Richard A. Matthew

Sex, Drugs, and Heavy Metal: Transnational Threats and National Vulnerabilities

Technological innovations over the past fifty years have had a profound and varied impact on the security of people worldwide. As this impact increases, weaknesses in conventional security thinking and behavior become apparent. Traditional understandings of security remain relevant in the post Cold War era, and policy-makers must continue to monitor and respond to threats posed by regional powers and rogue states.ii But today we must broaden our perspective to encompass neglected areas in which new threats are intensifying, vulnerabilities are real, and forward-looking policies are required.Many contemporary threats -- such as infectious disease, terrorism, and drug trafficking -- are transnational: they cross state borders but generally cannot be linked directly to the foreign policies or behavior of other states. Rather than being created and controlled by national governments, these threats are situated in a complex, dynamic, and global web created by modern communication, transportation, and information technologies. This web offers a vast array of incentives, opportunities, and capabilities to individuals and groups whose activities, intentionally or not, can threaten the core values of national security: territorial integrity and political independence; preservation of the well being, freedom, and property of citizens; and national culture.Transnational threats are difficult to neutralize. A terrorist may be trained in Libya, receive funds from a religious sect in the United States via a Caribbean bank, purchase weapons from a Russian crime organization, travel on a Canadian passport, and attack British tourists in Germany. Sever one of the links in this chain and he or she will quickly find a replacement. Even if governments in all the relevant countries can be persuaded to intervene, they may not be able to control the fluid criminal elements and black markets at work in their own jurisdictions. The transnational character of these actors and phenomena make them relatively impervious to traditional state-centric means of enforcement. Only by a concerted effort, involving the support of non-state actors from weapons manufacturers to commercial banks, can one hope to disrupt the transnational web of incentives, opportunities, and capabilities enough to discourage terrorism. A similar logic holds for many other transnational problems.In the following pages we discuss the increasing vulnerability of states to transnational threats and the sort of response strategies that might be effective. As numerous historians have made clear, how societies fare is closely linked to their ability to adapt to the diffusion of technology, the spread of disease, and environmental change. The failure to recognize and respond to the negative aspect of these changes in the past might explain why much of humankind lives in despair today. If, as we believe, the rate and magnitude of these transnational forces have grown, our understanding of them has improved, and the stakes are higher than ever, then much may depend on how well we respond to them today.

Cumulative hazard: The case of nuisance flooding

The cumulative cost of frequent events (e.g., nuisance floods) over time may exceed the costs of the extreme but infrequent events for which societies typically prepare. Here we analyze the likelihood of exceedances above mean higher high water and the corresponding property value exposure for minor, major, and extreme coastal floods. Our results suggest that, in response to sea level rise, nuisance flooding (NF) could generate property value exposure comparable to, or larger than, extreme events. Determining whether (and when) low cost, nuisance incidents aggregate into high cost impacts and deciding when to invest in preventive measures are among the most difficult decisions for policymakers. It would be unfortunate if efforts to protect societies from extreme events (e.g., 0.01 annual probability) left them exposed to a cumulative hazard with enormous costs. We propose a Cumulative Hazard Index (CHI) as a tool for framing the future cumulative impact of low cost incidents relative to infrequent extreme events. CHI suggests that in New York, NY, Washington, DC, Miami, FL, San Francisco, CA, and Seattle, WA, a careful consideration of socioeconomic impacts of NF for prioritization is crucial for sustainable coastal flood risk management.

Increased nuisance flooding along the coasts of the United States due to sea level rise: Past and future

Author(s): Moftakhari, HR; AghaKouchak, A; Sanders, BF; Feldman, DL; Sweet, W; Matthew, RA; Luke, A | Abstract:

Compounding effects of sea level rise and fluvial flooding

Significance Population and assets in coastal regions are threatened by both oceanic and fluvial flooding hazards. Common flood hazard assessment practices typically focus on one flood driver at a time and ignore potential compounding impacts. Here we outline a unique bivariate flood hazard assessment framework that accounts for the interactions between a primary oceanic flooding hazard, coastal water level, and fluvial flooding hazards. Using the notion of “failure probability,” we also assess coastal flood hazard under different future sea level rise scenarios. The results show that, in a warming climate, future sea level rise not only increases the failure probability, but also exacerbates the compounding effects of flood drivers. Sea level rise (SLR), a well-documented and urgent aspect of anthropogenic global warming, threatens population and assets located in low-lying coastal regions all around the world. Common flood hazard assessment practices typically account for one driver at a time (e.g., either fluvial flooding only or ocean flooding only), whereas coastal cities vulnerable to SLR are at risk for flooding from multiple drivers (e.g., extreme coastal high tide, storm surge, and river flow). Here, we propose a bivariate flood hazard assessment approach that accounts for compound flooding from river flow and coastal water level, and we show that a univariate approach may not appropriately characterize the flood hazard if there are compounding effects. Using copulas and bivariate dependence analysis, we also quantify the increases in failure probabilities for 2030 and 2050 caused by SLR under representative concentration pathways 4.5 and 8.5. Additionally, the increase in failure probability is shown to be strongly affected by compounding effects. The proposed failure probability method offers an innovative tool for assessing compounding flood hazards in a warming climate.

