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Anticipatory Intelligence: Climate Change in the National Intelligence Strategy
›January 29, 2019 // By Marisol MaddoxOn January 22, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Daniel R. Coats released the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS) for 2019, which represents a departure from the last such strategy. While the previous 2014 National Intelligence Strategy specifically noted that food, water, and energy resource insecurity contribute to instability, the 2019 NIS does not mention these concerns beyond a single reference to climate change and resource scarcity as “pressure points.”
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China’s Demand for Raw Materials Harms Communities Around the World
›The Solomon Islands’ “commercially available forests will be gone in about 15 years” due to deforestation, said Lela Stanley, a Policy Advisor for Global Witness’ Asia Forests team at the Wilson Center’s recent China Environment Forum event. It looks like they are logging about 20 times faster than they should for the logging to be sustainable, she added. While timber from the islands is exported to China—the world’s largest importer and consumer of timber products—local residents and communities bear the brunt of the environmental cost of lost ecosystem services suffered at the hands of the timber trade. And they aren’t alone. China’s insatiable demand for raw materials and its harmful resource extraction practices wreak havoc on the ecosystems of its many producer countries.
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Ken Conca on Transboundary Water Basin Management
›Friday Podcasts // Water Stories (Podcast Series) // January 18, 2019 // By Linsey Edmunds & Truett Sparkman“When we start talking about water in the context of security, we’re immediately drawn to a conversation about conflict. And that’s often framed in terms of scarcity of water and a real zero-sum game around water, where scarcity begets grievances, which beget instability and conflict,” says Ken Conca, Professor at American University’s School of International Service, in this week’s Water Stories podcast. Of the world’s 276 transboundary water basins, fewer than half are governed by an agreement or accord that allocates use of the shared water between countries—and less than a quarter of these accords include all the riparian states in a basin.
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50 Years of Water at Wilson: Water, Conflict, and Cooperation (Part 1 of 2)
›A number of countries across North Africa, the Middle East, into Central and South Asia are “at risk of failure if they can’t get the water equation right,” said Aaron Salzberg of the U.S. Department of State, at a recent Wilson Center event celebrating 50 years of working on water’s connection to conflict and cooperation. The event brought together experts from government, NGOs, and academia for a comprehensive look at the first year of the U.S. Global Water Strategy and new research and practice on water, peace, and conflict. Either now or sometime in the near future, said Salzberg, if fundamentally water insecure countries lacking access to sustainable supplies of safe drinking water and basic sanitation do not address their water problems, they will face increased risk of failure and greater fragility.
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Sandra Ruckstuhl on Capturing Practical Lessons on Water, Conflict, and Cooperation
›Friday Podcasts // Water Stories (Podcast Series) // December 14, 2018 // By Kathryn Gardner & Truett SparkmanWe realized “there was a need for a toolkit on water,” says Sandra Ruckstuhl in this week’s Water Stories podcast, “with a focus of conflict and conflict mitigation, but also peacebuilding.” Ruckstuhl, a consultant for the World Bank who has researched water programs in Yemen and the Middle East, helped the Wilson Center produce USAID’s Water and Conflict toolkit, which documents examples of successful development interventions focused on water and peacebuilding.
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Aaron Wolf on Transboundary Water Conflict and Cooperation
›Friday Podcasts // Water Stories (Podcast Series) // November 30, 2018 // By Evan Barnard & Sharif Wahab“Countries—even countries that don’t like each other much—have, and continue to have, conversations over water resources, even when they won’t about other issues,” says Aaron Wolf, Director of Water Conflict Management and Transformation at Oregon State University, in this week’s Water Stories podcast.
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Environmental Security in Times of Armed Conflict
›This summer, Iraqi citizens in Basra demonstrated in the streets to protest a serious public health crisis caused by polluted water. The condition of their water infrastructure was deplorable after years of devastating wars, corruption, and droughts and regional hydropolitics. More than 100,000 people have reportedly been poisoned by polluted water, while recent estimates warn that some 277,000 children are at risk of diseases, such as cholera due to rundown water and sanitation facilities at schools.
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Environmental Activists Under Assault in Brazil
›Environmental activists in Brazil are under attack. Last year—the worst year on record—57 of them were assassinated in Brazil, the most dangerous country for environmental activists in the world. The last few years have seen a dramatic uptick in killings of people who take a stand against companies and other actors that commit environmental crimes.
Showing posts from category environmental security.