It is uncomfortably easy to find connections between environmental change and security around the globe. 2023 began with heat records in Europe, a deadly cyclone in New Zealand, and military deployments in response to forest fires ravaging Canada. An untimely early heatwave scorched Spain and endangered its agricultural production. Cyclone Mocha destroyed the livelihoods of thousands in northwestern Myanmar, and Typhoon Mawar caused “significant damage” to a terminal building on Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base.

Climate change is a security concern due to its role as a risk multiplier, aggravating political, social, and economic vulnerabilities, straining resources, and undermining institutions. And as climate change intensifies, its impact on military operations around the world, including UN peacebuilding efforts, will grow in tandem.

 

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

Climate Change and Migration: Ensuring Safe Access for Women and Girls

A new report from UN Women found that climate change poses a significant threat gender equality. In particular, changes in weather patterns and extreme events exacerbate vulnerability among women and girls and leads them to seek safety and opportunities through increased migration.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 2023 State of the World Population (SWOP) Report offers a chance to reflect on what’s at stake in debates over global population. “The question is not whether the human population is too large or too small. The question is whether everyone can exercise their fundamental human right to choose the number and spacing of their children,” said Sarah Craven, Chief of the Washington Office of UNFPA at the virtual D.C. launch of the report at the Wilson Center on April 26, 2023.  

Russia’s brutal aggression has wreaked devastation in Ukraine for more than a year. It has also forced a fundamental rethink of geopolitics. Central to that new thinking is the role of energy security and how to manage the insecurities created by the lopsided dependencies exposed by the conflict.

Climate change’s ripples reach every corner of the globe, but nowhere is their geopolitical impact more pronounced than in China’s relations with the United States. This is especially the case as the undisputed security risks posed to both nations by climate change become intertwined with broader arcs of political, economic, and military competition on both sides.

For decades, western multinational companies have been profiting by exploiting plant, animal, or microbial genetic resources obtained from less developed countries. Take the neem tree, for example. Since the 1990s, international companies have registered more than 70 patents on products derived from India’s “tree of life.” Yet these patents have prohibited local people from using these trees (as they had for centuries) to make cosmetics, fertilizers, and medicines.

International companies have now turned their eyes to the high seas in a new hunt for genetic resources. Concerned they will be left out of the potentially profitable patents once again, developing nations are demanding equitable use and benefit sharing of genetic resources in ongoing global ocean treaty negotiations.