National security leaders deal with deep uncertainty on a daily basis about everything from North Korea’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon to the location and timing of the next terrorist attack by non-state actors such as ISIS and al-Qaida. Security decision-makers don’t use uncertainty as an excuse to ignore security threats.
Violent conflicts and security crises around the world have many different causes and effects. The vast majority of them, however, are in one way or another related to energy policy. Yet experts from the foreign policy, security and energy communities have been reluctant to fully grasp the security implications of promising green energy technology and market developments, argue Rebecca Bertram and Charlotte Beck.
It is hard to believe governments would cling to technologies whose climatic and health side-effects are so insidious. Why instead wouldn’t we embrace a transition that makes the world a more efficient, cleaner and healthier place?
Sponsored by Climate Vulnerable Forum members Bangladesh and Philippines, together with all other Climate Vulnerable Forum members and a total of over 110 countries co-sponsoring, including the African Group and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously adopted a new resolution today on human rights and climate change.
The Compact of States and Regions, the only global platform to record greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets and inventory data from sub-national governments, has today announ
Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si”, published on 18 June 2015, is a moral plea for action against climate change and environmental degradation. Besides laying out the Pope’s critical stance on the ecological, spiritual and economic motives to ‘save our common home’, it also sends a central message to policy makers that: international political climate action is more important now than ever.
China and the European Union redoubled their commitment to a strong climate pact on Monday in a Brussels summit, as the Asian giant readied its widely-anticipated pledge for submission. Heads of the world’s number one and three emitters of greenhouse gas emissions signed a joint agreement on climate change and heralded a “new starting point” after 40 years of relations.
“Tackling climate change in fact represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come”, according to the co-chair of the Commission on Health and Climate, Professor Anthony Costello, director University College London Institute for Global Health. The Commission, a group of scientists convened by The Lancet journal, has published its second report on 22 June 2015.
Between 2007 and 2014, social unrest erupted across the globe. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Greece, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, Bosnia, Venezuela and Ukraine people took to the streets to protest against their governments. These protests had one factor in common: discontent with the government and underlying tensions were exacerbated by dramatic increases in food prices.
Syria is a warning sign of the crises to come. It gives us an important lesson on the links between livelihood insecurity, climate change and fragility. However, most of the reporting on the current crisis focuses on the violence and the extent of destruction. While this kind of reporting is important as it can keep the crisis on the political agenda and hopefully spur action to decrease human suffering and find solutions to the conflicts, it does not provide us with a deep understanding of how the crisis emerged in the first place and thus misses some key points which might help us prevent the next crisis from happening.