The United States and Europe are beginning to deploy naming and shaming tactics to increase compliance with global environmental norms.  

“In the movement toward complex solutions, at the heart of it all we’re talking about individuals with their own complex issues as they are moving through different scenarios,” said Shanna McClain, Disasters Program Manager with the National Atmospheric and Space Administration, at last month’s International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. The panel discussion, “Resource Implications of Human Mobility and Migration,” focused on what data shows—and doesn’t show—are the complex linkages between climate, conflict, and mobility. Panelists discussed how more integrated programming and policy actions are needed to make migration safe, orderly, and voluntary, and how to keep human rights at the center of the complex processes. 

“After a series of poor harvests, limited rainfall, and an increase in the price of fertilizer, farm work has become unprofitable,” said Lazher, a fellah (agricultural laborer) from Tataouine in the rural south east of Tunisia. The 45-year-old had worked the land for half his life, even dropping out of school early to support his young family. However, when I met Lazher in December 2021, he was making the final arrangements to migrate to Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, in search of better job opportunities. Now, with diminishing local opportunities for agricultural work and few local companies that might hire unemployed laborers, Lazher secured work in one of Tunis’s many dried fruit shops called hamas. 

Growing up in Austria in the 1990s, one of the underlying lessons I learned in middle school was that nuclear power is humanity’s downfall. Though never explicitly described that way in the curriculum, from a young age my peers and I knew to associate the black-and-yellow trefoil symbol with apocalyptic environmental destruction. Reflecting on my upbringing helps me understand why so many in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece, and Italy argue that nuclear power should be our last resort as an energy resource. How could we allow the development and use of such dangerous technologies in our own lives? How could we just move on and accept that a nuclear accident could kill all of us at any moment?  

Water provision is “more lucrative than drugs,” said one of the interviewees in our research in Karachi, Pakistan. Competition for control of the city’s water includes water mafias and formal institutions. As water becomes increasingly scarce due to ongoing climate changes in the Indus Basin, it is already a source of intense economic and political competition. If not addressed in time, water scarcity may deepen fault lines in this highly fractured, multi-ethnic, populous city.  

The Arctic is ground zero for climate change. Warming in the region is occurring at three times the rate of the global average and September Arctic sea-ice is now declining at a rate of 13 percent per decade. However, the reverse is also true. The complex changes taking place in the Arctic are having profound effects on the rest of the world, and major economies are taking note. 

Gender issues, climate change, and security problems are interconnected in complex and powerful ways. Unfortunately, some of these connections have not received enough attention from scholars, policy analysts, and policymakers. This has serious, real-world implications for the promotion of gender equality, the mitigation of climate change, and the advancement of peace and security—three priorities that everyone should care about.  

U.S. efforts to reclaim its climate change leadership, as demonstrated at COP26 in Glasgow, will be undermined if the country does not also step up and accelerate action on reducing plastic waste. Plastic is packing a serious carbon punch along its entire supply chain, from oil extraction and manufacturing to disposal. According to Beyond Plastic’s new report, The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change, the U.S. plastic industry’s contribution to climate change will exceed that of coal by the year 2030.