreme heat events. Studies suggest that pregnancy expands the skin surface and creates hormonal changes that increase exposure to heat. One midwife in the Gambia, for instance, said he witnessed how dehydration made women too fatigued to push through labor. Women who are subsistence farmers and work for long hours in the soaring sun also present worsened symptoms of heat stress, ranging from hypertension, and cardiac arrest, to learning disabilities, epilepsy, and stillbirths.  

Two research projects in South Africa aim to map experiences that local women have with extreme heat to help build early warning systems. Awareness about heat and dealing with its effects is one key measure, including limiting outside chores to the cooler hours of the day, wearing fewer layers, and boiling and drinking plenty of water. Yet researchers found that in some regions, cultural factors—such as myths in rural Kenya advising women to cover their belly during pregnancy— are barriers to even these simple measures. Researchers are creating trials of public awareness campaigns in local clinics to inform women of best practices. They are also making concerted efforts to impel immediate family members to help reduce household chores for pregnant women.  

According to the UNPF, only around 20% of the 119 member states have mentioned maternal and fetal health in their climate change plans. So, beyond a focus on patients and awareness campaigns though, experts also emphasize the need for proactive and targeted global policymaking. The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has set up heat guidance targeted at pregnant women; providing rehydration salts on public transport, drinking water in public spaces, and compensation for heat-related deaths.   

READ | International Day for Maternal Health and Rights: Promoting the Right to Health for Pregnant People Globally 

Ideological Disputes over “Legal Personhood,” Rights of Nature (Mongabay) 

In 2014, New Zealand became the first country to give “legal personhood” status to a forest called Te Urewera. This action means that the forest lost its status as a national park and gained the status of a person, thus making western property rights irrelevant. Legal personhood grants environmental entities all the rights, responsibilities, liabilities, and protections given to human citizens. The Māori iwi tribes of Aotearoa, in New Zealand, spearheaded this effort, while also seeking this status for other environmental entities such as the river Te Awa Tupua, the mountain Taranaki, the snow-capped volcano Te Ika-a-Māui—and even, whales and dolphins. 

New Zealand’s efforts are inspiring analogous actions around the planet. Indeed, legal personhood drives push past conservation and serve as a reconciliation tool by which governments with colonial pasts can restore broken and alienated linkages between humans and nature. Legal Indigenous scholars suggest that the status can enhance the entities’ mana or spirit, hoping that it restores extinct species like the endangered North Island kōkako (Callaeas wilsoni), an endemic blue-wattled bird.  

Yet Indigenous scholars do have significant concerns with this emergent legal tool. They argue that giving such a status to individual features within interconnected ecosystems can be presumptuous and ineffective. They also say that the tool contradicts Māori beliefs by placing humans above the environment. These issues demonstrate that “legal personhood” can be viewed as a strange amalgamation of standardized Western laws on Indigenous ideologies that tend to vividly differ from one region to another. 

READ | Granting Rivers Legal Rights: Is International Law Ready for Rights-Centered Environmental Protection?