Diagnosing Climate Security
Now this initiative bears watching, because it gets beyond the fuzzy climate change cause-and-effect rhetoric. If adaptation is going to be done right in Africa–or anywhere–then this approach strikes me as a really smart way to go about it:
“It is not enough to say that Ethiopia is vulnerable,” says Joshua Busby, an assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Also necessary is “which parts of Ethiopia are vulnerable and why.”
Kudos to The New Security Beat for the interview with Busby. Instead of focusing so much attention on climate politics (which I plead guilty to), we journalists should be paying greater heed to these kinds of efforts that are just getting underway.
Josh has had some very good pieces looking at US climate and energy vulnerabilities as well, ones published by CFR and Brookings. Before climate and security links were every day topics, he published along with Nigel Purvis a piece in the Environmental Change and Security Program Report on what the UN should do on the topic.