Climate change is no longer an abstract issue we may face in the future. Devastating forest fires, the hottest June on record in the United States, lethal flooding in Europe and Asia, and extreme droughts in Africa reveal that the climate is already changing with extreme consequences. Even more concerning than these events alone is the reality that the drivers of climate change, violent conflict, and fragile states compound each other. Climate change exacerbates unstable social, economic, and political conditions, while conflict and fragility can hinder effective climate change response and adaptation. The U.S. can address the compound risks created by both of these issues only through integration of conflict prevention and climate change in its foreign policy and development assistance.

As the world continues to battle the COVID crisis, we must not lose sight of the greatest long-term threat faced by mankind: climate change.

COVID-19 and its even more contagious variants have wrought misery upon our world, inflicting massive loss of life and sickness, widespread disruption of health services, and economic ruin with ensuing social upheaval. There is no silver lining.

We can, however, attempt to extract useful lessons from the strategies and tactics──both successful and unsuccessful──used to battle the contagion to better array our forces against that other pending global catastrophe: climate change.

On my first tour of a Cambodian minefield in 2010, the demining supervisor of the platoon of deminers brought me through a tapioca field where heavily armored men and women stood in lines. I was not allowed beyond the bright red signs with skulls and crossbones. Wearing bulletproof helmets, masks, and aprons, they slowly and tediously walked through the field, using a metal detector to sweep the ground in front of them, the sun reflecting off the long plastic visor. To avoid the heat of the Cambodian sun, they began their work early in the morning. In the golden hour of sunrise as dawn gilded the fields, the sounds of a distant Buddhist temple surrounded us with chanting. I commented on how beautiful it was.

Thirty years of research underlies the realization that climate change poses substantial national, international and human security risks, but analysts have only recently shifted their focus toward how to simultaneously build peace in post-conflict environments and grapple with the dual challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change. In a recent article in World Development article, we propose what causal pathways can simultaneously facilitate climate change adaptation, increase resilience, improve natural resource governance, and build more sustainable peace. 

“Gui Jie” in Beijing, meaning Ghost Street, is dedicated to crayfish and is filled with towering bright red crayfish statues. While it might just seem like a show for tourists, the Chinese are responsible for 90 percent of the world’s crayfish consumption and crayfish is on menus throughout the country. Between 2006 and 2016, crayfish production more than tripled to 850,000 tons. Surprisingly, crayfish is not native to China but the Chinese began raising them when aquaculture began expanding in the 1980s. 

Cambodia’s lush Prey Lang rainforest is abundant with animals, insects and birds, including endangered species, and diverse types of forests. It also provides resin tapping and other sources of livelihood for some 250,000 people, many of whom are Indigenous Kuy, living within or adjacent to the forest.

The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban not only threatens people’s lives, security, and fundamental freedom, but also significantly increases risks of water insecurity both immediately and in the long term. While our hearts and minds are with the people struggling for survival and freedom in Afghanistan today, we should not forget that the implications of Taliban rule will add yet another challenge to the long-term future of the Afghan people, and possibly also to the entire region’s stability.

In 2007, at the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council, a colleague and I set out to determine if we could forecast two distinct political phenomena, the rise and the demise of high levels of democracy. To guide our decade-long forecasts, we relied on a simple statistical model and a spreadsheet of demographic projections from the UN’s 2006 World Population Prospects data set. Now that the experimental period (from 2010 to 2020) has ended, we can look back and ask: How well did these forecasts perform?