REPORT
A New Climate for Peace
Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks
This independent report, commissioned by the G7 members, identifies seven compound climate-fragility risks that pose serious threats to the stability of states and societies in the decades ahead. Based on a thorough assessment of existing policies on climate change adaptation, development cooperation and humanitarian aid, and peacebuilding, the report recommends that the G7 take concrete action, both as individual members and jointly, to tackle climate-fragility risks and increase resilience to them.
BLOG
Resilience Compass
When climate change exacerbates conflicts and crises, resilience must be the compass for foreign policy. The Resilience Compass features news, reflections and opinions on climate change and fragility, with contributions from the Wilson Center’s New Security Beat, International Alert and guest authors.
RESOURCES
Factbook, Readings, Events
This collection of resources complements and extends the analysis of the report. It contains an interactive factbook allowing users to explore case studies from around the world and provides background readings and contextualized report and event summaries.
How Terrorists Leverage Climate Change
09 September, 2019 by Scott Somers (Arizona State University)
Policymakers and emergency managers tend to build a conceptual wall between natural hazards and terrorism. The causes of—and remedies for—these two kinds of disasters are seen as separate and distinct. But, in the era of climate change, the wall between the two is crumbling. As climate and weather patterns shift, the resulting environmental crisis is being leveraged as a tool for terror and political violence.
Providing Water Security in an Uncertain World
20 August, 2019 by Nathanial Matthews (Global Resilience Partnership)
A problem is looming. Most water infrastructure isn’t designed to meet the demands of the increasingly volatile world that climate change is producing. Our modern landscape requires a reconceptualization of infrastructure’s demands and needs that often defies convention. And nowhere is a flexible and responsive approach more crucial than in water infrastructure, where we are experiencing unprecedented changes in flows and increasing pressures on consumption, according to Wellspring: Source Water Resilience and Climate Adaptation, a new report from the Global Resilience Partnership, the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation and The Nature Conservancy. The report explores some ways practitioners can take a new approach to source water protection that would enhance resilience and help sustain communities and ecosystems in a shifting climate.
Lost in Translation: How Building “Strong” Institutions can Diminish Human Security in the Global South
30 July, 2019 by McKenzie F. Johnson
Environmental institutions have been established in the global south to improve environmental regulation and increasingly contentious extractive landscapes, but they lack in generating positive incomes on the ground. In many countries illegal mining and logging, violent conflict over resource access and distribution, and environmental degradation still prevail. This paradox exists because environmental reform has limited non-elite access to resources while it helped multinational elites consolidate control over formal legal resource extraction, says McKenzie F. Johnson from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
When Climate Change Meets Positive Peace
18 July, 2019 by Marisa O. Ensor
Climate change is being increasingly framed as a security issue—a “threat multiplier” that can amplify the risks of breakdowns in peacefulness. Yet, even extreme climate hazards do not always lead to higher levels of violence.
Urban Elites’ Livestock Exacerbate Herder-Farmer Tensions in Africa’s Sudano-Sahel
14 June, 2019 by Matt Luizza
In recent years, conflict between herders and farmers for access to increasingly scarce natural resources in Africa’s Sudano-Sahel has escalated. While the problems fueling these tensions are both hyper-local and transnational in nature, one important piece of the puzzle has been overlooked. The real “elephant in the room” is who owns the livestock.