By Wilson Center StaffThrough the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has launched a new industrial strategy. Today’s episode of New Security Broadcast highlights a fireside chat at a Wilson Center event between John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation, and Duncan Wood, Wilson Center Vice President for Strategy and New Initiatives. Podesta and Wood explore the opportunities provided by the Inflation Reduction Act for the U.S....

To better understand the complex dynamics of global hunger and the urgent need for more collective action to address this humanitarian crisis, Chase Sova, Senior Director of Public Policy and Research at World Food Program USA, and his colleagues recently launched a new report, "Dangerously Hungry." In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP Program Coordinator and Communications Specialist, Abegail Anderson, speaks with Sova about the report's analysis on the current state of global...

Today's geopolitical climate, paired with the accelerating energy transition, means it is more important than ever to coordinate on international infrastructure investments. This episode of the New Security Broadcast features a recent Wilson Center panel discussion with Amos Hochstein, Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security. Moderated by Mark Kennedy, Director of the Wilson Center's Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition, and Wilson Center Global...

Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Kostiantyn Krynytskyi, Head of Energy at Ecoaction, and his colleagues, have been tracking the ongoing environmental damage caused by Russia’s aggression. In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP Director Lauren Risi speaks with Krynytskyi to discuss how Ecoaction, the largest environmental NGO in Ukraine, is mapping out the environmental destruction caused by the war and working to develop a green post-war reconstruction of Ukraine....

In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, Sarah Barnes, Project Director for the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative Project Director met with Bridget Kelly, Director of Research for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights at Population Institute to discuss the launch of Population Institute’s new report: Connecting the Dots, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights as Prerequisites for Global Gender Equality and Empowerment. On the episode Kelly, lead author of the Connecting...

In today’s episode of the New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Claire Doyle partnered with Elsa Barron at the Center for Climate and Security for a conversation with two young leaders who are working to tackle climate change and build peace: Christianne Zakour and Hassan Mowlid Yasin. Christianne is a volunteer with UNEP’s Major Group for Children and Youth and Hassan is co-founder of the Somali Greenpeace Association. On the episode, Christianne and Hassan share about the climate, equity, and...

It is fully within our power to guarantee a healthy ocean and protect it for the future, says Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry in today’s episode of the New Security Broadcast. Kerry spoke at a recent Wilson Center event hosted in partnership with the Embassy of Panama to spotlight the 8th Our Oceans Conference, scheduled to take place in March in Panama. In his remarks, Kerry emphasized the vital role the ocean plays in supporting global food security and economic prosperity...

This week’s episode of the New Security Broadcast explores Invisible Threads: Addressing the Root Causes of Migration from Guatemala by Investing in Women and Girls—a new report from the Population Institute. “We feel like it's really important to highlight how the lives of women and girls and other marginalized groups are really central to a lot of the issues that are at the root causes of migration from the region,” says Kathleen Mogelgaard, President and CEO of the Population Institute. In...

The war in Ukraine is not only displacing millions, straining the economy, and ravaging infrastructure. It’s also creating a mounting health crisis. In this week’s New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Director Lauren Risi hears from Ambassador Daniel Speckhard and Dr. Mariia Dolynska about the health impacts created by the war in Ukraine and what is still needed to strengthen the health system—as well as what one NGO is doing to deliver healthcare in the embattled nation.  Millions Displaced and an...

“Things that we used to think were 20 or 30 years into the future are in fact happening today…  Climate change is noticeably changing the extent, the severity, and the frequency of these kinds of events.” This stark assessment from Jonathan Pershing, Program Director of Environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is at the center of a discussion of progress made and needed for international climate commitments, the role of critical minerals in the green energy transition, and...

According to the World Bank, building enough renewable energy infrastructure to keep global warming below 2C will require more than 3 billion tons of minerals. Reducing emissions quickly is crucial to minimizing risk for the world’s most climate-vulnerable communities, many of whom are on the front lines of a crisis they did not create. But unless we are careful, ramping up mining in order to decarbonize could actually worsen inequity and injustice. “How do we do this quickly, safely, and...

As the last decade has brought about a dramatic shift in approaches to addressing climate change, water is increasingly at the forefront of the conversations around adaptation and resilience. In part, this is because more countries now experience the damaging effects of climate change through water-related events including rising sea levels, intensification of natural disasters, droughts, and flooding. In this week’s New Security Broadcast, John Matthews, Executive Director of the Alliance...

