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Women on the Front Lines of Change: Empowerment in the Face of Climate and Displacement
›With a swiftly changing climate comes rapidly rising sea levels, more frequent storms, and rising inequality. Slow yet consistent events like sea-level rise, as well as extreme events like hurricanes and other climate disasters, can force women and families from their homes. As the climate continues to change, adaptation will become more difficult, spurring some to leave home in search of safer ground. In the face of climate-induced instability, women are not just on the frontline of impacts, but also at the forefront of solutions.
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Environmental Cooperation Can Facilitate Peace Between States
›Environmental stress and climate change can accelerate instability and conflict—but shared environmental problems can also be a source of cooperation and facilitate peacemaking between states. Transnational environmental problems are common threats and often cross national boundaries, requiring international cooperation to address. In turn, this cooperation can provide a good entry point for building trust and cooperation.
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Panacea for the Pacific? Evaluating Community-Based Climate Change Adaptation
›Guest Contributor // February 22, 2018 // By Rachel Clissold, Tahlia Clark, Benjamin Priebbenow & Karen McNamaraThe Australian government’s recent Foreign Policy White Paper has been criticized for its underwhelming climate change section. Penny Wong, the current opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that its acknowledgement of the need to support a more resilient Pacific region “rings hollow in light of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s massive aid cuts.” But despite these criticisms, the Australian government continues to support a range of climate change initiatives in the Pacific. Increasingly, Australian Aid and its fellow donors, including USAID, JICA and GIZ, take a community-based approach to climate adaptation. Germany’s GIZ, for example, carries out community-level adaptation activities for all beneficiaries in the Pacific; and USAID has highlighted its community-level projects as important models. Our recent evaluation of some of these community-level adaptation programs in Vanuatu and Kiribati found that they provide some development benefits, including increased awareness, empowerment, cooperation, and self-esteem, but that it is too soon to tell whether this approach can reduce long-term vulnerability to climate change.
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Maps of Mayhem: Predicting the Location of Civil War Violence
›Over the past decade, we have seen a resurgence of civil conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia, as weak states are increasingly threatened by non-state actors, such as organized crime groups, terrorist organizations, and insurgents. These wars endanger millions of people—including some of the world’s most at-risk populations—by exposing them not only to violence, but also displacement, environmental degradation, and economic destruction. To effectively protect them, leaders and policymakers need to be able to predict exactly where, when, and how insurgent violence will break out and spread.
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On Streetlights and Stereotypes: Selection Bias in the Climate-Conflict Literature
›Scholarly attention to the links between climate change and conflict has increased. But which places are analyzed most frequently by researchers, and what are the implications of their choices?
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Climate Change Will Further Complicate the Politics of U.S. Military Bases
›The effects of climate change on an abandoned U.S. nuclear project in Greenland could create not just environmental problems, but also disrupt military politics and spur diplomatic conflicts. My new article in Global Environmental Politics finds that climate change will eventually expose toxic waste, long immobilized by ice, at Camp Century, which the U.S. military left in the 1960s. This situation—which has already spurred the dismissal of Greenland’s foreign minister—could be the canary in the coalmine signaling that climate change will further complicate the already contentious politics of military bases.
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Indian Military Recognizes Environment as “Critical” Security Issue, But Response Is Still Fragmented
›For the first time, the Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces acknowledges that the “environment has emerged as a critical area of the security paradigm,” and warns that if environmental degradation and related issues increase security risks, the military will need to respond. Released in 2017, the doctrine lists a series of non-traditional security challenges linked to the environment that could influence conflict and war, including “climate change, ecosystem disruption, energy issues, population issues, food-related problems, economic issues of unsustainable modes of production, and civil strife related to environment.” While the military has taken steps to address its impacts on the environment, it can do much more to support the nation’s environmental goals and mitigate environment-related security risks.
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One in 10 Interstate Disputes Are Fishy – And the Implications Stink
›Fisheries are a surprisingly common reason for conflict between countries. Between 1993 and 2010, 11 percent of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) – conflicts short of war between two sovereign states – involved fisheries, fishers, or fishing vessels. While the conflicts often involve fresh fish, the implications for global peace and prosperity stink like fermented herring. As climate change threatens to change fish habitats, new governance strategies may be needed to prevent these “fishy MIDs” from sparking broader conflicts.
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