We’re Hiring: Deputy Director for the Center for Climate and Security
The Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) seeks to hire a Deputy Director for the Center for Climate and Security. This is an exciting growth opportunity for the right candidate.
The person filling this role will:
Help ensure CSR has the right strategy, programs, and people to drive progress in addressing a range of threats to security posed by climate change and ecological degradation by:
- Identifying gaps in the field and devising plans for CCS/CSR to contribute to filling them, particularly at the nexus of foreign policy, development policy, and climate security.
- Raising awareness and pushing for the U.S. and international communities to prioritize addressing these threats.
- Contributing to current CCS efforts, such as the advancement of the recommendations in its Challenge Accepted report, its leadership of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, and its convening of the Climate Security Working Group and Climate Security Advisory Group.
- Developing new projects.
- Ensuring CCS work advances the organization’s mission.
Read, Watch, Listen: CCS Across the Web | August 2022
Welcome to “Read, Watch, Listen” from the Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a monthly round-up highlighting some of the articles, interviews, and podcasts featuring the CCS network of experts.
A hot August around the world had CCS experts discussing the security implications of heatwaves, the opening Arctic, and the energy transition.
Op-Eds
- Elsa Barron, CCS Research Fellow, writes that the heatwaves across the northern hemisphere this summer show climate change is not a future crisis, but a crisis of today. She further notes that the Balkans is one of the most vulnerable regions in Europe to the security risks which arise in a climate-changed world. (Geopolitical Monitor)
- Nonresident Research Fellow Cullen Hendrix joins Morgan Bazilian of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, to examine how the war in Ukraine is driving changes toward sustainable energy security and what a good transition will need to include. (War on the Rocks)
Articles
- As the Arctic warms and becomes an area of increased international attention, the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO offers the Alliance an important strategic foothold, comments Senior Strategist Sherri Goodman. (AP News)
- Bob Barnes, Senior Policy Advisor, participated in a panel event at the American Security Project focused on energy security in West Virginia, wherein he noted that some former mine lands in West Virginia could be used for solar power arrays. (Herald-Dispatch)
- A definition of Responsibility to Prepare and Prevent (R2P2), written by Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell (CCS Co-founders), was published in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures.
- The confluence of poor governance by the Taliban and disruptions to subsistence agriculture will likely result in an increased number of internally displaced people in Afghanistan, warned CCS Director Erin Sikorsky. (Thomson Reuters Foundation)
BRIEFER: Papua New Guinea, Climate and Security
In April 2022, the U.S. State Department released a Prologue to the 2020 United States Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability, part of the Global Fragility Act of 2019. The prologue selected four countries and one region—including Papua New Guinea—as a geographic focus in developing a blueprint for promoting global peace and security.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is at a pivotal moment in its development. Opportunities to modernize are clashing with traditional tribal strictures; foreign commercial and political actors are vying for favor and resources; and global geopolitical competition is buffeting regional relationships. Exacerbating all of these challenges is climate change.
This briefer by the Center for Climate and Security focuses on key PNG security risks, and the role of climate change in shaping security outcomes in the country. It highlights both risks and opportunities, and offers policymakers targeted recommendations to prevent instability and conflict in a complex, climate-stressed environment.
About the author
Rachel Fleishman is Nonresident Senior Research Fellow for the Asia-Pacific at the Center for Climate and Security, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks.
Water and Sabotage in Paradise: Greece’s Hidden Climate Conflict
Greece’s islands might seem like unlikely settings for a wild years-long sabotage campaign, but the explosions tell a different story.
In late July, a person or persons unknown detonated a bomb alongside the undersea Salamina-to-Aegina water pipeline in Greece, leaving nothing but traces of a fuse and leaking freshwater.
Two years earlier, in January 2020, other – or possibly the same – suspects punctured that pipeline in dozens of places with a drill. On that occasion, they set back the completion of the then-under construction project by more than a year.
On Mykonos, Paros, and a good number of other idyllic islands, desalination plants and other forms of water infrastructure have suffered repeated and ‘inexplicable’ breakdowns in recent years. Though impossible to prove malicious intention in many instances, desalination technicians say that not even subpar maintenance can explain away this volume of problems.
(more…)
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