The confluence of climate change, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine have placed enormous stress on food systems across the globe. Food insecurity spiked in 2020 and has stayed high, and the number of undernourished people is on the rise.

Why does climate change lead to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not others? In this week’s New Security Broadcast, Josh Busby, Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, discusses the latest thinking on this essential question as laid out in his new book, States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security, with ECSP Program Associate, Amanda King, and ECSP Senior Fellow, Sherri Goodman.

About half the world’s population lives in an area of active or latent conflict. And few corners of the planet are not feeling the effects of climate change. But in this week’s New Security Broadcast, researcher Clionadh Raleigh cautions against drawing too strong a connection between the two phenomena in an interview with ECSP Director Lauren Risi.

Debates around whether and to what extent international order is changing can be misguided “so long as we are thinking about international order as a single, monolithic thing,” says Jeff Colgan, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University in this week’s episode of New Security Broadcast. Colgan spoke at a recent Wilson Center event featuring his new book, Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order. In the book, Colgan challenges the idea of a monolithic ‘global order’ and shows that international order instead comprises a set of interlinked “subsystems.” In a world where there is no single, all-encompassing hegemon to trigger universal global change, this framework of subsystems allows us to explore how particular geopolitical realms can alter without fundamentally changing the geopolitical landscape, he says.

“To inform the most pressing issues of our time, to bring new voices to the policy space, and to help our audience better understand these complex connections and where we can be most effective in our responses, we bring you the New Security Broadcast,” says Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), in today’s launch of ECSP’s new podcast series, New Security Broadcast.

“Many people have watched fights between communities and big corporations around the world. The corporations usually win so those are the Goliath. The Davids usually lose,” says John Cavanagh, co-author of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed. In this week’s episode of Friday Podcasts, Cavanagh and co-author Robin Broad recount how local activists mobilized a global coalition of religious leaders, labor unions, and environmental activists to block an international corporation from opening a gold mine that threatened El Salvador’s fragile water supply.