Fire and (no) Ice: Climate Security Landscapes in Fall 2020
We are entering the last days of the BCSC 2020, with insightful discussions on a number of climate security challenges still to come, as well as the launch of our “21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy Is Climate Policy” essay series. Building on the high-level political Part I of BCSC 2020 back in July, this second part aims to bring together the field’s various actors in the realm of climate, development and security policy in one digital space to meet the strategic goals of sharing good practice on what works on the ground and help inform policy processes.
Two current catastrophes with a strong climate change impact are illustrating a different kind of climate security landscape. They should be seen as a wakeup call that alerts us of the urgency of finding sustainable solutions. The devastating forest fires in the Western United States, especially California, have already destroyed more than 4000 buildings and forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes. The area affected, more than 12 million acres, is nearly as large as that of the island of Vanuatu. Moving further north, the sea ice in the Arctic reached its annual minimum extent by mid-September, just 3.74 million square kilometres. In four decades of satellite recording, this is the second-lowest level on record.
Both catastrophes are worrisome signals of long-term downward trends. Given the current atmosphere of climate denial in significant parts of the United States, the elections in early November are taking on more and more the character of a final exam – one that will determine whether the United States returns to the table to ensure global risk management, or stays at the margin to play with fire – and no ice.
Moscow cries foul over EU’s planned carbon border tax
Russia’s economic development minister warned last week that the EU’s plans to deploy a carbon tax at the bloc’s borders will not be in line with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, just as Brussels doubled down on the idea of green tariffs.
China’s Post-Pandemic Water Woes
Few places have suffered more from the COVID-19 pandemic than southern China, the region where the novel coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan. But it turned out that the pandemic is not the only calamity to befall south China this year. The region has been inundated by heavy rainfall since late May, creating a risk of catastrophic flooding.
Natural resources-based conflicts are sometimes made complex by non-climate push and pull factors, like unemployment and political tension. These factors should be taken into account when developing and implementing a peacebuilding strategy, making sure all stakeholders are at the table – including those fueling the conflict. The online workshop ‘Integrating peacebuilding and climate change mitigation efforts in natural resource management’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex issue.
A little over a decade ago, the Himalayan region was considered by the IPCC a 'black hole for data'. Small steps have been taken since then, but now scientists hope recent border clashes and the pandemic will not derail the limited progress made on research cooperation over the past decade.