Which nations are most at risk of catastrophic outcomes due to intensifying ecological threats? The third edition of the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)’s Ecological Threat Report (ETR)—released on October 20, 2022— applies a lens of societal resilience to predict the hotspots most likely to suffer from instability and conflict in the future, and provides projections of ongoing trends to 2050.

“It is in Brazil’s interest to climate-proof the nation,” said Wilson Center Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman during a recent International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) event. Referencing a new IMCCS  report, Climate and Security in Brazil, Goodman, who is also Secretary General for the IMCCS, said that Brazilian leaders ought to develop counter-deforestation and climate plans as critical elements of the national security agenda.

Scenario planning—a powerful method for communicating and examining uncertainty—is once again in vogue as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the growing interest in this approach, however, its use is still limited, deployed predominately by the intelligence, business, and military communities.

The team of people tasked with coordinating the global climate change negotiations for the 26^th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021, we recently learned, consists entirely of men. While not surprising to many feminists in this space, this blatant disregard of gender diversity and women’s perspectives in climate policy is all too common. And it reflects broader ignorance of how gender and climate change intersect.

“The gender perspective highlights how pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities are exacerbated in conflict and in disasters,” said Susanne Kozak, a doctoral candidate at Monash University at a recent event hosted by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Science.

As Beijing prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, China’s environmental activities are once again on center stage. The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum took the top spot this month with Karen Mancl and Richard Liu’s coverage of the new program report, “Closing the Loop on China’s Water Pollution,” which details what China can learn from New York, Washington, D.C., and Singapore, to advance its wastewater and carbon reduction targets.

Is the world doomed to be ever-more tumultuous? For years, headlines have suggested that climate change causes or acts as a threat multiplier for violent conflicts. For example, climate change-influenced drought has been labeled a cause of the Syrian conflict and the war in Darfur. Natural hazard-related disasters (“disasters”) like earthquakes that are not related to climate change have also been connected to an increased risk of violent social conflict and political instability. The narratives are often that disasters displace people who then put pressure on already-strained resources and infrastructure in receiving areas, and that disaster-stricken people fight over limited resources in their struggle for survival.