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Environment Still Key to Global Security, Argues ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko

SEPTEMBER 2008—Full-Text Article in Environment Now Available Online

Twenty years after the release of the Brundtland report Our Common Future, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko says that global security still depends on the health of our environment. In an article in Environment, he reviews the successes and failures of efforts over the last two decades to integrate environmental concerns into national and international security agendas. "We must draw lessons from environmental security's history if we are to address the multiple threats—and opportunities—posed by environment-security links today," says Dabelko.

Dabelko's article, "An Uncommon Peace: Environment, Development, and the Global Security Agenda," is part of a year-long series in Environment commemorating the 20th anniversary of Our Common Future—also known as the Brundtland report, after the chair of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, Gro Harlem Brundtland. A defining document in the history of international environmental cooperation, the Brundtland report urged leaders and policymakers to expand the definition of security to include local, regional, and global environmental factors.

Environment is a peer-reviewed magazine that analyzes the problems, places, and people where environment and development come together, illuminating concerns from the local to the global.

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