Articles

130 Items

northern fulmar skims across water

AP Photo/David Goldman

Journal Article - The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs

Mapping a Path Forward for Arctic Cooperation with Russia: A Biodiversity Case Study

| Winter 2024

For most of this century, the Arctic has been a place of peaceful cooperation in science and environmental protection, an approach built on a foundation of multiple agreements reached in the twentieth century. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the geopolitical reverberations of the war have disrupted or outright halted most collaboration between Western and Russian scientists and conservationists.

French soldiers paddling from house to house in an inundated western front village searching for food in France on June 7, 1940. The French voluntarily flooded the village in an attempt to hold up the blitzkrieging German army.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Water and Warfare: The Evolution and Operation of the Water Taboo

    Author:
  • Charlotte Grech-Madin
| Spring 2021

Since the end of World War II, nation-states in international conflict have made concerted efforts to restrain the weaponization of water. Distinct from realist and rationalist explanations, the historical record reveals the rise of an international normative inhibition—a “water taboo”—on using water as a weapon.

Chernobyl welcome sign

Wikimedia CC/Jorge Franganillo

Journal Article - Futures

Accumulating Evidence Using Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning: A Living Bibliography about Existential Risk and Global Catastrophic Risk

    Authors:
  • Gorm E. Shackelford
  • Luke Kemp
  • Catherine Rhodes
  • Lalitha Sundaram
  • Seán S. ÓhÉigeartaigh
  • Simon Beard
  • Haydn Belfield
  • Shahar Avin
  • Dag Sørebø
  • Elliot M. Jones
  • John B. Hume
  • David Price
  • David Pyle
  • Daniel Hurt
  • Theodore Stone
  • Harry Watkins
  • Lydia Collas
  • Bryony C. Cade
  • Thomas Frederick Johnson
  • Zachary Freitas-Groff
  • David Denkenberger
  • Michael Levot
  • William J. Sutherland
| February 2020

The study of existential risk — the risk of human extinction or the collapse of human civilization — has only recently emerged as an integrated field of research, and yet an overwhelming volume of relevant research has already been published. To provide an evidence base for policy and risk analysis, this research should be systematically reviewed. In a systematic review, one of many time-consuming tasks is to read the titles and abstracts of research publications, to see if they meet the inclusion criteria. The authors show how this task can be shared between multiple people (using crowdsourcing) and partially automated (using machine learning), as methods of handling an overwhelming volume of research.

Rural Iowa Ethanol Plant

Magazine Article - John F. Kennedy School of Government Bulletin

Fuel for Thought

    Author:
  • Madeline Drexler
| Winter 2008

As the Biofuel industry surges with investments and new entrepreneurial players, Kennedy School scholars are analyzing it working to develop new ways to create carbon-neutral fuels. Madeline Drexler writes on the Kennedy School's input on this emerging new way to lower greenhouse gas emissions and become less dependent on non-renewable energy resources.

Coal-fired power plant in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Journal Article - Science

Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being

| January 25, 2008

"I would urge every scientist and engineer with an interest in the intersection of S&T with sustainable well-being...to 'tithe' 10% of your professional time and effort to working in these and other ways to increase the benefits of S&T for the human condition and to decrease the liabilities. If so much as a substantial fraction of the world's scientists and engineers resolved to do this much, the acceleration of progress toward sustainable well-being for all of Earth's inhabitants would surprise us all."

teaser image

Journal Article - Third World Quarterly

Security Dilemmas of Nuclear-Armed Pakistan

| October 2000

Pakistan's security environment has deteriorated through its adoption of a declared nuclear weapons posture in May 1998. Internal fissures have widened along regional and sectarian lines as the Pakistani economy falters, unable to sustain even limited external sanctions following decades of internal mismanagement. Tensions with India have also increased as Pakistan's security managers adopt interventionist policies, based on a misplaced belief in the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. The international community, in particular, the USA's failure to reverse South Asian nuclear proliferation, has emboldened Indian advocates of nuclear deployment. If India deploys nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, Pakistan will follow suit. Operation-ready nuclear weapons will increase the prospects of an India - Pakistan conflict that could assume a nuclear dimension. Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability will not prevent an Indian conventional attack nor will the presence of nuclear weapons deter an Indian accidental, unauthorised or preventive nuclear attack. Changed domestic and external priorities alone can buttress Pakistani security.

teaser image

Journal Article - Science

Equity and Greenhouse Gas Responsibility in Climate Change Policy

| Sep. 29, 2000

Under the Kyoto Protocol, industrialized nations have approved commitments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These commitments apply only to developed nations, reflecting the international consensus that the industrialized countries should take the lead in mitigating climate change.