“There’s been a tremendous amount of work done on looking for a climate signal for civil conflict, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and a lot of this work draws a very clear and simple path – if it rains more, or if it rains less, there will be more or less conflict,” says Stanford University’s Kaitlin Shilling in this short video interview. Unfortunately, that straightforward research does little in the way of helping policymakers: “the only way to change the agricultural outputs due to climate change is to change climate change, reduce climate change, or stop it,” she says, “and we’re not really good at that part.”

Since the concept of “environmental security” first gained traction in the early 1990s, research on the issue has been overwhelmingly focused on how environmental change impacts state security. That has been to the detriment of policymakers trying to preempt instability and conflict, according to the University of Toronto’s Tom Deligiannis in his article, “The Evolution of Environment-Conflict Research: Toward a Livelihood Framework,” published in February’s Global Environmental Politics.

We are entering “an emerging security environment” where “what constitutes a ‘threat’ and what constitutes a ‘challenge’” requires a broader understanding of security than has often been the norm, according to Sharon Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs. Burke was joined by the UK’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti and ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko on a new installment of Dialogue TV. They debated what climate change and energy security mean for the world’s militaries.

The original version of this article, by Kim Lovell, appeared on the Sierra Club’s activist network.

“Population, development, and climate should be a single discussion,” explained Jacques van Zuydam of South Africa’s National Population Unit. Van Zuydam, speaking to a sparsely filled room at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban last month, centers his work around the concept that climate matters because people matter.

“We know that there will be more conflicts in the future as a result of climate change than there would have been in a hypothetic world without climate change,” said Marc Levy, deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, although existing data and methodologies cannot predict how many additional conflicts there will be, or which causal factors will matter most. [Video Below]

“I think it’s appropriate to think about [climate change] adaptation or investments in adaptation as investments to open up the range of choices available to people to deal with an uncertain future,” said Jon Barnett, associate professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. “In some circumstances it might be appropriate to build infrastructure and hard options where we’re very certain about the nature of the risk…but in other cases, expanding the range of choices and freedoms and opportunities that people have to deal with climate change in the future is perhaps the better strategy.”

The European Union’s biofuel goal for 2020 “is a good example of setting a target…without really thinking through [the] secondary, third, or fourth order consequences,” said Alexander Carius, co-founder and managing director of Adelphi Research and Adelphi Consult. While the 2007-2008 global food crisis demonstrated that the growth of crops for fuels has “tremendous effects” in the developing world, analysis of these threats are underdeveloped and are not incorporated into climate change policies, he said. [Video Below]