Environment & Climate Change

The climate catastrophe is one of the most pressing and consequential challenges of the 21st century. To meet these challenges and maintain global leadership, the United States needs a diverse, nuanced, and data-driven approach to climate resiliency. U.S. foreign policy should prioritize climate diplomacy with an urgency that is comparable to any other U.S. national security interest.

For many, integrating “decarbonization” into public policy, corporate and financial strategies has become a requirement, not an option — yet, what happens when the critical link between climate stability and decarbonization breaks?

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

At one point in human history, water’s importance in war went beyond bearing convoys, hiding submarines, and slaking soldiers’ thirst. Water was often itself a weapon. In areas where it was scarce, armies took action to make it scarcer to force besieged enemy cities to capitulate, and in areas where it was abundant, combatants destroyed dams and watched the resulting floods carry their adversaries away. Today, however, most combatants recoil at the use of water as a weapon, and only the most depraved deploy it.

Fran Ulmer advocates for better U.S. federal Arctic coordination at home and abroad by detailing three steps that are a good first start.

Joel Clement writes that the nomination of Rep. Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary is a sea change for indigenous people  because it demonstrates the power of investing in indigenous leadership and institutions.

Arctic Innovator Rumaitha Al Busaidi argues for an Arctic Plastic Partnership that could highlight the business advantage to solving the region's marine plastic crisis.

Increased investment into the Arctic over the coming decades is inevitable. To respond to this, the Arctic's present international governance structures can be improved to help steer the region through these impending changes.

In a year of astonishing reversals, one of the biggest may turn out to be President Trump’s emergence as the unlikely savior of America’s national parks.

Stephen Walt offers what he considers to be the top five silver linings from the COVID-19 pandemic.