• Climate Change

U.N. Security Council Focuses Climate Risks

• climate change
• COP26
• food security
• migration
• nature
• poverty
• security
• United Nations

Climate change is the biggest threat facing the world, and yesterday’s United Nations Security Council meeting was focused on the topic. United States climate envoy John Kerry, who participated in the virtual meeting, warned that ignoring the crisis and its threats to global security would mean “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact.” 

Why this Matters: Global food security, poverty rates, and public health are all negatively impacted by climate change. These destabilizing forces are already driving people to migrate and shifting power balances on the international stage.

• Forests

Fighting Deforestation and Poverty Go Hand In Hand In Indonesia

• conservation
• deforestation
• environment
• Indonesia
• poverty
• rain forest
• science

A new study published yesterday in the journal Science Advances found that in Indonesia, a country with bountiful but highly exploited natural resources, a national anti-poverty program also reduced deforestation as a side benefit.

Why This Matters: Indonesia is one of the poorest nations in the world, and has the third-largest amount of tropical rain forest.  It also, according to Global Forest Watch, is the country with the third-highest rate of rainforest loss in the world in 2019.

• Land

Tornados are survivable yet Americans are still dying

• Alabama
• natural disasters
• poverty
• tornadoes

Tornado warning technology has improved significantly in the past decades yet in states like Alabama, tornadoes still routinely claim human lives when they don’t have to. Just last week more than three dozen tornadoes wrought havoc in the Deep South, killing 23 and razing the ground bare in many areas and just yesterday two tornadoes […]

• People

Interview with Ertharin Cousin On Climate and Food Insecurity

• climate change
• Drought
• food
• hunger
• poverty
• SNAP
• World Food Organization
• World Food Programme

Ertharin Cousin is the Distinguised Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.  She previously served as executive director of the World Food Programme from 2012 until 2017.