Showing posts from category video.
-
VIDEO: Karen O’Brien on Human Security and the Climate Change Agenda
›July 20, 2009 // By Sean Peoples“Environmental change is not just environment; people are responding to lots of different shocks and stresses simultaneously that really act together to affect capacity to respond,” said Karen O’Brien professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo and chair of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with O’Brien outside the GECHS conference in Oslo, Norway.
For O’Brien, the GECHS project aims to create “a community of researchers who are showing it is about individuals and communities having the capacity to respond to threats… and pulling environmental change out of the box of just environment and bringing it into issues of development, poverty, vulnerability, etc.” By studying the full spectrum of impacts on individuals and communities, we may learn how to better craft integrated solutions on a macro scale.
Moreover, O’Brien points out that linking research within the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities can lead to a greater understanding of the underlying issues driving challenges such as climate change. Her new book, Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, presents the latest research on integrated adaptation to climate change and was co-edited with colleagues Neil Adger and Irene Lorenzoni. -
VIDEO: Neil Adger on Adapting to Climate Change
›July 9, 2009 // By Sean Peoples“We can adapt to climate change… and there are lots of opportunities for change, lots of things that would be harmonious with sustainable development,” said Neil Adger, a professor at the University of East Anglia and leading researcher on adaptation at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK. “But saying we can change and can adapt does not mean to say we necessarily will adapt to climate change.”
In this short video, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko speaks with Adger outside the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo, Norway. As an environmental economist, Adger believes the need to mitigate and adapt to current and future climate shifts is unambiguous. Adger recently co-edited a new book with colleagues Irene Lorenzoni and Karen O’Brien, entitled Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, in which they present the latest interdisciplinary research on adaptation.
Adger warns against relying on geo-engineering, or rearranging Earth’s atmospheric dynamics, as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.” He says “there are significant inherent dangers with just about every serious geo-engineering technology being discussed.”
For more information regarding geo-engineering, read The Climate Engineers, an essay by former Woodrow Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar James Fleming, which discusses the evolution of radical ideas to control atmospheric patterns. -
VIDEO: Jon Barnett on Remembering REDD Realities
›June 26, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the run-up to December’s Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, the idea of REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is gaining greater currency as a way to bring forests into climate mitigation efforts. Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne finds the principle of compensating states or communities for reducing deforestation sound. Yet he cautions that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Barnett stresses that deforestation’s diverse causes is an initial challenge in designing effective responses. And to whom should payments be made? Should they go to national governments that may or may not share those resources with communities affected by the restrictions on forest use?
In this interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett addresses these questions and highlights a number of areas where translating REDD from principle to practice remains challenging at best and counter-productive at worst: governance and corruption; social justice; monitoring and verification; and potential carbon leakage between participating and non-participating states. -
VIDEO: Geoff Dabelko on the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Conference (Day Two)
›June 24, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffThe second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
In this short video, Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and chair of the panel, notes that in the last 10 years, researchers and practitioners have moved from a nearly exclusive focus on the connections between environmental scarcity or abundance and conflict to a wider set of questions about environment’s roles all along the conflict continuum—including prevention, active conflict, conflict termination, and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. This wider agenda includes questions of cooperation and peacebuilding around environmental interdependence. Jensen’s UNEP post-conflict office directly engages these multiple environment-conflict connections, and he shared both practical lessons learned and concrete UN points of entry.
Dabelko also comments that human security, enunciated most prominently in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, has raised the profile of a wider set of vulnerabilities than those coming directly from the end of a gun. This more inclusive agenda brings livelihoods, human rights, and social and cultural values more squarely into the analysis of insecurity. -
VIDEO: Simon Dalby on ‘Security and Environmental Change’
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffSimon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”
Dalby “argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s population becomes vulnerable in new ways.”
Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with Dalby about his book outside the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo, Norway, where more than 160 experts and practitioners have gathered for three days of intense discussions. -
VIDEO: Geoff Dabelko on the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Conference
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffMore than 150 experts from around the world are assembled this week in Oslo, Norway, for the capstone conference of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project. The conference features a mix of researchers and policymakers, who are debating the practical impacts of bringing a focus on people more firmly into discussions of global environmental change.
The Wilson Center’s Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program, is attending the conference, and in this video, he comments on three themes prominently discussed in the opening day of the conference: human security versus national security; climate change and migration; and practical avenues for incorporating human security research into the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. -
VIDEO: Jon Barnett on Climate Change, Small Island States, and Migration
›June 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffNo one is currently emigrating from Pacific small island states principally due to climate change, according to Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne. In this short interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett situates climate change’s potential future impacts within the broader social, political, and economic challenges for residents of small island states, reminding us that there is great physical and political diversity among these islands.
Stressing the mix of pushes and pulls that motivate people to move, Barnett suggests we examine existing patterns of migration to better understand how they will develop in the future. He emphasizes that climate change is most likely to push islanders to move due to declining food production and drinking water availability, rather than sea-level rise—despite the iconic image of lapping waves submerging low-lying countries. These sober reminders on the complexity of climate-migration links are worth keeping in mind when evaluating the plethora of new reports on the topic. -
VIDEO: Environment Key to Resolving Conflicts, Building Peace, Says UN Environment Programme Director Achim Steiner
›June 2, 2009 // By Rachel Weisshaar“Addressing the issue of the environment in the context of conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacekeeping, [and] peacebuilding becomes ever more important because we know from everything we have learned—and are learning every day—about climate change that one thing is for certain: The world is going to be under more stress,” says UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner in a short expert interview on YouTube.
Yet in another original Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) video, Steiner emphasizes that environmental issues do not lead inexorably to conflict. “History shows that human societies are not prone to looking for conflict but rather for conflict resolution, particularly when it comes to fundamental elements of life support systems, be it water, or be it clean air or other issues—we have seen the model of cooperation emerge.”
Steiner was at the Wilson Center in March 2009 for the launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report by UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme. According to From Conflict to Peacebuilding:- Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
- Such conflicts are twice as likely to relapse within the first five years of peace.
- Less than a quarter of peace agreements for these conflicts address natural-resource issues.
- Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
