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 a recent study of the… Read more »
Tag: Climate
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 risk of triggering irreversible climate tipping… Read more »
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 now.
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 story we hear today is… Read more »
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 on Climate Change (IPCC) published… Read more »
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. In this blog post, seven… Read more »
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 collaboration, and the emergence of… Read more »
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 Governance in Latin America, looks… Read more »
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 an outpouring of evidence that… Read more »
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 to put on the Council’s… Read more »