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Beware the Dark Side of Environmental Peacebuilding
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Environmental peacebuilding is a good idea. As a practice, it aims to address simultaneously environmental problems and challenges related to violent conflict. Examples include the promotion of environmental cooperation between rival states, conflict-sensitive adaptation to climate change, and restoring access to land and water in post-conflict societies. As a concept, environmental peacebuilding directs researchers’ and politicians’ attention to cooperative adaptation as a response to environmental stress. It thus helps to correct one-sided narratives about environment-conflict links.
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Community Input Improves Climate Change-Induced Resettlement Effort
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In the Global South, climate change-induced resettlement requires a holistic and integrated approach, involving all stakeholders—state institutions, local customary and civil society institutions—and in particular respectful engagement with local traditional actors and networks. In a policy brief for the Toda Peace Institute, we examined climate change-induced resettlement from the Carteret Islands in the Pacific, a case which encompasses a broad range of issues relevant to future relocation efforts elsewhere. Those who seek to make this type of resettlement possible would do well to heed these lessons.
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To Help Save the Planet, Stop Environmental Crime
›Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the Anthropocene Epoch. Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, inflicting changes that may persist for millennia.We are razing the planet’s last intact wild lands, degrading, deforesting, carving up, and destroying huge swathes of habitat. We’re overfishing and poisoning our rivers and oceans. We continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising CO2 levels and hastening climatic changes that are already affecting all life on Earth.
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All the Population Future We Cannot See
›In the quarter century the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program has been pondering the issues for which it’s named, the world’s demographic future has been wobbling. A key concern of analysts: How many people will farmers need to feed in 2050? Mainstream projections have teetered between 8.9 billion and 9.8 billion, amounting to an increase of between 13 and 21 percent over today’s 7.7 billion. This significant variation in projections is rarely acknowledged by prognosticators. Many simply round up today’s latest guess and state confidently that there will be 10 billion people in 2050—though just a few years ago, the number most confidently stated was 9 billion. -
Protecting the Protectors: Environmental Defenders and the Future of Environmental Peacebuilding
›Early scholarship on environmental peacemaking recognized the important role that local civil-society can play in promoting regional cooperation while, at the same time, pressuring governments to protect the environment. For example, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya in Uzbekistan and the Dashowuz Ecological Club in Turkmenistan, were at the forefront of the fight to restore the Aral Sea and protect the region’s biodiversity. -
Foresight for Action | Weathering the Storm: Improving Predictive Capabilities for Extreme Weather and Water Events in the Caribbean
›For two weeks, Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest hurricanes to make landfall in the Pacific, decimated large swaths of the Caribbean displacing 70,000 people and killing at least 50. Natural disasters like Hurricane Dorian in the Caribbean have only been worsening over the last decade, a trend often attributed to warming oceanic and atmospheric temperatures.
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By, for, and of the People: How Citizen Science Enhances Water Security
›In the Peruvian Andes, where cropland is irrigated and water availability is variable at best, knowledge of highland hydrology is crucial to survival. However, until recently, the locals did not have adequate information to be able to use their water efficiently. So the community worked with a nonprofit to develop a non-specialist/non-researcher run data-gathering project to monitor the water in the region to optimize its use: in short, they developed a citizen science project.
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Three Trends to Track in Population-Environment-Security
›Exactly 25 years ago the international community met in Cairo for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. In the aftermath of the Cold War, ethnic conflict seemed to be exploding globally and research on the role of population growth and resource scarcity found an eager audience among policy makers struggling to understand this new international disorder. ECSP’s founding in that same year positioned the program as a leader in bringing together the scholarly and policy communities around non-traditional security issues over the last 25 years. The last two-and-a-half decades have brought tremendous change in population trends, environmental change, and the security landscape. Over the next 25 years three trends will shape the agenda of those working on the nexus of population-environment-security issues.
Showing posts from category environment.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the 
In the quarter century the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program has been pondering the issues for which it’s named, the world’s demographic future has been wobbling. A key concern of analysts: How many people will farmers need to feed in 2050? Mainstream projections have teetered between 8.9 billion and 9.8 billion, amounting to an increase of between 13 and 21 percent over today’s 7.7 billion. This significant variation in projections is rarely acknowledged by prognosticators. Many simply round up today’s latest guess and state confidently that there will be 10 billion people in 2050—though just a few years ago, the number most confidently stated was 9 billion.
Early scholarship on 
Exactly 25 years ago the international community met in Cairo for the 
