In this four-page comment, Susanne Dröge from SWP discusses what the election of Donald Trump as the new US president will mean for future international climate policy cooperation. She argues that Germany and the EU need a comprehensive new climate diplomacy strategy to deal with the fallout of the US turnaround. Read the full comment here.

The GCSP’s new strategic security brief “Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation” sheds light on rising water stress, the conflict risks, and on potential ways to improve cooperation across borders and manage water sustainably.

Recently released by the World Bank, Unbreakable: Building the Resilience of the Poor in the Face of Natural Disasters finds that extreme natural disasters cost the global economy $520 billion in lost consumption each year – 60 percent higher than any previous estimate. Traditional disaster risk assessments have focused solely on aggregate losses, or how “disasters affect people wealthy enough to have wealth to lose.” But, as the report points out, a dollar in losses does not mean the same thing to the wealthy as it does to the poor. Instead, the report uses a new measurement that moves beyond asset losses to estimate a community’s socioeconomic resilience – or the ability to resist, absorb, accommodate, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely manner.

A low-emission transition will require profound changes in terms of infrastructure, business models as well as individual habits. In order to support this process adelphi, WiseEuropa and the Institute for Sustainable Development launched a Polish-German discussion on the benefits of a low-emission economy for local development. The discussion paper draws on this exchange, and offers a basis for further reflection about selected benefits based on evidence from Germany and Poland.