SAIS Perspectives Editorial Team
As shown by recent events, climate change is quickly becoming a real and immediate threat. We invite contributors to explore the principle of ‘Escalating Consequences’ through a range of interdisciplinary lenses, both critical and hopeful. Whether your passion is development or security, human rights or finance, we want to uplift your ideas about consequences of climate change. We want to hear about the ideological and the technical, the theory and the practice, and offer our readers deeper insight into the many nuances, contradictions, and possibilities of the consequences of climate change. Click here to submit for publication.
Escalating Consequences
As recent studies have shown, the consequences of climate change are real and immediate. 2024 has so far been the hottest year on record, with the world seeing temperatures well over 2° Fahrenheit warmer than the global average. High nighttime temperatures, urban heat islands, lack of air conditioning, and other factors have led to thousands of deaths throughout the summer due solely or in part to the lethal temperatures. According to the WHO, heat stress is the leading cause of weather related deaths, and the number of people exposed to extreme heat has increased exponentially in the 21st century.
This theme looks to address the looming disaster that is climate change. These can include questions and prompts such as:
- How can the developing world mitigate the effects of climate change that are currently happening?
- How do we grapple with domestic and international climate migration?
- The relationships between the developing and developed world, and how to avoid green colonialism.
- Climate solutions in response to escalating effects.
Potential futuristic technologies that can mitigate the effects of worsening natural disasters such as hurricanes.
- Intergovernmental organizations and their work to assist those most affected by recent disasters.
This theme gives the opportunity to speak about potential solutions or write about what governments’ actions or inactions in regards to alleviating the problem. Submissions can discuss potential technologies that they learn about in other concentrations (such as Security and Statecraft or Technology and Innovation) that could help to assist those most affected by current climate change effects or those that are imminent. This theme looks to move toward a viable future that needs to be implemented soon in order to preserve as many peoples’ livelihoods and lives as possible.