On The Verge – Interview with Chip Barber on Illegal Logging, Forestry Crime, and Forest Integrity (017)

In this episode, Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director of the Converging
Risks Lab, moderates a discussion about illegal logging, forestry
crime, forest integrity and their connection to security. The
discussants are Dr. Rod Schoonover, Head of the Council on
Strategic Risks’s Ecological Security Program, and Dr. Charles
Barber, Director of the Forest Legality Initiative and Senior
Biodiversity Advisor at the World Resources Institute (WRI) This is
the first in a series of discussions about the concept of
ecological security. Prior to WRI, Dr. Charles “Chip” Barber served
as Forest Chief in the Bureau of Oceans and International
Environmental and Scientific Affairs at the U.S. Department of
State, and as Environment Advisor at the U.S. Agency for
International Development. He received his PhD in Jurisprudence and
Social Policy from the University of California at Berkeley. Before
coming to CSR, Dr. Schoonover served a decade in the U.S.
intelligence community, first at the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research and later at the National Intelligence
Council, working on the national security and foreign policy
implications of environmental and ecological change. To fill an
urgent gap in understanding and addressing the security
implications of global ecological disruption, the Council on
Strategic Risks (CSR) has significantly expanded its Ecological
Security Program over the past months, with the help of a grant of
close to $1 million from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation. The
program, housed within CSR’s Converging Risks Lab, addresses all
elements of global ecological disruption, including biodiversity
loss and beyond, caused by drivers such as habitat change, direct
(and often illegal) exploitation of organisms, climate change,
pollution, and the spread of damaging invasive or otherwise
destructive organisms.  To read more about our work on
ecological security issues, please read CSR’s landmark ecological
security report The Security Threat That Binds Us and the
programmatic and policy responses recommended in that report.