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Backdraft: Flipping the Frame on Conflict and Climate Change
›Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.
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Lisa Friedman: Bangladesh Shows Importance of Expanding Coverage of Climate-Induced Migration
›“What I found in Bangladesh was that [climate migration] wasn’t a straight line,” says Lisa Friedman in this week’s podcast. It’s “a far more complicated story.”
Friedman is the deputy director of ClimateWire, a news service that brings readers daily information related to climate change and its effects on business and society. At the launch of ECSP’s new report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation, Friedman discussed her experiences reporting on climate-induced migration in Bangladesh – one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in the world, due to its low-lying geography, dense population, and high poverty levels.
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Stacy VanDeveer: “Green Economy” May Bring More of the Resource Curse
›“We can’t talk about a ‘green economy,’ ‘green technologies,’ or ‘green energies’ only by talking about technologies that are stamped out at one end of a large global process and deployed for cleaner energy,” says Stacy VanDeveer in this week’s podcast.
“The green economy, or green energy transition, requires a lot of metals, and a whole lot of things that are mined,” he says. “Because of the scale of the industry now, the scale of the environmental and social change being driven by mining globally is actually quite stunning.”
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Dale Lewis on Combating Poaching in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley Through Integrated Development
›June 28, 2013 // By Jacob Glass“We did something very special for the community and the resources these farmers live with. We sat down with local leaders and promised to stop spending so much time caring about the elephants, and instead create a company that will try to address community needs,” said Dale Lewis in an interview at the Wilson Center. “The deal was they had to put down their snares and guns.”
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Wilson Center Roundtable on ‘Backdraft’: The Unintended Consequences of Climate Change Response
›As President Obama readies a new road map for addressing climate change in the United States, experts warn that poorly designed and implemented initiatives, especially in already-fragile parts of the world, could unintentionally provoke conflicts, rather than diffuse them.
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The Farmer’s Dilemma: Climate Change, Food Security, and Human Mobility
›“Most of the world’s poor are farmers; they share the same profession and the same challenges,” said One Acre Fund’s Stephanie Hanson at a recent Wilson Center event on small-scale farming, climate change, food security, and migration. They are tasked with growing enough food to support their families with only tenuous access to land and natural resources, the most basic of tools, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns to deal with. [Video Below]
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Susan Bradley on Feed the Future: Solving Hunger Requires Cross-Cutting Development Initiatives
›“Sustainable food security means that food production has to be climate smart,” says Susan Bradley in this week’s podcast. “In order to achieve climate smart food security, we are going to have to build resilience and adaptive capacity into agriculture.”
Bradley, division director for the USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, is working to implement the U.S. government’s Feed the Future Initiative. Unveiled by the Obama Administration in 2009, the $3.5 billion “whole of government” initiative aims to alleviate hunger and increase food security around the world.
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From Dakar to Abidjan, Population Finally Finding Its Place in Food Security Assessments
›June 20, 2013 // By Kathleen MogelgaardA woman sat crouched on the side of a busy road in Dakar, a baby in a sling on her back and a basket of peanuts in front. I know only a little French, and no Wolof, but I decided to try anyway. “Bonsoir,” I said, and smiled at the toddler beside her. “Combien?” I asked, pointing at the peanuts.
She smiled back at me, we negotiated a sale, and in exchange for the coins in my pocket I walked away with a few bags of the small, tasty nuts that are grown throughout the “peanut basin” of central Senegal.
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