Climate and environment

Compound Risks and Sustainable Security

In the Anthropocene, it is vital for those in power to understand the interplay between drivers of insecurity and act accordingly. But no state is currently equipped to do this. Read more

Running Out of Time? Future Prospects for Climate Stability

The recent Conservative UK election victory and the lack of progress in the recent Madrid climate summit have cast doubt over future efforts to reduce global carbon emissions. This briefing assesses the prospects of whether a radical rethink amongst policymakers to mitigating climate breakdown will occur in time. Read more

A Green Election – If Not Now, When?

Ahead of the upcoming UK General Election, this briefing examines the approaches taken by each of the main political parties to tackling climate change and asks whether election campaigns can really achieve long-term policy changes on key issues. Read more

Silent Spring to Strident Summer: The Politics of Global Heating

This briefing tracks the evolution of the ecological movement since the 1960s and of scientific and direct action to respond to the catastrophic threat of climate disruption. Read more

Tipping to Rebellion: Action and Reaction on Climate Science

Global climate change is happening faster than most models have predicted and the consequences are likely to be ruinous on a global scale. Yet, as the Extinction Rebellion protests demonstrated, there remains a gulf between an increasingly informed and activist public and established political, security and economic interests. Read more

Blueprints for a Green Challenge

Climate disruption is one of the greatest challenges facing the global community and given the lack of an appropriate response it is going to be essential for some states to take a much more forceful role. Read more

2018: Passing the Buck

2018 has been a quieter year than many expected from the high tensions at the end of 2017. Yet the underlying drivers of global conflict have continued to increase. Read more

ORG Explains #8: UK Food Security and Climate Change

This primer explains the current situation concerning the United Kingdom’s food supply and how this is likely to change in the medium and long term as a result of climate change. Read more

Climate Change, Populism and National Security

Climate disruption is the human security challenge of our age. With carbon emissions again rising and the world well off course delivering on the commitments it made in Paris three years ago, this briefing looks at this challenge as well as the rising influence of populist nationalism in key countries, including the US and BRIC states. Read more

A Tale of Two Puzzles: Accounting for Military and Climate Change Expenditures

This research paper by Oliver Scanlan, ORG's Climate Fellow, examines the discrepancies between the UK Government’s military expenditures and its direct outlays on climate change mitigation and adaptation, both at home and abroad. Read more

ORG Explains #3: UK Energy Security and Climate Change

This primer explains the UK’s current energy mix, with a focus on how import dependency might affect energy security in the context of rising geopolitical tensions and a changing climate. Read more

2017: More than a troubling year?

2017 has been a deeply troubling year for international security. Geopolitical tensions between established and aspiring nuclear powers returned with a vengeance, US, Russian, European and Middle Eastern powers doubled down on their roles in foreign wars, and the Trump administration attempted to restore climate change denial to the international mainstream. Read more

The case for integrating a Climate Security approach into the National Security Strategy

Although climate change is referenced repeatedly in the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Security Strategy (NSS) and Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), there is insufficient detail addressing the full range of security implications of a changing climate for stated Government strategic objectives. Read more

Jungle Justice: European Migration Policy Seen from the South

The causal link between food insecurity, climate change, conflict and migration is a contested one, not least because the driving forces of economic inequality and marginalisation are so strong both within and between states. Read more

So Much Hot Air: Climate Change After the US Election

Whether or not he believes his own campaign rhetoric, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency is bad news for efforts to enforce climate governance and restrain carbon emissions. Yet the global mood is one of determination in the face of US obstinacy, buoyed by technological advances in green energy generation and storage and by the increasingly apparent commercial opportunities presented by a transition away from fossil fuels. Read more

Climate Change: Prospects for Effective Future Action

This briefing updates an earlier ORG report on climate change and points to the significance of the recent acceleration in global warming in relation to the need for a radical transition to ultra-low carbon economies world-wide. It examines this in terms of the chances of such a change, not least in the context of the current US presidential election campaign. Read more

2015: A Perfect Storm?

The New Year has started with the appalling and traumatic atrocities in Paris and these acts, and their wider context, give an indication of what may be a dominant security issue of 2015 – the developing war in Iraq and Syria with its escalating Western involvement. Read more

Fighting Climate Change Denial: Climate Disruption in Perspective

Oxford Research Group’s work on ‘sustainable security’ is centred on four trends that are likely to influence international and intra-national conflict in the coming decades – climate change, socio-economic divisions, resource scarcities and militarisation. Read more

Food Security and Climate Change

Rising food prices point to a potential crisis later this year as poor communities across the world find themselves unable to afford basic foodstuffs. The crisis now unfolding has some similarities to the major problems that occurred in 2008 that led to food riots in many countries. It also has echoes of the much more severe World Food Crisis in 1973/74. This time, though, there is mounting evidence that climate change is playing a role. Read more

After Durban - the Big Climate Change Questions

The Durban climate change conference produced a higher level of agreement than many analysts predicted, but its response did not match the scale of the problem. Recent evidence indicates that climate change will be a transforming issue in the coming decades and will require responses that embrace radical changes in our understanding of security. Read more

Climate Change and Security

The consequences of climate change for human security are profound, but much of the last decade has been lost in avoiding those consequences. Read more

Secure Energy? Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming

This report asks two questions: how dangerous is nuclear power? And can it help reduce CO2 emissions? The short answer to the first questions is ‘very’: nuclear power is uniquely dangerous when compared to other energy sources. For the second question the answer is ‘not enough and not in time’. Read more