As the world turns its attention to the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (CoP27) in Sharm El Sheikh, CoP26 President Alok Sharma reflects upon the achievements won thus far in the fight against climate change in our latest podcast. Sharma’s address at the Wilson Center also outlines the steps that need be taken at CoP27 and in the future to ensure a sustainable and prosperous future for all.Sharma observes that the CoP26 in Scotland last year represented a “fragile win” and that the Glasgow...

On a recent visit to the Wilson Center, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari remarked on the historic nature of the monsoon-related floods that have submerged a huge swath of his country over the last several months.   “These are no normal monsoons and no normal floods,” said Zardari. “We are used to monsoons. We are used to floods. We have provincial mechanisms [and] national mechanisms to deal with such disasters. What we were not prepared for was for floods to descend from...

The confluence of climate change, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine have placed enormous stress on food systems across the globe. Food insecurity spiked in 2020 and has stayed high, and the number of undernourished people is on the rise.As we respond to this emergency, there is an opportunity—and a need—to strengthen the kind of strategic investments that will make our agrifood systems resilient to tomorrow’s shocks. “We cannot be running crisis to crisis,” says Bram Govaerts, Director General...

Why does climate change lead to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not others? In this week’s New Security Broadcast, Josh Busby, Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, discusses the latest thinking on this essential question as laid out in his new book, States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security, with ECSP Program Associate, Amanda King, and ECSP Senior Fellow, Sherri Goodman.  In States and Nature, Busby...

About half the world’s population lives in an area of active or latent conflict. And few corners of the planet are not feeling the effects of climate change. But in this week’s New Security Broadcast, researcher Clionadh Raleigh cautions against drawing too strong a connection between the two phenomena in an interview with ECSP Director Lauren Risi.“Conflict is a competition for power,” says Raleigh, a professor of political geography and conflict at the University of Sussex and the executive...

Debates around whether and to what extent international order is changing can be misguided “so long as we are thinking about international order as a single, monolithic thing,” says Jeff Colgan, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University in this week’s episode of New Security Broadcast. Colgan spoke at a recent Wilson Center event featuring his new book, Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order. In the book, Colgan...

The impacts of COVID-19 have shown policymakers that we need to invest in infrastructure and shore up existing systems to ensure that they can withstand changing conditions over time, says Alice Hill, former special assistant to President Barack Obama and current senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Resilience, in this week’s New Security Broadcast. “As we go forward, we need to have resilient systems. But we haven’t done that yet, we’re unprepared.” Hill sat down with Sherri Goodman,...

“When we started out, people thought it was weird. ‘Why are you integrating people and animals and why are you integrating human health and animal health?’” says Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), in this week’s New Security Broadcast. Indeed, health infrastructure and conservation have long been organized around distinct silos. “Donors were focusing on single sector funding, and government departments were aligned along single sectors,” says...

“To inform the most pressing issues of our time, to bring new voices to the policy space, and to help our audience better understand these complex connections and where we can be most effective in our responses, we bring you the New Security Broadcast,” says Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), in today’s launch of ECSP’s new podcast series, New Security Broadcast.  New Security Broadcast serves as the successor to ECSP’s long-running...

“Many people have watched fights between communities and big corporations around the world. The corporations usually win so those are the Goliath. The Davids usually lose,” says John Cavanagh, co-author of The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed. In this week’s episode of Friday Podcasts, Cavanagh and co-author Robin Broad recount how local activists mobilized a global coalition of religious leaders, labor unions, and environmental activists to block an...

Too often, many in my community are excluded from sexual and reproductive health services, said Ruth Morgan Thomas, co-founder and Global Coordinator of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, in today’s episode of Friday Podcasts. This episode features highlights from a recent Wilson Center and UNFPA event where Thomas and Zandile Simelane, an HIV Youth Advocate from Eswatini, address the barriers that their respective communities—sex workers and HIV positive youth—face in accessing sexual...

“The world is still feeling the full brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic which most likely had its origins in a wild animal,” says John Scanlon AO, Former Secretary-General of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and Chair of the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, in this week’s Friday Podcast. Scanlon spoke at a recent Wilson Center event on the connections between wildlife crime, human health, and security.  “We need to recalibrate our...