„We all share the risks of climate change and environmental degradation on this planet. Rising sea levels affect everyone, and increasingly fierce hurricanes do not stop at national borders. To paraphrase Martin Luther King: instability anywhere is a threat to peace and wellbeing everywhere.”
Bert Koenders, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, giving the opening speech at the first Planetary Security Conference (The Hague, 2 November 2015).
As opposed to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, India could lead a campaign for climate-responsible international development cooperation, shifting from coal to renewables domestically and promoting the values of the International Solar Alliance globally.
Using a progressive environmental security concept can help to tackle a range of environmental issues related to armed conflict, such as deforestation, loss of biodiversity, tensions over natural resources, conflict pollution, and damage to ecosystems. The environment can actually play a role in peacebuilding. This article briefly outlines why such an inclusive and environmental protection approach is needed and how it could be implemented.
Climate action and free trade have been perceived as contrary agendas for a long time. Despite more and more governments seeing tremendous potential for win-win outcomes, aligning trade and climate has become harder. This is due to changes in our current geopolitical landscape, as Christian Hübner explains in light of the upcoming G20 summit.
Human activity has caused the temperature of the Earth and its atmosphere to rise by about 1°C above pre-industrial levels, triggering fundamental changes to the planet’s physical and social landscapes. On 8 October an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that temperatures were rising faster than expected, and that 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels could occur as early as 2030.