“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.

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.” 

Bodily autonomy is something almost innate in us, and yet also a Eureka moment for many people, says Dr. Nahid Toubia, Director for the Institute of Reproductive Health and Rights in Sudan on this week’s episode of Friday Podcasts. “Every human being really has the right to own their body, to own their decisions, to own their choices regarding their life, their futures, how they want to live, who they want to partner, whether they want to have children or not, what kind of families they want to have,” she says. “So, all of these choices are all wrapped up in this concept of body autonomy.”

“I’ve been quite impressed by the wide diversity and complexity of young women’s and men’s engagement for peacebuilding and development often while confronting seemingly insurmountable challenges,” says Marisa O. Ensor, Adjunct Professor in the Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University, in this week’s Friday Podcast.