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<i>Huffington Post</i>: "Overselling Climate Conflict?" Cites <i>ECSP Report 13</i>

MAY 2009&#8212;ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko Highlights Three Pitfalls to Avoid

Will climate change push fragile states to become failed states? Will it increase the frequency of humanitarian missions for the military, or create new sparring over competing sovereignty claims in the melting Arctic?

In the Huffington Post, John Wihbey's article "Overselling 'Climate Conflict'?" looks at newly emerging questions about the links between climate and security.
Wihbey—a correspondent for NPR's "On Point" and the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media—cites ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko as one environmental-security expert who is urging researchers to back up their assertions with hard data.

Dabelko's foreword to the latest issue of the ECSP Report urges policymakers not to allow the new focus on climate security to detract from other, equally pressing problems.

Wihbey writes:

"Of course, the Obama team talks a lot about the security dimensions of climate change. And they should. Governments are supposed to look at over-the-horizon threats…But some veteran watchers of the environmental security field are expressing a note of caution amid the flurry of new threat-focused reports. They welcome the attention to climate concerns, and they don't doubt that there's real risk down the road. Yet, they are worried about exaggeration and lack of clear analysis.

‘Our challenge now is to utilize this attention wisely and avoid overplaying our hand by fueling false fears,' Geoffrey Dabelko, director for the Environmental Change and Security Program at the non-partisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, writes in a new report."

To read the full article, visit Huffington Post.

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Environmental Change and Security Program

The Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) explores the connections between environmental change, health, and population dynamics and their links to conflict, human insecurity, and foreign policy.  Read more