The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Speakers
Francis X. Johnson is a Senior Research Fellow with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and is currently based at the SEI-Asia centre in Bangkok as Policy/Climate Cluster leader. He holds Master’s degrees in Public Policy and Operations Research and a PhD in Energy and Climate Systems. He has more than twenty-five years of experience in socio-economic and environmental policy analysis on climate mitigation, biofuels, bioeconomy and sustainable land use. He served as a Lead Author for the IPCC AR6 Special Report on Climate Change and Land and is a member of the writing team for the forthcoming IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report.
Henrique Pacini is an economist at UNCTAD in Geneva, where he works on trade and circular economy issues. He has a degree in economics from the University of São Paulo, a Masters in European Studies from Hochschule Bremen, Germany, and a PhD in Energy Technology from KTH, Sweden. He recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where he examined the commercial dynamics of secondary/scrap materials in world trade, and co-chaired Harvard’s first Circular Economy Symposium. He is also part of the steering committee and implementation team of the GBP 24.6 million Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution (SMEP) programme, which develops scientific evidence and funds pollution-mitigation projects with circular characteristics in Africa and South Asia. Dr. Pacini published over 60 articles on environment, energy, trade and development issues.
