Climate Change and Climate Action

Iran’s Environmental Impasse

By Masoud Mostajabi

Iran’s environmental challenges are reaching a crisis point. Severe water and air pollution, deforestation, land degradation, desertification, climate change, and biodiversity loss are only a few of the increasing number of major environmental issues faced by Iran. These calamities have become a source of social and economic hardship, a threat to public health and a […]

Latin America: On target for COP24?

By David L. Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough

As signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement gear up for the upcoming COP24 meetings in Katowice, Poland in December 2018, Latin America has emerged as a global leader in energy modernization and climate change management, although progress has been uneven, and serious challenges remain for many countries in Latin America.

Intelligence community continues to see threat from climate change

By Ellen Scholl and David Livingston

The 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment, released on February 13, includes climate change among the identified threats to global stability. While many have pointed to the gap between this assessment and the rhetoric of US President Donald J. Trump—and the noticeable absence of climate change from his administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy—the worldwide threat assessment underscores […]

Intelligence community continues to see threat from climate change

By Ellen Scholl and David Livingston

While continued identification of climate change as part of the threat landscape is certainly important, incorporating climate concerns into foreign, defense, development, and national security policy in a comprehensive way is still a work in progress.

Our take on Donald Trump’s first State of the Union

US President Donald J. Trump delivered his first State of the Union in Washington on January 30, 2018. Read the address here. Trump touched on a diverse set of topics. We asked our analysts their thoughts on what the president had to say. Here is their take: ON THE SPEECH Trump said: “As we rebuild […]

Trump gave global warming the cold shoulder

By David Livingston

What has changed? Nothing yet. Despite the fanfare surrounding the president’s Rose Garden announcement, there is a drawn-out legal process for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement that puts the earliest date for withdrawal at November 4, 2020—one day after the 2020 US presidential election.

Fiji’s COP23 presidency highlights climate struggles of small island nations

By Gray Johnson, Becca Hunziker

Despite all eyes on the United States in the wake of US President Donald J. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, Fiji, the host of the twenty-third Conference of the Parties (COP23), framed the conversation in Bonn around the challenges climate change poses to small island nations and how larger, wealthier nations can help.