Showing posts by Wilson Center Staff.
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VIDEO: Dan Smith on Climate Change, Development, and Peacebuilding
›July 1, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffClimate change will have serious impacts on fragile states. To effectively address the potential for instability, the climate community must communicate and collaborate with the development and peacebuilding communities.
In an interview recorded in Washington, Dan Smith of International Alert makes the case for extending this dialogue: “This is not just an environmental issue, not just a development issue, it’s not just a peace and conflict issue, if we don’t understand the connectivity and the interactions between all of these categories, we’re going to get it wrong.”
Smith enumerates the shortcoming of failing to account for the special circumstances of states in conflict or emerging from conflict by “Adaptation and peacebulding are very, very closely related. A society which can adapt against the threat of climate change is a society that can you imagine can handle conflict and peace issues quite well and quite constructively…and vice versa,” he tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
With the Copenhagen negotiations set for December, the climate community is negotiating over significant funds for adaption in the realm of development. Yet the climate and development communities have too few overlaps in terms of people and understandings.
At a Woodrow Wilson Center event, Smith and colleague Shruti Mehrotra provided an update on the climate-conflict arguments and called for better trilateral dialogue among these three communities, drawing on the November 2007 co-authored report A Climate of Conflict. -
VIDEO: Jon Barnett on Remembering REDD Realities
›June 26, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the run-up to December’s Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, the idea of REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is gaining greater currency as a way to bring forests into climate mitigation efforts. Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne finds the principle of compensating states or communities for reducing deforestation sound. Yet he cautions that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Barnett stresses that deforestation’s diverse causes is an initial challenge in designing effective responses. And to whom should payments be made? Should they go to national governments that may or may not share those resources with communities affected by the restrictions on forest use?
In this interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett addresses these questions and highlights a number of areas where translating REDD from principle to practice remains challenging at best and counter-productive at worst: governance and corruption; social justice; monitoring and verification; and potential carbon leakage between participating and non-participating states. -
Weekly Reading
›A study published in Conservation Letters finds that emphasizing the ways the environment benefits the world’s poor “is a substantial improvement over dollar-based, ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor” and “offers great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.”
NATO offers seven one-minute videos on environmental-security topics.
In Foreign Policy, Stephen Faris argues that melting Himalayan glaciers could make security problems in South and Central Asia even worse.
The Financial Times offers an extended look at environmental migration in Ghana.
The Arctic Climate Change and Security Policy Conference: Final Report and Findings, a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, maintains that a multilateral process is the best way to minimize tensions over the Arctic. -
VIDEO: Geoff Dabelko on the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Conference (Day Two)
›June 24, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffThe second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
In this short video, Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and chair of the panel, notes that in the last 10 years, researchers and practitioners have moved from a nearly exclusive focus on the connections between environmental scarcity or abundance and conflict to a wider set of questions about environment’s roles all along the conflict continuum—including prevention, active conflict, conflict termination, and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. This wider agenda includes questions of cooperation and peacebuilding around environmental interdependence. Jensen’s UNEP post-conflict office directly engages these multiple environment-conflict connections, and he shared both practical lessons learned and concrete UN points of entry.
Dabelko also comments that human security, enunciated most prominently in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, has raised the profile of a wider set of vulnerabilities than those coming directly from the end of a gun. This more inclusive agenda brings livelihoods, human rights, and social and cultural values more squarely into the analysis of insecurity. -
VIDEO: Simon Dalby on ‘Security and Environmental Change’
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffSimon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”
Dalby “argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s population becomes vulnerable in new ways.”
Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with Dalby about his book outside the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo, Norway, where more than 160 experts and practitioners have gathered for three days of intense discussions. -
VIDEO: Geoff Dabelko on the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Conference
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffMore than 150 experts from around the world are assembled this week in Oslo, Norway, for the capstone conference of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project. The conference features a mix of researchers and policymakers, who are debating the practical impacts of bringing a focus on people more firmly into discussions of global environmental change.
The Wilson Center’s Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program, is attending the conference, and in this video, he comments on three themes prominently discussed in the opening day of the conference: human security versus national security; climate change and migration; and practical avenues for incorporating human security research into the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. -
VIDEO: Jon Barnett on Climate Change, Small Island States, and Migration
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffNo one is currently emigrating from Pacific small island states principally due to climate change, according to Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne. In this short interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett situates climate change’s potential future impacts within the broader social, political, and economic challenges for residents of small island states, reminding us that there is great physical and political diversity among these islands.
Stressing the mix of pushes and pulls that motivate people to move, Barnett suggests we examine existing patterns of migration to better understand how they will develop in the future. He emphasizes that climate change is most likely to push islanders to move due to declining food production and drinking water availability, rather than sea-level rise—despite the iconic image of lapping waves submerging low-lying countries. These sober reminders on the complexity of climate-migration links are worth keeping in mind when evaluating the plethora of new reports on the topic. -
Weekly Reading
›The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which integrates federal government research on climate change, released Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States this week. The report examines climate’s likely impacts on various regions of the country.
The Guardian examines ongoing conflicts over natural resources between indigenous people and governments.
In her final dispatch from the Bonn climate negotiations, Population Action International climate director Kathleen Mogelgaard notes the conspicuous absence of demography in international climate discussions.
A webcast is now available of the Johns Hopkins University-Population Reference Bureau symposium “Climate Change and Urban Adaptation: Managing Unavoidable Health Risks in Developing Countries.”
A new policy paper from the World Bank seeks to answer the question, “Do the households in game management areas enjoy higher levels of welfare relative to the conditions they would have been in had the area not been designated as a game management area?”
A Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, led by John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and Lincoln Chafee, former Republican senator from Rhode Island, has been formed to advise President Obama on how to reduce tropical deforestation through U.S. climate change policies, reports Mongabay.com.
