The National Intelligence Council has released
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, an unclassified report seeking to identify a range of future security trends. As the
Washington Post notes, the report “makes for sometimes grim reading in imagining a world of weak states bristling with weapons of mass destruction and unable to cope with burgeoning populations without adequate water and food.” ECSP hosted a
review of an intermediate draft of the report in July 2008.
The United Nations, the U.S. Department of Defense, and several other militaries are spearheading an effort to
fight climate change and ozone-depleting substances. The partnership comes out of a
conference held in Paris earlier this month on the role of militaries in protecting the climate.
Andrew Alder, who attended the conference, writes, “the Pentagon can also play a leading role in reducing carbon emissions, ironically helping to reduce the very threat for which it is preparing.”
In “Quantum of Solace,” James Bond goes up against a villain who takes control of a country’s water supply. Pacific Institute Director Peter Gleick thinks this is “art imitating life in many ways,” as he believes conflict over water will become more severe unless we develop and implement more efficient ways of using our limited freshwater resources.
“Data on rainfall patterns only weakly corroborate the claim that climate change explains the Darfur conflict,” argue Michael Kevane and Leslie Gray of Santa Clara University in “Darfur: rainfall and conflict,” a paper in Environmental Research Letters.
Human and animal diseases must be addressed before the different protected areas that make up the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area can be connected, according to “As the Fences Come Down: Emerging Concerns in Transfrontier Conservation Areas.”
Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems is a new manual by the World Wildlife Fund on how to integrate health and family planning into existing conservation projects. It features examples of population-health-environment projects from the Philippines, Nepal, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Uganda. 
