A staggering amount of development dollars – one in three, in fact – are lost due to natural disasters and crises. Certain communities are less affected than others by such disasters; they are more resilient. Knowing where vulnerability and strength exist and how to bolster them could help avoid these losses. Yet, today, very little data exists to help development practitioners understand which adaptive capacities are lagging in a given community.

Amid the growing number of reports warning that climate change could threaten national security, another potentially dangerous – but counterintuitive – dimension has been largely ignored. Could efforts to reduce our carbon footprint and lower our vulnerability to climate change inadvertently exacerbate existing conflicts – or create new ones?

Although climate change is a global phenomenon, developing countries – especially urban centers – are the most vulnerable to the negative health impacts of climate change.  In “Urban Governance of Climate Change and Health,” a working paper for the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, author Siri Bjerkreim Hellevik reviews the existing literature on governments’ responses to climate change and health in developing urban centers. Overall, Hellevik concludes that there is a substantial need for more research specifically linking the two. She offers several recommendations for urban policymakers to consider, including developing an integrated and multi-level approach, and recognizing that human health and urban development are issues of global justice.

“However rapid change has been over the past couple decades, the rate of change will accelerate in the future,” states the newest quadrennial report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Released late last year, the report identifies the “game-changers, megatrends, and black swans” that may determine the trajectory of world affairs over the next 15 years, including demographic dynamics and natural resource scarcity. [Video Below]

Five million people die each year due to climate- or carbon-related causes, and total mortality by 2030 could total 100 million people, according to new report from DARA, a nonprofit organization that works to improve aid to those affected by conflict and climate change and quantify the global cost of climate change and carbon use. But the report has drawn some fire for being too alarmist.

“I think that the conditions that we’re experience now are ones that track with what we expect to see more of; so dry places getting drier, wet places getting wetter, and more extremes in terms of variability of the weather,” said ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in the latest installment of CONTEXT, a weekly Wilson Center interview series. While it’s difficult to link the current drought – or any one weather or climate event – directly to man-made climate change, Dabelko said that “the warming trends that we’re seeing and anticipating with climate change suggests that this is a preview of what may be to come.”

“We established [the Climate Change Security Program] as a methodology of exposing the defense community in the U.K. and Europe to some of the more nuanced security debates that are going on around climate change, environmental change, and resource shortages,” said Tobias Feakin, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) in an interview with ECSP.

We are entering “an emerging security environment” where “what constitutes a ‘threat’ and what constitutes a ‘challenge’” requires a broader understanding of security than has often been the norm, according to Sharon Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs. Burke was joined by the UK’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti and ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko on a new installment of Dialogue TV. They debated what climate change and energy security mean for the world’s militaries.