New Year, New Challenges—and New Questions for our Audience

Jan 5, 2018 | Lauren Herzer Risi
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The new year promises some big changes for the field of environmental security—and some big moves for the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). As we say hello to 2018, we wave goodbye to Roger-Mark De Souza, and welcome him to our team of advisors and fellows. And I’m excited (if a bit daunted) to step into his shoes as our Acting Director and tackle the challenges to come. At December’s Planetary Security Conference in The Hague, the hallway chatter focused on the United States’ dramatic roll-back of the progress on climate-security connections made in 2016. But even as the U.S. administration cools on climate, the discussion continues to heat up in Europe, where policymakers are working to bridge the gap between research and practice on conflict-sensitive, climate-resilient development. At the conference, ECSP Senior Advisor Geoff Dabelko and I led two innovative workshops where migration experts Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne and Wilson Center Global Fellow Caroline Kihato worked with participants to identify out-of-the-box responses to climate-migration-security linkages.