The Humanity of Global Environmental Ethics

Over the past decade, scholars have begun to develop the discipline of global environmental ethics. In doing so, they have encountered two obstacles. First, much environmentalism cloaks itself in the discourse of prudence and security, and thus, ethical concerns are difficult to identify. Second, when scholars do recognize ethical issues, they explain them in terms of how people treat the nonhuman world and advance a biocentric or ecocentric moral sensibility. This is a problem to the degree that it neglects countless instances of environmental injustice that involve the way humans treat each other, using nature as a medium. This article illuminates the nonprudential dimensions of global environmental affairs and explains how a focus on the way humans mistreat each other can serve as a central ethical focus for understanding and addressing environmental injustice. Overall, it aims to provide a vocabulary for advancing an anthropocentric sensibility toward global environmental ethical concern.

Integrating climate change into peacebuilding

Peacebuilding countries are concentrated in areas of heightened vulnerability to climate change impacts, and almost certainly lack the capacity to manage these impacts. In spite of this overlap, climate change adaptation and mitigation projects are typically excluded from peacebuilding activities. This is particularly alarming given that many analysts believe climate change will trigger, amplify or perpetuate humanitarian crises, population displacement, political extremism and violent conflict in the regions in which most peacebuilding operations take place. This paper investigates opportunities for integrating climate change into peacebuilding. It identifies three obstacles to this integration—the lack of climate change tools and policies that can be easily introduced into typical peacebuilding programming; the skepticism and complacency of the donor community; and tensions between the objectives and timeframes of peacebuilding and those of climate change response. The paper then examines opportunities to integrate climate change into four principal programmatic areas of peacebuilding—socio-economic recovery, politics and governance, security and rule of law, and human rights—and concludes that more attention needs to be given to these opportunities in order to build resilience and reduce the likelihood of more daunting and costly challenges in the future.

Public Perceptions of Traumatic Events and Policy Preferences During the George W. Bush Administration: A Portrait of America in Turbulent Times

The American policy landscape during the George W. Bush administration was shaped by a series of traumatic events that confronted the nation and people of the United States. These included the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the threat of a flu pandemic in 2005 and 2006, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and the financial collapse of 2008. The results of the 2008 presidential election appear to be a rejection of the Bush administrations major policy responses to these events, but the variation in type and level of public support among different groups suggests a much more varied and dynamic portrait of America in turbulent times. Using a multiyear panel survey, an interdisciplinary team of political scientists and psychologists analyzed the behavior and political responses to the events by the American public. The findings suggest that even seven years after the events of 11 September 2001, people with higher levels of post-traumatic stress symptomatology related to 9/11 have significantly different interpretations of the threat of terrorism and the appropriate policy responses to it than do others. Perceptions of threat, the political salience of terrorism and other traumatic events, the level of support for political leaders and assessments of the governments actions vary over time and across different groups within society based on the psychological, political and social, and personal characteristics of the respondent. These results help to open the black box of aggregate public opinion by providing a detailed portrait of how psychological, social, political, and personal factors affected perceptions and political behavior during the George W. Bush administration.

Projecting nuisance flooding in a warming climate using generalized linear models and Gaussian processes

Nuisance flooding corresponds to minor and frequent flood events that have significant socio-economic and public health impacts on coastal communities. Yearly-averaged local mean sea level can be used as proxy to statistically predict the impacts of sea level rise (SLR) on the frequency of nuisance floods (NF). In this study, we use Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and Gaussian Process (GP) models combined to (i) estimate the frequency of NF associated with the change in mean sea level, and (ii) quantify the associated uncertainties via a novel and statistically robust approach. We calibrate our models to the water level data from eighteen tide gauges along the coasts of United States, and after validation, we estimate the frequency of NF associated with the SLR projections in year 2030 (under RCPs 2.6 and 8.5), along with their 90% bands, at each gauge. The historical NF-SLR data is very noisy, and shows large changes in variability (heteroscedasticity) with SLR. Prior models in the literature do not properly account for the observed heteroscedasticity, and thus their projected uncertainties are highly suspect. Among the models used in this study the Negative Binomial Distribution GLM with GP best characterizes the uncertainties associated with NF estimates; on validation data ≈ 93% of the points fall within the 90% credible limit, showing our approach to be a robust model for uncertainty quantification. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Kony 2012 and the Mediatization of Child Soldiers

Although art has been engaging and inspiring audiences throughout history, new information and communication technologies have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for media to serve as an agent for social change. Social justice campaigns are utilizing a broad array of new media strategies to engage the public, including online distribution, podcasts, and social networking sites. Many are combining these new technologies with traditional movement strategies such as rallies, protests, and lobbying efforts, creating a new form of civic engagement about which little is known. The new forms of media that are emerging can involve the public as both consumer and producer and have the ability to engage individuals, communities, and societies at speeds and on scales that were previously impossible.

Cities Under Siege: Urban Planning and the Threat of Infectious Disease

Abstract Many analysts argue that the potential for a natural, accidental, or nefarious infectious disease event to have a dramatic impact on urban areas in the United States and abroad is growing. After reviewing the justification for this position, this article considers what cities should do to prepare for a major disease event. Recognizing that prevention and preparation receive insufficient attention, we recommend that planners seek out and work with both public and private sector groups with roles in disaster planning; design land and transportation planning information systems to aid and support decision makers during crises; encourage greater self-sufficiency in food production and consumption; assist in the design of humane, realistic evacuation strategies and routes; and consider the effects of their day-to-day recommendations on disease risk and response.