Event Summary: Progressing Efforts on the Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery, and Peace
By Noah Fritzhand, Amineh Najam-ud-din and Kamsi Obiorah
Introduction
On 16 October, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mercy Corps, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) convened key stakeholders for a roundtable discussion on Progressing Efforts on the Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery, and Peace (RRP Declaration). Signed into existence at COP28 by some 90 states, including the United States, and 40 international partners, this landmark declaration calls for bold and collective action to build climate resilience at the scale and speed necessary to support highly vulnerable communities, including those threatened by fragility or conflict, or facing severe humanitarian needs.
Nearly one year after the signing, this discussion brought together humanitarian, development, climate, and US officials from various agencies to assess progress on these commitments, share concrete examples of efforts that have or have not been successful, and discuss lessons learned. The roundtable was held under Chatham House Rule, and the list of guiding questions can be found in Annex 1 of this summary.
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Event Recap: Feeding Resilience: Interagency Coordination and Foresight
By Tom Ellison and Noah Fritzhand
On 22 October, the Center for Climate and Security brought together current and former US government officials, scientists, and researchers to discuss two topics that the Feeding Resilience program has identified as essential to progress at the nexus of food systems, climate change, and US national security: improved US government interagency coordination and better deployment of strategic foresight capabilities. The discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule.
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Marketplace Podcast Highlights Center for Climate and Security Experts
For the past six years, the radio program Marketplace, hosted by Kai Ryssdal, has run a “climate solutions” podcast called “How We Survive.” The latest season, which debuted last month, focuses on the intersection of climate change and national security – specifically, how the US military is dealing with, and could ultimately shape, the changing climate. Ryssdal himself served in the Navy during the 1980s but, by his own admission, never heard much about climate change or global warming during his time in uniform. Forty years later, however, it’s become a major topic of discussion and debate within the Department of Defense (DoD). Over six episodes, Ryssdal explores those debates and speaks with a number of prominent members of the Center for Climate and Security (CCS).
(more…)Preparing for Ecological Disruption: Strategic Foresight and a Futures Approach to Ecological Security
Author: Lily Boland
Editors: Andrea Rezzonico, Erin Sikorsky, and Francesco Femia
Executive Summary
A short-lived gap in the clouds let satellites observe a striking phytoplankton bloom east of Greenland, June 16, 2024.
(NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview)
Abstract: This report leverages insights gained from the use of strategic foresight as an approach for better anticipating how risks to global security are heightened by ecological disruption. It offers a range of use-cases for applying the foresight toolkit to the field of ecological security and to establish a knowledge base to assist practitioners, governments, and institutions in enhancing their anticipatory decision-making and planning processes for addressing the security ramifications of large-scale destabilization and decline of the biosphere and ecosystems.
Executive Summary
In February 2021, the Council on Strategic Risk’s Ecological Security Program published its landmark report, The Security Threat that Binds Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It.1 The report identified ecological disruption as a substantial and underappreciated security threat and aimed to prescribe recommendations for how the US government should adapt its national security architecture to better respond to this evolving threat landscape– including stresses to critical systems such as water, food, wildlife, forests, and fisheries, and how these stressors heighten threats to global security, namely pandemics, conflict, political instability, and loss of social cohesion.
The initial report noted that the US government needed to adapt its national security architecture and mainstream ecological concerns to better anticipate the evolving threats from ongoing ecological disruption. Enhancing strategic foresight capabilities is one approach to addressing this challenge. To this end, the preliminary report developed an ecological security research agenda that involved several strategic foresight practices: (1) use foresight tools such as horizon scanning to better understand and uncover the linkages between ecological disruption and security, (2) develop early warning indicators to identify what signals of harmful future ecosystem regime shifts can be detected in the present and inform anticipatory planning, (3) build mature ecological forecasting capabilities to improve resilience against future shocks. All of these recommendations fall under the strategic foresight toolkit.
In line with these recommendations, the Ecological Security Program undertook several foresight initiatives, including a two-day Ecological Security Game conducted in May 2023 and several scenario exercises on the security impacts of ecological decline and biodiversity loss in Southeast Asia and Africa. Building on the success of these activities and the Program’s ongoing horizon scan for drivers and trends at the intersection of ecological disruption and global security risks, this report proposes several actionable, futures-focused strategies and tools for stakeholders and policymakers to integrate into existing ecological response and national security efforts.
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