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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • From the Wilson Center

    New Year, New Challenges—and New Questions for our Audience

    January 3, 2018 By Lauren Herzer Risi
    Lauren-Herzer-Risi

    The new year promises some big changes for the field of environmental security—and some big moves for the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). As we say hello to 2018, we wave goodbye to Roger-Mark De Souza, and welcome him to our team of advisors and fellows. And I’m excited (if a bit daunted) to step into his shoes as our Acting Director and tackle the challenges to come.

    At December’s Planetary Security Conference in The Hague, the hallway chatter focused on the United States’ dramatic roll-back of the progress on climate-security connections made in 2016. But even as the U.S. administration cools on climate, the discussion continues to heat up in Europe, where policymakers are working to bridge the gap between research and practice on conflict-sensitive, climate-resilient development. At the conference, ECSP Senior Advisor Geoff Dabelko and I led two innovative workshops where migration experts Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne and Wilson Center Global Fellow Caroline Kihato worked with participants to identify out-of-the-box responses to climate-migration-security linkages.

    Even as the U.S. administration cools on climate, the discussion continues to heat up in Europe

    The conference was a great opportunity to connect with old friends like Aaron Wolf, Peter Gleick, and Ashok Swain, who are all leading experts on transboundary water security. After 10 years at the Wilson Center, I still get giddy at the power of the network that we’ve built over 23 years: starting from a small seminars of the pioneering researchers who created the field of environmental security, and growing to today’s global broadcasts that reach tens of thousands of contacts around the world.

    With Roger-Mark’s departure for Sister Cities International, that network just grew by one. Sister Cities, which was created at President Eisenhower’s 1956 White House summit on citizen diplomacy, seeks to foster peace between communities across the world. As a champion for population, health, and environment programming, and an advocate for small island states, Roger-Mark’s impact has always reached far beyond the Wilson Center walls—and  no doubt he will continue to punch above his weight at Sister Cities International. We’ll greatly miss his thoughtful leadership, his inspiring way with words, and his generous laughter.

    While I’m sad to say goodbye to Roger-Mark, I’m excited to work with our team to ensure that the critical work continues. ECSP has been a program at the Wilson Center for two decades, and our cross-cutting, intersectoral approach to critical challenges has been a key contribution to the Wilson Center’s ranking as the #1 Transdisciplinary Think Tank.

    Over my 10 years at the Center I’ve worked on all of our nontraditional security issues

    Over my 10 years at the Center I’ve worked on all of our nontraditional security issues, from climate and water, to women’s health and urban sustainability. I’ve been very proud to lead our work on the Resilience for Peace Project, which supported the groundbreaking New Climate for Peace project commissioned by the G7 Foreign Ministers and helped drive some of the big policy changes we saw in 2016. A highlight for me was co-authoring Navigating Complexity, a first-of-its-kind report on climate, migration, and conflict; and I am eager to continue to share our analysis with the emerging networks focused on these little-understood and critically important intersections.

    I’m very lucky to work with a team of rock stars; together, we have over 30 years of experience at the Wilson Center:

    • Meaghan Parker is more than our Senior Writer/Editor. Sure, she founded New Security Beat, co-produced our 4 films, and sits on the board of the Society for Environmental Journalists. But she’s also the first person any of us turn to when we need a smart answer to a tough problem, a communications strategy (which, let’s face it, is 90 percent of our work), or a mentor.
    • John Thon Majok is a daily reminder of the power—and the possibility—of resilience. His personal experience as a resettled refugee from South Sudan is a constant source of inspiration—as our his rigorous financial management skills.
    • Benjamin Dills has grown into every role that we’ve thrown at him—program assistant, social media manager, digital editor—he does it all with a wry smile and a focus on the future.
    • Sarah Barnes—after just five months—is transforming our Maternal Health Initiative into one of the most dynamic programs at the Wilson Center. Her nearly 20 years of experience across multiple countries is injecting new energy and new insights to the initiative’s excellent programs.

    As we head into 2018, we look forward to shining a spotlight on how global transboundary trends interact to create security issues. We will continue to produce analysis and reporting on water and conflict that informs policymakers’ efforts—such as the recently released Global Water Strategy—to confront these threats. On January 16 at the Center, the former president of Slovenia, Danilo Turk, will share his ideas for building peace through transboundary water resource management. And together with our Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman and Senior Advisor Geoff Dabelko, we’re working to create a water conflict prevention center that will leverage our 20 year of experience on water security and encourage smart answers to these difficult questions.

    Women’s health and empowerment remains a key part of our programming

    Women’s health and empowerment remains a key part of our programming—and of global political and social discourse. On January 23, an expert panel on women and war will delve into how women’s health services enable women’s political participation, peacebuilding, and military leadership. And throughout 2018 we’ll explore why better health for women equals more wealth for everyone.

    As we build on what we’ve learned from Roger-Mark, we’re thrilled to welcome him to our all-star group of fellows and advisors, and along with Geoff Dabelko, Maxine Burkett, Rich Cincotta, Ken Conca, Jack Goldstone, Sherri Goodman, Sharon Guynup, and Jennifer Sciubba, we’ll continue working to amplify the need for holistic approaches to our critical foreign policy and security issues.

