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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category backdraft.
  • Climate Change is a Security Issue: An Interview with Geoff Dabelko

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    Eye On  //  October 29, 2020  //  By Cindy Zhou

    Climate change is a threat multiplier; it is an underlying and exacerbating factor that makes things worse at a level that all actors, including security actors, need to pay attention to, said Geoff Dabelko, Professor and Associate Dean at the George V. Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University and Senior Advisor to the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. He spoke in a recent interview about climate change and security as part of CimpaticoTV’s Climate Adaptation Channel.

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  • Lost in Translation: How Building “Strong” Institutions can Diminish Human Security in the Global South

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    Guest Contributor  //  July 29, 2019  //  By McKenzie F. Johnson
    Informal charcoal production near Yangambi, DRC.

    In the Global South, natural resource conflict has largely been considered a consequence of poor governance and weak political institutions. The international community’s solution? Build “green” governance capacity as a way to mitigate violent conflict and improve environmental outcomes. For the international development community, this has meant introducing laws, policies, and practices based on international standards of best practice, and training local regulators to adhere to those standards.

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  • The Dark Side of the Sun: Avoiding Conflict Over Solar Energy’s Land and Water Demands

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    October 2, 2018  //  By Olivia Smith

    The 73-megawatt Lopburi solar power plant in central Thailand is the largest solar photovoltaic project in the world.  It will be central to Thailand's efforts to generate  energy from renewable sources.

    Solar farms—just like regular farms—cover large swaths of land, requiring between 3.5 to 16.5 acres per MW of generating capacity. The largest solar plant in the world, the 648 MW Kamuthi facility in Tamil Nadu, India, covers ten square kilometers. But it will be dwarfed by the 3,450 MW facility under construction on China’s Tibetan Plateau, which will span 298 square kilometers when completed. Building these large plants requires fundamentally changing how the land they sit on is used, which—without careful planning—could have negative impacts on the environment and local communities that could potentially lead to conflict. The backlash could not only derail solar projects, but could also fuel resistance to future renewable energy development.

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  • Crisis in Lake Chad: Tackling Climate-Fragility Risks

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    Eye On  //  Guest Contributor  //  October 13, 2017  //  By Stella Schaller
    adelphi-banner-Lake-Chad

    While attention in the United States is focused on the disasters in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a crisis across the Atlantic is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters since World War II. In the Lake Chad basin of West Africa, about 17 million people are affected by the emergency, struggling with food insecurity, widespread violence, involuntary displacement, and the consequences of environmental degradation. An estimated 800,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition; and although international donors pledged $672 million in February, the famine and humanitarian misery continues unabated. Suicide bombings and attacks by Boko Haram, which have killed at least 381 civilians since April 2017, have forced many people to leave their homes and farmers to leave their lands, interrupting livelihoods and reducing food supplies.

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  • Backdraft #9: Joshua Busby on Mapping Hotspots of Climate and Security Vulnerability

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    Backdraft podcast  //  Friday Podcasts  //  September 29, 2017  //  By Gretchen Johnson

    Podcast-thumb9-ReducedMaps help us to grasp complex ideas, such as patterns of risk and vulnerability, but the stories they tell can have significant implications. “It’s very difficult to validate that what you’re capturing in the maps is representative of real-world phenomenon,” says Joshua Busby in this week’s “Backdraft” episode, describing his efforts to map climate and security hotspots in Africa and Asia. “You have to be modest in what you think the maps can tell policymakers, but also realize there is some seductive power in the way maps simplify complex reality.”

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  • Backdraft #8: Simon Nicholson on Climate Engineering

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    Backdraft podcast  //  Friday Podcasts  //  July 21, 2017  //  By Lauren Herzer Risi

    Podcast-thumb8-reducedWhen the Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the negotiators put climate engineering on the table, says Simon Nicholson, professor at American University, in this week’s episode of Backdraft. Once the purview of science fiction, a majority of the models run by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) required large-scale use of climate engineering technologies to keep additional warming below 2 degrees.

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  • Consensus, Certainty, and Catastrophe: The Debate Over Ocean Iron Fertilization

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    Guest Contributor  //  May 3, 2017  //  By Kemi Fuentes-George
    Greenpeace

    Almost three decades ago, at a conference at the Woods Hole Institute, oceanographer John Martin said with “a half a tanker of iron…I will give you the next ice age.”

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  • Backdraft #7: Janani Vivekananda on What Renewable Energy Projects Can Learn From Oil, and Future-Proofing Humanitarian Responses

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    Backdraft podcast  //  Friday Podcasts  //  April 21, 2017  //  By Lauren Herzer Risi

    Janani-smallAs more and more development and humanitarian programs contend with climate-related problems, there are important lessons learned from past experience that should not be forgotten, says Janani Vivekananda, formerly of International Alert and now with adelphi, in this week’s episode of “Backdraft.”

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