Blog post archive

Tuesday, 16 May 2023
What’s Next in Climate Security Studies? Exploiting Synergies between Practice and Research

The increase in global temperatures by over 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times is already having broad and significant impacts. An ongoing multi-year drought in Eastern Africa, for instance, has been attributed to global warming. Hunger crises, displacement, and exacerbated conflict between pastoralist groups are some of the reported dire consequences. This blog post reports on ...

Monday, 15 May 2023
What's Next in Climate Security Studies? Exploiting Synergies between Practice and Research

The increase in global temperatures by over 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times is already having broad and significant impacts. An ongoing multi-year drought in Eastern Africa, for instance, has been attributed to global warming. Hunger crises, displacement, and exacerbated conflict between pastoralist groups are some of the reported dire ...

Thursday, 10 Nov 2022
Armed Conflict and Climate Change: How These Two Threats Play Out in Africa

The world is falling miserably short of reducing carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, a 2015 treaty to keep global warming well below 2℃. The results of this failure are a greater increase in the prevalence and severity of extreme weather events, more rapid sea-level rises and an elevated ...

Monday, 5 Sep 2022
Norway and the Geopolitics of Battery Minerals

Batteries are as essential to the “green” energy transition as wind parks, solar power, and electric cars. These green energy technologies all require vast amounts of minerals. Norway has the potential to be an important new supplier of batteries, but it has been surprisingly silent on the issue – until ...

Tuesday, 21 Jun 2022
The Ukraine War and the Fate of the Earth

The stories that are told about the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the interpretations that are advanced about what the war means and why it went the way it did – are going to play a decisive role in determining nothing less than the fate of the earth. The dominant ...

Wednesday, 23 Mar 2022
Climate Policy Must Be Inclusive to Be Successful

Climate justice is essential if we are to succeed in preventing global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. This is a point that receives far greater attention in the new Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report than in previous reports. The Intergovernmental Panel ...

Wednesday, 23 Mar 2022
Climate Policy Must Be Inclusive to Be Successful

Climate justice is essential if we are to succeed in preventing global warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. This is a point that receives far greater attention in the new Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report than in previous reports. The Intergovernmental Panel ...

Wednesday, 9 Mar 2022
New Report by the IPCC: Climate Adaptation Is Happening Too Slowly

When the first part of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) was released last summer, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared “Code Red for humanity”. The report documented that climate change is more extensive and occurs more rapidly than previously assumed, and showed the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. ...

Sunday, 13 Feb 2022
Good Reads: Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics & Political Economy

Green Curses project member Stacy VanDeveer has written a book review of three new, exciting books in the fields of comparative environmental politics and comparative political economy. The three books bring together the study of energy, the environment, and political economy, looking at energy transitions in middle-income countries, firms’ cross-border ...

Tuesday, 1 Feb 2022
Hope and Despair in the Indus River Delta: Navigating the Treacherous Waters of Capitalism, Climate Change and Politics

Concern over the impacts of climate change is rising globally, and often seen in relation to migration. Drawing on MIGNEX fieldwork in Keti Bandar, a Pakistani fishing port in the Indus river delta, we sketch observed climate change impacts and scope for local action. Lost Glory What is today a ...

Wednesday, 5 Jan 2022
Can we predict climate change impacts on future peace and security?

In the same manner as societies are developing policies to strike the optimal balance between public safety and social and economic cost of COVID-19, the international community is negotiating strategies to address climate change. However, unlike lockdowns, vaccination, and other responses to the ongoing pandemic, risk-reducing effects of alternative climate ...

Friday, 26 Nov 2021
Good Reads: Resource Sovereignty

Green Curses research project member Dr. John Andrew McNeish, Professor at the Faculty of Landscape and Society at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, has just published two books on contestations over natural resources. The first book, a monograph authored by McNeish and entitled Sovereign Forces: Everyday Challenges to Environmental ...

Monday, 22 Nov 2021
Climate Resilience and Conflict: Multi-stakeholder Partnerships As A Way Forward?

As world leaders convened in Glasgow for the 26th annual Conference of Parties (COP 26) in hopes of accelerating action on the Paris Agreement and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the correlation between climate change and conflict is receiving more attention. In recent years, there has been ...

Monday, 13 Sep 2021
Book club review: Savage Ecology - War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

Screenshot from book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFP2m8O2Ex8 Pardon me, I was dreaming; I forgot you are herewaiting for me to accept you again, tell you that you’re not dangerous.Alice Notley, Above the Leaders With the global security system implicated in just about every scenario of civilisational and species collapse, should it be ...

Friday, 10 Sep 2021
Book club review*: Savage Ecology - War and geopolitics at the end of the world

*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth ...

Thursday, 29 Jul 2021
Obscuring the True Causes of Conflicts

Is Norway’s mission on the Security Council to reinforce the myth that climate change is a root cause of violent conflicts? This will make finding lasting solutions more difficult. As a new member of the UN Security Council, Norway has identified climate security as one of four key thematic priorities ...

Tuesday, 15 Jun 2021
Climate and Security: What will Norway do during its term as an elected member of the Council?

Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. While climate change is rarely, if ever, the root cause of conflict, its cascading effects make it a systemic security risk. The UN Security Council will increasingly be forced to respond to the security impacts of climate change. ...

Tuesday, 15 Jun 2021
Climate and Security: What will Norway do during its term as an elected member of the Council?

Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. While climate change is rarely, if ever, the root cause of conflict, its cascading effects make it a systemic security risk. The UN Security Council will increasingly be forced to respond to the security impacts of climate change. ...

Friday, 5 Mar 2021
Climate-conflict research: A decade of scientific progress

The last decade was the warmest on record, with 2020 tied with 2016 for the all-time high average annual global temperature. This 10-year period also saw armed conflicts at severity levels not seen since the Cold War era. Could there be a causal link between these trends? To the frustration ...

Sunday, 12 Feb 2017
Climate, Peace and Security

Despite rapid scientific progress, firm knowledge about the societal consequences of global warming remains limited. What are the implications of climate change for peace and security? Should we expect more wars and more political instability as the world heats up? The real concerns linked to climate change are not about ...

Thursday, 7 May 2015
A Climate of Conflicts?

Political violence correlates strongly with climate: Civil conflict risk is seven to ten times higher in dry and tropical climates than in continental climate zones. Yet, there is little evidence that climatic variability and change are important in understanding this pattern. The prospect of climate change causing forced migration and ...

Tuesday, 10 Mar 2015
Reflections on Climate-Conflict Research: More Confusion than Knowledge

Does climate change constitute a threat to peace and security? Many agree that it does. The US administration’s new National Security Strategy, launched last month, portrays climate change as ‘an urgent and growing threat.’ And this week, a new study appears to add scientific credibility to this concern, suggesting human-caused ...

Thursday, 17 Apr 2014
Climate Change and War

The day after the publication of the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the effects of climate change, Norwegian daily newspaper Dagsavisen was able to report that Norway’s Minister for Climate and Environment now envisaged a future world with more conflicts. This is in ...