    Finally, I’m turning the tables on our popular Q&A segment and asking you—our experts—for  your input. Please give us your feedback in the comments:

    1. What do you think are the most critical—and most critically overlooked—issues that need a more innovative and integrated approach?
    2. Which parts of the world aren’t getting the focus from our foreign policy community that they deserve?
    3. What are the opportunities we are missing that could truly transform environment, health, and security?

    What can we do differently at the Wilson Center to support you and your efforts to build a more secure, sustainable world?

    Topics: environment, featured, From the Wilson Center, security
    • Stacy D VanDeveer

      Wow! Big news! Congratulation to Roger-Mark & to Lauren and the team! My comments on a cold Boston snow day:
      — all things AFRICA still get too little attention in DC and in the US — and indeed on nearly every US campus.
      — Corporate activities, particularly their nefarious practices and impacts, are still too often downplayed. Yes, CSR can be great and it matters. But that is not where most corporate resources go.
      — Corruption: still getting worse in most places (including at home in the US, though I know that’s not your remit). How much does corruption undermine human security? How much conflict does it drive? And are there ways to reduce it that are actually working in the world?
      — More connections between enviro-security concerns and healthcare systems and labor rights and labor conditions?
      — More attention to diaspora communities and their transnational connections & influence?
      — More attention needed to a comprehensive resource efficiency agenda that seeks to reduce aggregate material through puts of all/many kinds. What experiments happening in the world? What is working? Can we use less AND improve human well-being and security?
      — More pushing for academics/social sciences to apply research to really-existing problems now!
      –Finally, a suggestion just popping into my mind: Is there a way to organize online and package your growing film/video works (and podcasts?) and projects to facilitate greater use in classes, lectures, general audience viewing, and so on? Some user friendly digital archive?
      THANK YOU for keeping the fires of reason, science, research, civil discourse, and internationalism alive in Washington

      • Roger-Mark De Souza

        And thank you for the great responses Stacy. I agree with you – and I’m delighted to see Lauren’s excellent blog – great questions and framing for 2018! Of course, now at the helm of Sister Cities International, I will continue to make the case for citizen diplomacy – engaging the public, increasing exchanges and information sharing, promoting mutual interests – these form some of the critical dimensions of peacebuilding from the ground up. Way to go ECSP – I miss you already and Happy New Year to you! I’m looking forward to this next step in our relationship. See you soon!

        • Stacy D VanDeveer

          Congratulations to you. Sounds like a fantastic new gig! Perhaps there are great opportunities at Sister Cities to think and interact more around much needed (equitable!) climate adaptation & resilience

    • Tom Deligiannis

      Congratulations to Lauren and your great team! Keep up the good work in 2018 and beyond. The ECSP remains the go-to global resource on this issue, a credit to Roger-Mark, Geoff, and everyone who has contributed to the Wilson Center’s work in the past twenty years.

      I second many of Stacy’s suggestions below and add a few more:

      Central and South America seem to get very little attention on these issues today, so expanded coverage of this region would be welcome.

      There’s room for expanded synergies with the communities of scholars and practitioners working on disasters, risk management, and resilience, like the RADIX group. I’d like to see more collaboration and dialogue there.

      I echo Stacy’s comments about trying to better package or make more user friendly the extensive video archive of ECSP. I have often tried to find videos to use in my classes, but am frequently frustrated by the lack of availability of shorter videos and interviews – between 15-30 minutes. The long meeting video broadcasts are normally not usable in an undergraduate classroom. This situation has gotten better in recent years, with more short documentaries and interviews. I’d like to see more of this from ECSP, focusing on both the cutting edge research and the policy experience. How about a policy lessons video series? How about a series on ground breaking research?

      Along the lines of the corporate comments below, I think that the political economy linkages don’t get enough coverage in the ECSP work. This is both in problem definition and in highlighting multi-level solutions to managing or ameliorating the political economy impacts on the planet.

      On the research side, we still seem to have a situation of two solitudes between quantitative and qualitative researchers on environmental change and conflict. This has also improved in the past 5 years, but I think ECSP could further help to bridge these communities – three communities if you include policy makers as a separate category.

      In terms of topics, why isn’t Environmental Peacebuilding a separate topic in the ECSP, or a separate topic under security? This area has exploded as well in the past decade and it makes sense to collect thinking and links under one topic.

      Local stories! More of them please. How about an interactive map, with links to the local stories that you’ve covered over the years?

      Finally, linkages – linkages between scholars, organizations, communities of practitioners. ECSP could do more to foster these linkages, I think. There’s a great need to find ways to bring together scholarly and practitioner communities from around the world working on these issues. I would like to see ECSP take a more active role on this front.

      Happy New Year!

    • Sam Sellers

      Congrats to Roger-Mark and Lauren! It’s a bittersweet development but also a chance for new beginnings! Best of luck in 2018 and beyond!

