“This is not an island issue, this is not a Caribbean issue, this is an issue that is [also] critical for us,” says Roger-Mark De Souza, the Wilson Center’s director of population, environmental security, and resilience in a recent video interview. “For us in the United States we have to continue to recognize that we ourselves are also vulnerable.” De Souza remains hopeful about the possibility of rebuilding and rebounding in the face of devastation, but also presses the importance of generating response mechanisms which address environmental hazards before they manifest into disasters. “That means planning, it means investing in community mobilization mechanisms, it means thinking about ways we provide humanitarian assistance.”

Island states contribute only .03 percent to global emissions, but “nineteen major Caribbean cities are in the bullseye of the climate threat” and Pacific island states such as Kiribati and Tuvalu face an existential threat from sea level rise, said Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the Organization of American States and the United States. At the same time, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Pacific and the Caribbean are leading efforts to combat climate change, said experts at the Wilson Center on July 10.

As the Senate returns from recess, passing the annual National Defense Authorization Act will be one of its top priorities—and this year it could include a potentially controversial amendment directing the Pentagon to assess the impact of climate change on national security. In the House, the Langevin amendment surprisingly garnered enough Republican support to withstand a challenge in July. Since then, two more senior military appointees have testified to the importance of understanding the challenges climate change poses to national security. 

Fear fends off disaster, but does fear give us the tools to manage risk? Do we need to spend precious time learning complex risk management techniques? Perhaps not: learning disaster reduction techniques could be as easy as playing a game.  “Well-designed games, like risk management measures, involve decisions with consequences. While games can never fully capture the complexity of climate risk management decisions, through gameplay these complexities can be revealed, discussed, and processed,” writes Pablo Suarez, the Climate Centre’s associate director for research and innovation.

In 2015, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina received the United Nations Champion of the Earth award for her “outstanding leadership on the frontline of climate change.” One of the world’s most populated countries, Bangladesh is also one of the least developed and most vulnerable to climate change. While Bangladesh is well-known for the natural calamities that regularly leave millions of people homeless and displaced, far fewer know that it is also one of the most proactive countries in the fields of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate adaptation, as well as a leading voice among the poorest countries in climate negotiations.

“Interest in earth observation—and in particular, the value to what we do in development internationally—has never been higher,” said Jenny Frankel-Reed, adaptation team lead at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Frankel-Reed spoke at the Wilson Center’s recent panel discussion of the earth observation data program known as SERVIR, which included insights from USAID’s soon-to-be-released evaluation of the program.

Capable of upending rural livelihoods, compromising institutions of governance, and inducing new patterns of migration and crime, global water stress has emerged as one of the principal threats to U.S. national security, said David Reed, senior policy advisor at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and editor of WWF’s new book, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy, on June 27 at the Wilson Center. Four defense and development leaders – retired U.S. Marine Corps General James L. Jones; Paula Dobrianksy, vice chairwoman of the National Executive Committee of the U.S. Water Partnership; retired U.S. Navy Admiral Lee Gunn, vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board; and Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive of the World Bank – joined Reed for a panel discussion of water’s central role in global stability and prosperity.

Sea-level rise will put approximately 13 million coastal Americans at risk of displacement by 2100, but the first to move will be the most vulnerable communities. In Reaching Higher Ground: Avenues to Secure and Manage New Land for Communities Displaced by Climate Change, Wilson Center Global Fellow Maxine Burkett and her coauthors look at Native American communities on the frontlines of climate change as a model for how vulnerable coastal communities can successfully relocate. Currently, there is no central mechanism within the federal government for relocating communities displaced by climate change. Federally recognized Native American communities have historically coexisted alongside the United States government as sovereign entities, and their many avenues – legal, policy, and corporate – to acquire land could provide a starting point for addressing this imminent challenge. The authors identify tools communities can use to secure new homes and preserve their ownership of evacuated lands.