A country can achieve sustainable peace and security only if women are included, said Monde Muyangwa, Director of the Wilson Center’s Africa Program at a recent Wilson Center event on the role of women in promoting peace and security in Africa. “And I would argue that part of the challenges that we face on the African continent, the insecurity that we face in parts of the African continent,” she said, “is precisely because not all segments of society are included.”

Evidence that extreme weather, water, and climate events pose critical security risks to the U.S. homeland, national security, and global stability has been mounting in recent years. From destabilizing droughts in Africa to devastating hurricanes and flooding in the United States, we are clearly seeing an increase in not only the frequency and severity of these events, but also their physical, social, and economic impacts.

This year, 2019, marked a new nadir for the environment that may reflect an ominous trend in warfare: Environmentally sensitive targets are being weaponized and taken hostage. Farmland went up in flames and burning oil tankers dominated the headlines, serving as a stark reminder of conflict’s ripple effects.

“In 1959, he knew it was coming,” said Delbert Pungowiyi, a Yupik native of Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea in an interview at the Wilson Center’s 8th Syymposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. “He prepared me my whole life for this. It is a crisis.”

Meaningful engagement with the social and conflict implications of climate change in Solomon Islands must be firmly grounded within local worldviews—within Solomon Islanders’ physical, economic, political, and social and spiritual worlds. As we note in a recent policy brief for the Toda Peace Institute, when addressing conflict challenges exacerbated or caused by climate change, approaches should be draw upon community understandings of what constitutes peace and justice. 

“If you go to some Taiwan beaches, you can see snow,” said Chieh-Shen (Jason) Hu, Ocean Initiative Coordinator for Taiwan’s Society of Wilderness, a 6,000-member organization similar to Sierra Club. Hu was referring to pervasive Styrofoam marine debris from western Taiwan’s oldest industry, oyster aquaculture.

Venerated in art and poetry, Korea’s verdant mountain forests hold a special place in Korean people’s hearts. Like their political systems and economies, however, forest fortunes in North and South Korea have gone in very different directions since the country’s division more than 70 years ago.