Scarcity as a non-traditional security threat

by | Aug 26, 2009


I spent yesterday morning presenting on scarcity issues – water, food, energy, land and climate security – to staff from the UN Department of Political Affairs, as part of a three day session on non-traditional security threats organised by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy

Here’s a copy of my presentation on the kinds of institutional change we need in order to manage scarcity, which focuses particularly on reducing the vulnerability of poor people and fragile states.  This draws heavily on a new report on Multilateralism and Scarcity that I’ll be publishing through the Brookings Institution later in the year.

Also presenting were Geoff Dabelko from the Woodrow Wilson Center (if you don’t subscribe to The New Security Beat, the Center’s superb blog on scarcity-security links, then you should); and Mike Hutton from the US Department of Energy’s Office for Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (as previously documented here, one of a handful of hotspots of radical forward thinking in the US government – you can get involved, too).

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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