ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: “Firepower, Geopolitics and the Future: Rethinking Environmental Security”

21 February | 15:00 – 16:00 CET | 14:00 – 15:00 UTC
ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: “Firepower, Geopolitics and the Future: Rethinking Environmental Security”


As climate change accelerates and causes ever more calamities to human societies, scholars need to think much more carefully about how the world is changing and why. One key to this is the role of combustion in modern societies and the need to constrain its use in both civilian and military uses to make us all more secure in future. Discover more in the “ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: Basic Sciences For Sustainable Development” webinar featuring Simon Dalby from the Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Canada.

Lecture Abstract

The interconnected crises of energy, security and climate change require rethinking many aspects of modernity. The great power rivalries, accelerating climate related calamities and technological innovations reprise many of the themes first clearly articulated at the 1972 Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Half a century later the urgency of grappling with our predicament, of only having one earth, requires redoubled efforts to link across disciplines, and in particular across the divide between natural and social sciences. Innovative formulations such as the Anthropocene are obviously needed because perpetuating the modern social order based on firepower can no longer provide security. Instead strategies to facilitate adaptation and remove institutional blockages to rapid energy innovation are a key theme for policy makers, and likewise for researchers in numerous geosciences.

Watch the recording:


Speaker biography

Simon Dalby

Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies.

Simon Dalby was educated at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Victoria and holds a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. Prior to joining Wilfrid Laurier University he was Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University.

He has served as co-editor of Geography Compass and Geopolitics journals, as the sustainability theme lead for the Borders in Globalization research program, and from 2012 to 2018 he was CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He is coeditor of Reframing Climate Change (Routledge 2016) and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge 2019) and author of Anthropocene Geopolitics (University of Ottawa Press 2020), and Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar 2022). He has active research interests in the contemporary climate security discussion and the burgeoning debate about the Anthropocene and the implications of both for geopolitics and policy formulation.

About the ISC Distinguished Lecture Series: “Basic Sciences For Sustainable Development”

Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development represents a new way of thinking about how to better link basic science and education with issues such as climatic and environmental change, water and energy security, ocean preservation, disaster risks and other topics. It intertwines social, economic, and environmental targets in 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Basic sciences have an important contribution to make to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The United Nations General Assembly approved by consensus a resolution that promulgates 2022 as the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development. IYBSSD2022 encourages exchanges between scientists and all categories of stakeholders, whether from grassroots communities or political decisionmakers and international leaders, as well as associations, students and local authorities.

Nine ISC Members forming GeoUnions proposed to establish the programme “Distinguished Lecture Series on Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development” to promote the IYBSSD2022, and to highlight the importance of basic sciences for the ISC community.

Explore other lectures of this series

ISC Distinguished lecture series

Promoting discussion and debate around the importance of basic science and their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals


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