On the Verge

Andrea Rezzonico interviews Johan Berganas, Senior Vice President of Oceans at WWF-US. They discuss the geopolitical concept of ‘fishwars’, and how it centers on a converging nexus of climate change, IUU fishing, ocean health, and more.

In this episode, Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director of the Converging Risks Lab (CRL) and Andrea Rezzonico, Deputy to the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and Deputy Director of CRL, co-host an interview with the Hon. Dan Poneman, who currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Council on Strategic Risks.  We discuss the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for nuclear energy and talk about how the U.S. could reinvigorate its leadership role on providing nuclear fuel and technology to countries interested in off-setting carbon emissions by generating electricity with nuclear power. In addition to his role on the CSR Board, Mr. Poneman is president and chief executive officer of Centrus Energy Corp. He has had a distinguished career with the U.S. government, serving from 2009 to 2014 as the Deputy Secretary of Energy and chief operating officer of the U.S. Department of Energy. His responsibilities spanned the range of U.S. energy policies and programs – hydrocarbons, renewables, nuclear, and efficiency – including cybersecurity, project management, national security, and international cooperation. Mr. Poneman has published widely on national security issues. His most recent book, Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change, was released by the MIT Press in May 2019. This interview with the Hon. Dan Poneman is part of a series of pioneering work by CSR’s Converging Risks Lab that began in 2017. Between 2017 and 2020, CRL took on its first project, the Climate-Nuclear-Security Project (CNSP), which brought together the experience and expertise housed within the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) and the Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons (The Nolan Center), as well as the broader climate security and nuclear security policy communities. The CNSP recognizes that climate and nuclear risks are growing more complex and interconnected, and are beginning to converge in new ways. Understanding and managing this risk landscape requires climate, nuclear and security experts to break down issue sector barriers and develop joint solutions. In 2022, CRL is thrilled to begin a new, related line of work which builds upon the previous project to help reinvigorate U.S. leadership on nuclear energy issues, with a view toward improving nuclear safety, security and nonproliferation.

In this episode, Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director of the Converging Risks Lab, interviews Dr. David Maher who has more than three decades of experience in secure computing and currently serves as Chief Technical Officer of Intertrust.  Before joining his current company in 1999, Maher was chief scientist for AT&T Secure Communications Systems, Head of the Secure Systems Research Department, and security architect for AT&T’s Internet services platform. Maher holds dozens of patents in secure computing; has published papers in the fields of mathematics and computer science; and has consulted with the National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Maher holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Lehigh University.  They discuss the intersection of data and national security, explore the challenges of data authentication, provenance, and disinformation, and examine technical solutions such as blockchain. This podcast builds upon work undertaken by the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) in collaboration with the European Leadership Network (ELN) to explore the impact of emerging technologies on nuclear decision-making and new approaches for mitigating risks. To read more about our work, please visit CSR’s website. 

In this episode, Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director of the Converging Risks Lab, moderates a discussion about environmental crime and wildlife trafficking and their connection to security. The discussants are Dr. Rod Schoonover, Head of the Council on Strategic Risks’s Ecological Security Program, and Dr. Tanya Wyatt, Professor of Criminology at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. This is part of a series of discussions about the concept of ecological security. Dr. Wyatt’s research focuses on green criminology with a specialty in wildlife crime and trafficking, non-human animal abuse and welfare, and their intersections with organized crime, corporate crime, and corruption. Professor Wyatt also researches crimes of the powerful, particularly industrial agriculture and wider issues of pollution. 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, as well as the recently-published report Societal and Security Implications of Ecosystem Service Declines, Part 1: Pollination and Seed Dispersal.