The Planetary Security Initiative and the Clingendael Institute are proud to announce a new partnership with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) (initiated in January 2021), based in New Delhi, India. Established in 1996, the IPCS’ is one of India’s oldest independent think-tanks that has produced pioneering research on South Asian security issues. The Clingendael Institute is a top-5 ranked international relations think tank in Western Europe, that through the Planetary Security Initiative, acts as a central knowledge hub in the field of climate security.
Aim
This partnership is motivated by an interest in aligning our institutional areas of expertise to:
- Better understand the risks posed by climate change to security
- Support security planning and policy decision-making on the impacts of climate change
- Revisit how we conceptualise ‘security’.
Our project is a research and dialogue-heavy effort to identify trends and challenges in the climate-security landscape in Southern Asia. Over the past seven months, it has brought together the expertise of regional security practitioners, diplomats, scholars, climate policy specialists, and scientists, in different formats. This is a fairly new area of research for the traditional security and foreign policy think-tank community in South Asia, and we hope to contribute meaningful interventions through a sustained, and for now, year-long study.
Activities
- August: a forthcoming research paper on security and climate risks in the Bay of Bengal. It builds on six months of research on juxtaposing regional security and conflict datasets against climate vulnerabilities. Further, the Planetary Security Initiative team of the Clingendael Institute will publish a policy brief discussing the potential of EU-India cooperation in climate security. The issue of climate-related risks, involving energy transition and climate change impacts, presents a potential avenue for stepping up EU-India cooperation.
- May: closed-door, by-invite-only workshop on Climate-Security in the Bay of Bengal. The discussion centred on three questions: (1) How do different institutions and countries in the Bay of the Bengal conceptualise the relationship between climate change and security? (2) Is this a useful frame of analysis for the region? (3) Can we develop a security vocabulary that helps us better articulate these challenges?
- April: we spoke to Dr Dhanasree Jayaram (Assistant Professor, Manipal Academy of Higher Education) on her new book, Climate Diplomacy & Emerging Economies, on an episode of Parallax, the IPCS vodcast. It is available to view here.
- August - December: a newly constituted task force will consider the security impacts of climate change from a pan-South Asian perspective. It will identify pathways to address existing and emerging regional climate-security fault-lines.
Going forward, IPCS will host three more webinars, both open and closed, involving actors from across the security and climate communities in the region. This is a vital step to not only incubate local and innovative solutions but also to foster cross-border dialogue in a region which has seen a high level of bilateral security tensions, especially between India and Pakistan.
Further activities will be incubated using these same parameters.
For the PSI's latest reporting on South Asia, click here. Read IPCS partnership announcement here.