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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category conflict.
  • How We Misunderstand the Magnitude of Climate Risks – and Why That Contributes to Controversy

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    Guest Contributor  //  January 12, 2021  //  By Peter Schwartzstein
    shutterstock_79914109

    For years, analysts have disputed the extent of climate change’s role in conflict. But the nature of climate risks can stifle those looking to define them.

    The Syrian civil war has raged for almost a decade now, and in the climate security community it can feel as if we’ve spent at least that long arguing about its causes. For every claim about the impact of extreme drought in the lead up to 2011, there’s been blowback, with some scholars arguing that the climate angle has been exaggerated at the expense of other causes of the conflict. And for every argument about rural-to-urban migration, there have been suggestions that its impact in precipitating protests has been overstated. Amid some overly forceful media assertion about the significance of climate change—and valid fears that invoking the environment might be seen as absolving guilty parties, despite efforts to highlight the regime’s ultimate culpability—climate security analysts have struggled to fully pinpoint climate’s precise contribution to the conflict. Cue uncertainty, controversy, and sometimes fierce academic polemics.

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  • Climate War in the Sahel? Pastoral Insecurity in West Africa Is Not What It Seems

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    Guest Contributor  //  November 30, 2020  //  By Leif Brottem

    As violence in Mali and Burkina Faso reached a ten-year high this year, the West African Sahel appears to be experiencing the perfect storm of climate stress, resource degradation, and violent extremism. At the center of that storm, one finds livestock herders—pastoralists—who are both vulnerable to environmental changes in the region, and historically marginalized from politics. Conflict in the region looks like a harbinger of the climate wars to come—but is it really? In research produced for Search for Common Ground, Andrew McDonnell and I found that while competition for land and water resources has increased dramatically across the region, violence associated with pastoralism emerges from a much more complex set of factors. Not surprisingly, the decisive conflict variable is governance.

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  • Collaborating Across Borders: Young Professionals in the Middle East Tackle Region’s Water Issues

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    November 3, 2020  //  By Leah Emanuel
    shutterstock_707877076

    Her triangular computer mouse finds the blue circular logo with the white camera on the bottom of her screen. She hovers over it for a second, taking a deep breath before clicking on the icon. Remembering the last program meeting, Marina Lubanov commits herself to listening more to the other participants, prepping herself to take a step back and really absorb what everyone is saying. With nervous excitement, she clicks on her zoom app and is launched into a meeting with other young professionals from her home country of Israel, and neighboring Jordan and Palestine.

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  • 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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  • The Environmental Collateral Damage of the South China Sea Conflict

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    Guest Contributor  //  October 13, 2020  //  By Ryan McNamara

    shutterstock_1503568094

    Tensions in the South China Sea increased last April when a Chinese coast guard ship sank a Vietnamese fishing boat near the Paracel Islands—a fiercely disputed territory in the South China Sea. Disputes over island territories in the region have endured for decades, with China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei all making overlapping territorial claims. The region is rich in natural resources and biodiversity, holding vast fish stocks and an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 cubic feet of natural gas.

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  • 21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy is Climate Policy (Report & Project Launch)

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    From the Wilson Center  //  October 1, 2020  //  By Lauren Herzer Risi & Alexander Carius

    This article is an excerpt from “21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy is Climate Policy,” a new report by the Wilson Center and adelphi.

    Climate change will upend the 21st century world order. It will redefine how we live and work, and change the systems of production, trade, economics, and finance. Even now, in the midst of a global pandemic, it is clear that climate change will be the defining issue of this century. In fact, COVID-19 has only underscored the inadequacy of our responses to global crises and heightened the urgency of this call to action. 21st century diplomacy will have to raise climate ambition, shape the transformative systems change needed, and promote and facilitate new modes of multilateral collaboration.

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  • Gender Equality is Important to Building Resilience and Peace during Disasters and Conflict

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    On the Beat  //  September 28, 2020  //  By Cindy Zhou
    NSB Pic

    “The gender perspective highlights how pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities are exacerbated in conflict and in disasters,” said Susanne Kozak, a doctoral candidate at Monash University at a recent event hosted by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Science.

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  • Many Companies Struggle to Comply with Conflict Mineral Reporting Rules

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    Reading Radar  //  September 25, 2020  //  By Cindy Zhou
    Conflict Minerals

    “The exploitation of the mining and trade of conflict minerals in the eastern DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] has contributed to instability, violence, displacement of people, and severe human rights abuses,” says the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its annual report, Conflict Minerals: Actions Needed to Assess Progress Addressing Armed Groups’ Exploitation of Minerals. The report examines a sample of filings from 1,083 companies that submitted conflict mineral disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2019.

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