Climate change poses a serious threat to U.S. national security and is becoming a “catalyst for conflict” in vulnerable countries, according to a panel of retired military leaders speaking at the Wilson Center on May 15. [Video Below]

According to NASA and a team of scientists from the University of California, significant portions of the West Antarctic ice sheet have begun an unstoppable slide towards oblivion, slowly melting in warmer-than-usual ocean currents that have been eating away at their bases. [Video Below]

In 2007, an influential analysis by 11 retired generals and admirals characterized climate change as a “threat multiplier” that could aggravate the conditions for conflict. Last week, in a follow-up report launched at the Wilson Center, members of the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board framed climate change as a more direct and immediate risk, calling it a “catalyst for conflict.”

Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) celebrated 150 years of their mission to “protect the lives and dignity of victims of war and internal violence.” Though this mission hasn’t changed in the past century-and-a-half, the nature of conflict and crisis response has. [Video Below]

As the earth’s surface grows hotter and precipitation becomes more variable due to the impacts of climate change, the world is in need of solutions to more effectively store water supplies. One potential solution is deceptively simple: store water in aquifers below the ground.

Military leaders should be very concerned about climate change – that’s the message of a new report released this week by the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board.

As climate change threatens more extreme weather, it is becoming more important to incorporate disaster risk reduction into poverty-reduction efforts, writes the Overseas Development Institute in a new report. The authors of The Geography of Poverty, Disasters, and Climate Extremes in 2030 argue that the hard-won gains of development are threatened by vulnerability among the poorest to climate change disasters, especially droughts. “Up to 325 million extremely poor people will be living in the 49 most hazard-prone countries in 2030, the majority in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,” write Andrew Shepherd et al. Using an index measuring the risk of a nation’s exposure to natural disasters as compared with a nation’s vulnerability to extreme poverty (income less than $1 daily), the report singles out 11 nations at high risk in both categories.