      I wanted to echo Stacy’s comments and add a couple of my own. I think a greater focus on corruption and good governance in integrated development would be most welcome. As integrated development practitioners, we often talk about “capacity building” or “empowerment” when describing our aims, yet these principles are largely contingent on building strong governance institutions where decisions are made equitably and transparently. Yet development projects often don’t have the time or resources to develop these institutions, nor is it necessarily a primary focus of many projects.

      I would be especially interested in events or research that ties in efforts by the business community to improve their compliance with anti-corruption laws such as FCPA with the efforts of the government and nonprofit sectors to improve governance capacity in their work. While the needs and aims of each sector differ, I feel that there is much that we can learn and apply to integrated development.

      Other thoughts include:
      –Attention on incorporating newer technologies (e.g. tablet PCs, drones, mobile payments) into integrated development work, and some of the opportunities and challenges that exist for organizations adopting these technologies.
      –Continued focus on family planning as an empowerment mechanism, as well as a means of helping families become more resilient. I would be interested in an event that focused domestically (or perhaps on the US/Western Europe) on efforts to promote long-acting reversible contraceptives, such as Colorado’s LARC program, and how this affects various dimensions of poverty.
      –More events outside of DC. WWC is understandably DC-focused, but events in other development hubs throughout the US, including New York, Boston, Raleigh/Durham, San Francisco, and Seattle would be most welcome for those of us not able to attend events in the DC area.

    • Tom Deligiannis

      Congratulations to Lauren and your great team! Keep up the good work in 2018 and beyond. The ECSP remains the go-to global resource on this issue, a credit to everyone who has contributed to the Wilson Center’s work in the past twenty plus years.

      I second many of Stacy’s suggestions below and add a few more:

      Central and South America seem to get very little attention on these issues today, so expanded coverage of this region would be welcome.

      There’s room for expanded synergies with the communities of scholars and practitioners working on disasters, risk management, and resilience, like the RADIX group. I’d like to see more collaboration and dialogue there.

      I echo Stacy’s comments about trying to better package or make more user friendly the extensive video archive of ECSP. I have often tried to find videos to use in my classes, but am frequently frustrated by the lack of availability of shorter videos and interviews – between 15-30 minutes. The long meeting video broadcasts are normally not usable in an undergraduate classroom. This situation has gotten better in recent years, with more short documentaries and interviews. I’d like to see more of this from ECSP, focusing on both the cutting edge research and the policy experience. How about a policy lessons video series? How about a series on ground breaking research?

      Along the lines of the corporate comments below, I think that the political economy linkages don’t get enough coverage in the ECSP work. This is both in problem definition and in highlighting multi-level solutions to managing or ameliorating the political economy impacts on the planet.

      On the research side, we still seem to have a situation of two solitudes between quantitative and qualitative researchers on environmental change and conflict. This has also improved in the past 5 years, but I think ECSP could further help to bridge these communities – three communities if you include policy makers as a separate category.

      In terms of topics, why isn’t Environmental Peacebuilding a separate topic in the ECSP, or a separate topic under security? This area has exploded as well in the past decade and it makes sense to collect thinking and links under one topic.

      Local stories! More of them please. How about an interactive map, with links to the local stories that you’ve covered over the years?

      Finally, linkages – linkages between scholars, organizations, communities of practitioners. ECSP could do more to foster these linkages, I think. There’s a great need to find ways to bring together scholarly and practitioner communities from around the world working on these issues. I would like to see ECSP take a more active role on this front.

      Tom Deligiannis

    • stevenearlsalmony

      Looking at 7.5 billion human beings

      We can see well enough, and generally agree about, what is happening on Earth. Can we focus for a moment on,”Why these things are happening with such a vengeance on our watch?” Under no circumstances can it ever be correct for scientists to consciously censor naturally persuasive scientific research with extraordinary explanatory power just because the new evidence is unforeseen and unwelcome. Our unwillingness to accept what science discloses to us about our distinctly human creatureliness, about the placement of the human species within the order of living things, and about how the world we inhabit actually works, makes our efforts to adapt to the ‘rules of the house’ in our planetary home a protean challenge. As Carl Sagan reminded all of us, “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science.”
      We possess so much knowledge and know-how, thanks to science, and know enough to recognize and understand that humankind is precipitating a planetary emergency on Earth. And what is our collective response? An inexcusable, unconscionable lack of urgency as well as a deliberate refusal to examine and report findings of extant scientific research. Why not ask a vital science question to which we appear to already have an answer, but of which scientists willfully refuse to speak? Why not ask about the ecological science of human population dynamics/overpopulation? If human beings are primary drivers of dissipating natural resources, dying oceans, degrading environs and destabilizing climate, then let us carefully and skillfully examine extant scientific research that simply and persuasively explains why absolute global human population numbers continue to grow so rapidly and, by so doing, to ravage so radically the prospects for the future of life as we know it in our planetary home. If the human community can share a good enough understanding of what it is that ails us and threatens life as we know it, then perhaps momentum can be gathered rather than thwarted to initiate an able collective response to the problems we appear to have induced for ourselves and other living things on the planet.

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