The war in Ukraine is not only displacing millions, straining the economy, and ravaging infrastructure. It’s also creating a mounting health crisis. In this week’s New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Director Lauren Risi hears from Ambassador Daniel Speckhard and Dr. Mariia Dolynska about the health impacts created by the war in Ukraine and what is still needed to strengthen the health system—as well as what one NGO is doing to deliver healthcare in the embattled nation.

“Things that we used to think were 20 or 30 years into the future are in fact happening today…  Climate change is noticeably changing the extent, the severity, and the frequency of these kinds of events.”

This stark assessment from Jonathan Pershing, Program Director of Environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is at the center of a discussion of progress made and needed for international climate commitments, the role of critical minerals in the green energy transition, and climate-related migration trends with ECSP Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman and ECSP Program Associate Amanda King in this week’s episode of New Security Broadcast. Pershing brings a wealth of perspective to the conversation, drawing on his roles formally supporting Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, and serving both as a Special Envoy for Climate Change at the U.S. Department of State and lead U.S. negotiator to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

According to the World Bank, building enough renewable energy infrastructure to keep global warming below 2C will require more than 3 billion tons of minerals. Reducing emissions quickly is crucial to minimizing risk for the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities, many of whom are on the front lines of a crisis they did not create. But unless we are careful, ramping up mining in order to decarbonize could actually worsen inequity and injustice. “How do we do this quickly, safely, and sustainably, in ways that benefit all?” asks Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program in this week’s New Security Broadcast.

As the last decade has brought about a dramatic shift in approaches to addressing climate change, water is increasingly at the forefront of the conversations around adaptation and resilience. In part, this is because more countries now experience the damaging effects of climate change through water-related events including rising sea levels, intensification of natural disasters, droughts, and flooding.

In this week’s New Security Broadcast, John Matthews, Executive Director of the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), observes that the heightened attention to water has placed his group at the center of discussions at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

As the world turns its attention to the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (CoP27) in Sharm El Sheikh, CoP26 President Alok Sharma reflects upon the achievements won thus far in the fight against climate change in our latest podcast. Sharma’s address at the Wilson Center also outlines the steps that need to be taken at CoP27 and in the future to ensure a sustainable and prosperous future for all.

Sharma observes that the CoP26 in Scotland last year represented a “fragile win” and that the Glasgow Climate Pact went further than many had imagined it would to keep accepted climate goals in place. “The pulse of 1.5 degrees remained alive,” he says.

On a recent visit to the Wilson Center, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari remarked on the historic nature of the monsoon-related floods that have submerged a huge swath of his country over the last several months. 

 “These are no normal monsoons and no normal floods,” said Zardari. “We are used to monsoons. We are used to floods. We have provincial mechanisms [and] national mechanisms to deal with such disasters. What we were not prepared for was for floods to descend from the sky.” 

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.