The Environmental Change and Security Project recently provided input to a high-level UN panel convened to analyze emerging global security threats. Panel member and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft asked a group of international experts to recommend ways the UN could mitigate the threats posed by climate change, population growth, and other environmental problems.
Download summary report: Environment and Security
Environmental problems—-climate change, water scarcity, population growth, pollution, and natural disasters—-are some of the most powerful and least understood challenges we face. But how can collective actors like the United Nations prevent environment-related conflict, and can they use the environment to build peace between nations?
Calling this post-Iraq moment "no less decisive than 1945 itself," United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan convened a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change to improve how the United Nations prevents and removes threats to peace. Eminent world citizens like Brent Scowcroft, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Sadako Ogata, and Nafis Sadik will recommend clear and practical measures for ensuring effective collective responses to the world's security problems, ranging from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to "soft threats" like extreme poverty and disease.
As part of the United Nations Foundation's United Nations and Global Security Initiative, the Environmental Change & Security Project at the Wilson Center invited international experts to provide the panel with fresh intellectual insights into environmental security. Leading thinkers in the fields of water, climate change, and natural resources answered three questions posed by the panel:
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
