The pace of environmental, socio-economic and technological change around the world is creating a new set of geopolitical dynamics that will directly influence our ability to achieve equitable transitions towards sustainability. It is essential to understand these new dynamics – and how they both shape the space for sustainable transitions, and can be supported or influenced by insights from the environment and development field.
Our interest in the relationship between geopolitics and sustainable development is driven by a growing realization that both the security and environment establishments have a limited understanding of how environmental constraints, changing ecosystems and growing pressures on limited resources have begun to change geopolitical patterns and strategies. Likewise, the influence of changing power structures on the governance of ecosystems – including the climate – and scarce resources is poorly understood, to the detriment of science-policy dialogues and research.
Given SEI’s experience in areas such as scenario development, energy systems, climate change and resource governance, combined with a deepening understanding (and growing research capacity) of political economy contexts at global, regional and local scales and their interlinkages, we are very well-placed to bring together the necessary perspectives and partners to explore these issues and communicate our insights to policy audiences.
The aim is to improve our common understanding of the ways in which new geopolitical dynamics can be incorporated into our thinking about sustainable development pathways, making them more effective and robust, and to provide the scientific underpinnings for development of geopolitical strategies that reflect sustainability considerations.
Design and development by Soapbox.