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?

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

Deforestation Dynamics in Colombia: The Role of Armed Groups

A 29% drop in deforestation in Colombia in 2022 was labeled as a victory for President Gustavo Petro. Yet there is another reason behind the decrease. Armed groups, such as the Estado Mayor Central (EMC), have imposed logging bans in areas under their control, and levy fines amounting to 251 dollars per hectare.

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.

“Too many children are dying in the first month of life,” said Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet at a recent launch event for the 2023 Lancet Series on Breastfeeding, hosted by The Royal Society of Medicine, London. Indeed, the global numbers are staggering. Horton observed that 2.3 million children died in the first month of life in 2021—that’s more than 6,000 newborns dying every single day.

China’s high-speed railway (HSR) is the most recent poster child for the country’s rapid development, with more HSR tracks than the rest of the world combined. Since 2004, the Chinese government has invested more than 10 trillion RMB to build a 40,000-kilometer (km) network of trains that zip between stations at speeds reaching 350 km/hr (or 220 miles per hour). Not to be outdone, by 2035 the government aims to expand this train network by 75 percent to help the country reach its transport connectivity and low-carbon transportation goals. 

The world has plenty of reasons to avoid conflict already. Yet attendees at the recently-concluded COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt were presented with another compelling argument: Warfare is bad for global warming. So much so, in fact, that Ukraine’s delegation to the conference organized a special session at the conference of parties on “War Related Emissions,” bringing along a tree trunk bearing scars from Russian shell fragments as tangible evidence.

Earlier in 2022, Ecuador’s capital was left “virtually paralyzed” after some 14,000 people, mainly Indigenous Ecuadorians, participated in 17 days of sometimes violent nationwide protests. The actions forced the Lasso government to the negotiating table for a 90-day dialogue with Indigenous leaders. By early September, the parties signed a temporary moratorium on the development of oil blocks and the allocation of new mining contracts.

As countries prepare to gather for the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in December 2022, the stakes for global biodiversity couldn’t be higher. Over the last half century, global wildlife population sizes plummeted by 60 percent. A 2019 UN report, one among many, warned that the current global response to this accelerating loss of species is insufficient and that “transformative changes are needed to restore and protect nature.”