The global transition to low-carbon energy is spurring new momentum to produce and secure the mineral inputs necessary for renewable technologies. Yet meeting demand may prove difficult. From electric cars to wind turbines, essential renewable energy technologies often require more minerals than fossil fuel-powered infrastructure. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that efforts to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement could lead to a fourfold increase in mineral demand by 2040.

Many developing countries today face the dual challenges of development and decarbonization, racing against climate change that makes the latter increasingly urgent. This dilemma brings China’s railway investments in Africa under the spotlight. Can stakeholders of these megaprojects achieve the goal of boosting host countries’ economies while mitigating the socio-environmental risks of these ventures?

More than 11,300 people are confirmed to have died in the floods that struck eastern Libya on September 11, 2023, far surpassing many estimates of the death toll in the country’s 2011 civil war. Thousands are still missing. Flooding has washed away approximately 25% of the city of Derna, and damage to roads and bridges is curtailing emergency service access. A rapid attribution study estimated that the extreme rain was at least a “1-in-300 year event.” This is far beyond previously recorded incidents, yet such incidents are now up to 50 times more likely—and up to 50% more intense—when compared to a 1.2°C cooler climate. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can significantly affect the country’s domestic and overseas energy transition and decarbonization agenda. Electricity projects in China’s BRI investments, contrary to popular impressions of being part of a monolithic “project of the century,” have divergent implications for the host country’s shift away from coal-based power plants.

“The message of the report we are issuing today is clear: health equity and gender equality have a unique and powerful ability to contribute to peace,” said Finland’s former President Tarja Halonen at the recent launch event at the Wilson Center for a new report by the Lancet Commission on peaceful societies through health equity and gender quality.

In the wake of Storm Daniel, which hit Libya in September 2023, ECSP spoke with Wilson Center Global Fellow Peter Schwartzstein about the storm’s tragic fallout and its connection to conflict. As an environmental journalist and consultant, Schwartzstein has written extensively about the climate-conflict nexus and other environmental and geopolitical issues, primarily in the Middle East, North and East Africa.

In 2021, US Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III referred to climate change as an “existential threat”—a term traditionally reserved for nuclear weapons. Yet two years and several strategic plans later, tangible progress to mitigate and prepare for this threat remains elusive, especially on the international scale where the greatest impacts could be realized.

A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

Treading Water: Why Were Libya’s Floods So Devastating? 

This week’s devastating disasters in Morocco and Libya underscore the cascading effects of environmental shocks (and in the case of Libya, climate-related shocks), as well as the cross-sectoral response needed to comprehensively address the damage.