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UN High-Level Panel Releases Final Report on Global Threats, Challenges, and Change

Environmental Expert Available to Discuss UN Global Security Reform

Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change & Security Project, will be available to talk about the environmental aspects of the final report from the United Nations' High-Level Panel on Global Threats, Challenges, and Change. He can be reached at 202-691-4178; cell 301-802-8707; or dabelkog@si.edu.

In the final report from Secretary-General Kofi Annan's high-level panel, eminent world citizens like Brent Scowcroft, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and Nafis Sadik recommend measures to improve how the United Nations prevents and removes threats to peace, ranging from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, to "soft threats" like environmental degradation, poverty, and disease.

Dabelko worked with the United Nation Foundation's Global Security Initiative to inform the panel about the security threats posed by environmental problems. The Environmental Change & Security Project invited international experts on water, climate change, and natural resources to recommend ways the United Nations could prevent environment-related conflict and use the environment to build peace between nations.

Dabelko has written extensively on environment's roles as a cause of conflict and as a pathway to peace. For the past seven years, as director of the Environmental Change and Security Project, he has helped facilitate dialogue among policymakers, practitioners, and scholars grappling with the complex connections among environment, health, population, conflict, and security. His most recent work has focused on using environmental issues to engender cooperation, particularly in international river basins. He is co-editor, with Ken Conca, of Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Johannesburg (3rd ed., January 2004) and Environmental Peacemaking (2002).

Dabelko is a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Board of Experts member at the Center for Non-Traditional Security, University of California, Irvine, and an advisory board member of Screenscope's Journey to Planet Earth Initiative.

For more on the Environmental Change & Security Project's work with the High-Level Panel please click here.

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