The Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program explores how climate change and the responses to it are changing international politics, global governance, and world security. Our work covers topics from the geopolitical implications of decarbonization and environmental breakdown to the challenge of building out clean energy supply chains, alternative protein options, and other challenges of a warming planet.
Clean energy and associated products are increasingly essential for the security and prosperity of the United States. But if the United States is to decarbonize its own economy and do its part to cut global emissions to net zero, it will have to effect change beyond its borders.
Bentley Allan
Nonresident Scholar, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Katie Auth
Nonresident Scholar, Africa Program
Dan Baer
Senior Vice President for Policy Research, Director, Europe Program
Susan Crawford
Senior Fellow, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar
President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Kelly S. Gallagher
Nonresident Scholar, Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics Program
Liliana Gamboa
Nonresident Scholar, Carnegie California; Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Noah Gordon
Acting Co-Director, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program, Fellow, Europe Program
Sarah Labowitz
Nonresident Scholar, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Olivia Lazard
Fellow, Carnegie Europe
Jessica Tuchman Mathews
Distinguished Fellow
Milo McBride
Fellow, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Satyendra Prasad
Nonresident Senior Fellow, South Asia Program, Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics Program
Brett Rosenberg
Nonresident Scholar, American Statecraft Program
Matias Spektor
Nonresident Scholar, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program
Anirudh Suri
Nonresident Scholar, Technology and Society Program
Katie Tobin
Nonresident Scholar, American Statecraft Program
Zainab Usman
Senior Fellow and Director, Africa Program
Richard Youngs
Senior Fellow, Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program
And how technology could help mitigate the issue—if global power dynamics don’t interfere.
An article on the federal authorization of emergency funding for housing recovery
Many Floridians, of all possible political persuasions, are going to face financial ruin and displacement over the next few decades, as storms increase in intensity and chronic flooding arrives. These risks need to be reduced to avoid stupendous human and financial burdens ahead.
The rising pace and cost of disasters is cause for alarm, both because of the likelihood of major disruption in so many people’s lives, and because of the potential for systemic failures in the housing and insurance markets that could lead to wider, global economic shocks.
Politics is pushing the United States and Europe to prefer domestically produced clean energy technologies. But such preferences risk slowing that transition—unless the governments take supplementary measures.
Climate change litigation is experiencing an unprecedented moment. More and more states are turning to international tribunals to seek guidance on a key question: what are their obligations under international law to address the climate crisis?
Climate change presents states with new obligations. Chile and Colombia are asking what those are.
If you were to unwrap the intersecting problems known as “the polycrisis,” you’d find climate change at the middle. Destructive floods, unaffordable energy, unsustainable debt burdens, and economic conflict between superpowers — the overheating of the planet plays a role in all of them.
Roughly half of the world lives in countries holding elections in 2024. Carnegie asked a global group scholars to reflect on the role of migration in electoral campaigns.
Bipartisan Consensus Is Key—but Depends on U.S. Control of Supply Chains.
