Blog Posts
Posted by Halvard Buhaug on Sunday, 12 February 2017
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 shrinking glaciers, eroding coastlines, or changes in precipitation patterns. Nor, strictly speaking, are they about coral bleaching, phenological changes, or species migration. The primary grounds for concern relate to the consequences these physical changes will have for societal development and prosperity, including human well-being and physical security. It is somewhat ...
Posted by Kristian Hoelscher, Hanne Cecilie Geirbo, Ingrid Nytun Christie, Lisbet Harboe & Sobah Abbas Petersen on Tuesday, 18 October 2016
The Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador this week is the most important meeting on cities and development in decades. It will shape the urban agenda of the 21st century. It is now well-known that the world is more urban than rural, with the challenges of 21st century urbanisation firmly on the agenda. In Quito, Ecuador’s capital, the contrasting opportunities and challenges of cities are fully on display – vibrant and exciting culture, choking pollution, snarling traffic, and prosperity and insecurity varying dramatically between neighborhoods. And it is in Quito this week that these and other challenges will be taken ...
Posted by Nic Marsh on Tuesday, 17 November 2015
Full details of the arms used in the 13 November massacres will emerge in time. This post provides some information on illicit automatic weapons, such as the Kalashnikov, in France, and how they reach illicit markets. Overall, it appears that there is a pool of several thousand illicit military style firearms in France and relatively small numbers are trafficked in from abroad. Such quantities mean that terrorists and criminals in France and neighbouring countries can obtain Kalashnikovs and similar weapons, and that should be a matter of great concern. Nevertheless, Europe is very far from being ‘awash’ with illegal Kalashnikovs ...
Posted by Kristian Hoelscher on Monday, 16 November 2015
Attacks in Paris show how urban security challenges are becoming more complex. They ask difficult questions and present no easy answers. Friday’s attacks in Paris were an alarming reminder of the threats of organised violence in European cities. This comes less than a year after the assault against French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and days after similar attacks in Beirut, in Lebanon, and Sinai, in Egypt. The coordinated events in the French capital were quickly linked with islamic terrorist groups, with ISIS on Saturday claiming responsibility. In response, the French President Francois Hollande declared a state of emergency, implemented curfews ...
Posted by Marta Bivand Erdal & Zain Ul Abdin on Thursday, 1 October 2015
Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems. This summer CNBC run a report titled Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems after more than a thousand people died during heatwaves during the first days of Ramadan. Insufficient preparedness for the heatwave is largely seen as the cause of deaths, yet the context of the protracted electricity crisis in Pakistan is also widely connected with the scale of deaths and hospitalization during this summer’s heatwave. Pakistan’s energy crisis has worsened over the past few years, with increasing gaps between electricity supply and demand in the country. The crisis has been reported on in ...
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 food and economic insecurity, meanwhile, raises new concerns about possible future conflict scenarios. Climate change is not likely to have a common and universal effect on armed conflict risk. Indirect effects of climate on conflict may work via migration, food insecurity or economic shocks. Many of the factors that increase ...
Posted by Halvard Buhaug on Tuesday, 10 March 2015
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 climate change contributed to the drought that preceded the Syrian civil war. So does the Syrian case represent a general pattern, where climate changes and extremes are systematically increasing conflict risk? The short answer is no. But if scientists want to explore these links more closely, there are a few ...
The global shift from rural to urban living will be the most important demographic transformation of the 21st century. All great shifts create the opportunity for great fortunes, especially for those with audacious visions who are positioned to capitalize on them. Indian industrialist Ajit Gulabchand runs Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), which is responsible for some of the country’s most iconic infrastructure projects. In what might be the single biggest bet in the history of Indian real estate, Gulabchand has staked HCC’s future – and his own family fortune – on a cluster of five planned cities perched along artificial fjords ...
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff must see off two fast gaining rivals to win reelection in October. Problems during the World Cup might end up being be her political downfall. With the World Cup underway, the eyes of the world are on the football in Brazil. Off the field though, the focus has been on violence in the country’s cities and the wave of protests that started last summer. Protesters took to the streets over the lack essential investment in health, education, transport, and other critical areas of need in Brazilian society, and how this contrasted with the exorbitant sums spent ...
In April, 800 hundred million people began casting their ballots all across India in the largest election the world has ever seen. When we think of voting in India, we often picture a poor elderly villager showing a big ink-stained thumb and boasting a wide smile as proof of democracy in action. But elections in today’s India mean big money, big ideas and a growing focus on big urban centers as the drivers of development that will continue to catapult it from a 20th century agrarian laggard to a 21st century global power. India’s electorate is bigger than all of ...
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 line with claims made earlier by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Against this background, I embarked with some anticipation on the report’s 2,679 pages. I found that each of the four chapters that address this question gives a slightly different answer. The question is discussed most thoroughly in the chapter on ...
When Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan known for her work in human rights and environmental conservation, including efforts to fight deforestation, won the Nobel Peace Prize last month, many took note that the Nobel Committee had evidently expanded its notion of “peace.” “Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment,” it proclaimed, seeming to embrace an extended concept of peace as “human security.” More probably, the committee intended to highlight scarcity of renewable natural resources as an important cause of war. Their statement, it is true, didn’t deal with that issue directly, but Maathai herself said that ...