A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

Climate Change and Migration: Ensuring Safe Access for Women and Girls

A new report from UN Women found that climate change poses a significant threat gender equality. In particular, changes in weather patterns and extreme events exacerbate vulnerability among women and girls and leads them to seek safety and opportunities through increased migration.

When Michelle Bachelet, former United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, pointed to what she called “the reality of multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination” in December 2020, she also highlighted the importance of factoring them into any analysis and policymaking in the human rights space.  

Two centuries ago, extinctions were rare. Islands were hotspots, losing flightless bird species like the dodo and other animals that were hunted out of existence by European traders and colonists or killed off by introduced rats and cats.

“Save your kitchen scraps to feed the hens,” urged a poster for the victory gardens created on the home front in the Second World War. Feeding food scraps to backyard chickens and pigs turned this waste into a delicious source of human food. Pigs were especially prized in this effort as they would eat what most other animals considered inedible.

A new initiative by the Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles, could play a significant role in curbing emissions of a potent climate pollutant from chemical plants in China while filling a gap in international climate agreements and China’s environmental regulations. 

The Central Sahel is increasingly deemed the new epicenter of terrorism, accounting for 35 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2021. Yet as the situation in the region continues to deteriorate, artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) both persists and proliferates. For instance, in Mali, where much of the region’s security crisis originates, this conundrum is laid bare.

The idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” has been gaining steam since it was first proposed roughly 15 years ago. This framing acknowledges that climate can interact with existing political, social, and demographic conditions to heighten communities’ security risks—which in turn suggests that problem-solving in the face of these risks must be interdisciplinary.

China is Brazil’s main trading partner and accounts for over a quarter of all Brazilian exports. Yet two of the largest products in this trading relationship—beef and soybeans—are also crops that drive deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil’s deforestation rates declined substantially between 2004 and 2012, but forest clearage needed to raise cattle reversed the trend: The Amazon lost 10,476 square kilometers of rainforest in 2021, the highest total in the decade.