Ed Carr appointed to National Academies panel addressing climate-related security issues

Professor Edward Carr, director of the International Development, Community, and Environment Department (IDCE), has been appointed to the Climate Security Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Roundtable, established at the direction of the U.S. Congress, brings together experts across different sectors to support the Climate Security Advisory Council, an existing partnership between the intelligence and federal science communities. The goal of these groups is to better understand and predict the effects of climate change on national security interests.

“Concern over the connections between climate change and security has been on the rise in policy circles since I was working on climate change at USAID in the Obama Administration,” Carr says. “This is an extraordinarily complex issue that is not easy to translate into productive policy and action. I’m looking forward to helping shape the conversation around an honest understanding of the knowledge base.”

The Climate Security Roundtable will explore climate-related topics impacting national security. Carr says he is the only member of the panel with ethnographic expertise and one of a few members with extensive expertise and experience in qualitative research.

Because National Academies roundtable members must be nominated by others in their fields — Carr’s was one of more than 350 nominations — appointment represents recognition as a national leader in a subject area. The Climate Security Roundtable includes experts from academia and the public and private sectors.

Earlier this year, Carr was a lead author of “Climate resilient development pathways,” the final chapter of “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” the Working Group II contribution to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In addition, Carr serves as the climate change adaptation adviser on the Global Environmental Facility’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel. He is one of only seven panelists making key decisions and providing guidance to the GEF portfolio, which exceeds $1 billion per year.

While serving as a science and technology policy fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Carr was the first climate change coordinator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, and later served as an adviser on the Climate Change Team in the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and the Environment. Carr also served as the lead author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the United Nations Environment Program’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook.