In collaboration with the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance and AI Congressional Program Executive Director and former Agriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman, EEP is launching a new initiative on modernizing agriculture and ranching with a lens to sustainability and impacts on and from climate change.

Hosted in partnership with Aspen Italia in May 2016, the International Forum on Food Security Coordination explored how to deepen coordination between multilateral institutions and the private sector and better link existing food security initiatives. This initiative was built on the recommendations of the Food Security Strategy Group, which recommended that international coordination of food security efforts be enhanced. This includes improving systems for standardizing the development of public-private partnerships.

Food Security Strategy Group was a high-level, non-partisan, and international dialogue series hosted in 2012-2015. It was comprised of prominent and influential leaders in business, government, non-profit organizations and academia brought together to address the urgent need for cross-sector alignment on a long-term vision for food security planning. The group focused on cross-sector solutions between four interlinked areas: population, health and poverty; science, technology and innovation; markets, trade and investment; and environmental sustainability. Read more and explore the group’s final report.

The Dialogue on U.S. Food Insecurity & Healthcare Costs, hosted in partnership with Aspen’s Health, Medicine & Society Program, was a series of meetings in 2014-2015 that explored the fiscal and policy relationships, trends and tradeoffs between food insecurity and healthcare costs. The final report explores current understandings of the relationship among food insecurity, healthcare costs, poverty, relevant health outcomes, and public and private sector opportunities for addressing food insecurity.

During the past several years, our co-chairs have assembled a high-level group of about twenty-five experts from government, NGOs, academia, and the business community in the US and India to build on initiatives originally launched in the energy MOU signed between President Obama and Prime Minister Singh at the 2009 summit in Washington and to help define a constructive bilateral agenda on critical energy and climate concerns.

The co-chairs and participants of the Track II Dialogue uniformly agree that a constructive, civil-society dialogue focused on climate change and clean energy is needed to strengthen and enhance the strategic partnership between India and the U.S. The Dialogue is dedicated to positively impacting how the two countries interact bilaterally while also demonstrating genuine leadership multi-laterally on climate change.

The U.S.-China High-Level Dialogue on Energy and Climate Change is hosted by the Counselors Office of the State Council of China (COSC) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) in partnership with the Aspen Institute. The Dialogue strengthens U.S.-China collaboration on energy, climate change and sustainable development by convening 30 high-level Chinese and U.S. energy and climate experts for 1-2 days of private dialogue, alternating in China and the U.S. The Dialogue brings together technical and policy experts, opinion leaders, and other experts from think tanks, academia, private and non-profit sectors, and from government. The Dialogue emphasizes the importance of U.S.-China collaboration, and is designed to ensure strong follow-through for the new phase of climate action beyond the Paris Agreement. To date, the group has convened in Beijing for three dialogues, and most recently the US hosted the Chinese in San Francisco in July 2018.

Threats to national security can be understood through many pathways, including: public health, food, water, and energy security, migration, and economic and political stability. As seen with food shocks and shortages in the Middle East, droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, and sea-level rise in Southeast Asia, climate change can lead to instability and security threats across a region and around the world. Yet, despite the escalating risks posed by climate change impacts, the body of scholarship on the topic is remarkably thin and little infrastructure exists to encourage or support further research. The initiative aims to explore and define the nexus of national and international climate and security issues, build nonpartisan relationships and cooperative policy approaches, identify critical areas for further research, and broaden the national and international community of engaged stakeholders.