The human population explosion is far from over, and its dire effects will be with us for many decades yet. “As many people will be added in the next 50 years as were added in the past 40 years,” the U.N. writes, “and the increase will be concentrated in the world’s poorest countries, which are already straining to provide basic social services to their people.”
When a Russian icebreaker arrived at the North Pole a few weeks ago carrying a load of tourists, it found a mile-wide patch of ice-free water. It seemed like an astonishing development: indeed, reporter John Noble Wilford wrote in a front page story in the New York Times that “the last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago.” Here, it appeared, was bold evidence that global warming is finally upon us.
with Daniel Schwartz and Tom Deligiannis | The environment, population, and conflict thesis remains central to current environment and security debates. During the 1990s, an explosion of scholarship and policy attention was devoted to unraveling the linkages among the three variables.
Edward Barbier and Thomas Homer-Dixon | Endogenous growth models have revived the debate over the role of technological innovation in economic growth and development. The consensus view is that institutional and policy failures prevent poor countries from generating or using new technological ideas to reap greater economic opportunities. However, this view omits the important contribution of natural-resource degradation and depletion to institutional instability
Valerie Percival and Thomas Homer-Dixon | On April 6, 1994, President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane exploded in the skies above the Kigali region of Rwanda. Violence gripped the country. Between April and August of 1994, as many as 1 million people were killed and more than 2 million people became refugees.
Peter Gizewski and Thomas Homer-Dixon | This paper examines the contribution of environmental scarcity to violent conflict in Pakistan. It argues that scarcity is never the sole cause of Pakistan’s social conflict.
This paper shows that some commonly advocated methodological principles of modern political science are inappropriate for the study of complex ecological-political systems. It also provides conceptual tools for thinking about the causal roles of environmental and demographic factors, and it discusses various strategies for hypothesis and inference testing.
At a meeting in Stockholm this past August, Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank’s Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development, released a new report on global water issues.
Walking along Shanghai’s waterfront late on a misty June evening, it’s easy to be intoxicated by China.
As human population and material consumption increase in coming decades, scarcities of natural resources will increase in some regions. Will societies be able to adapt?
