CEENRG Thursday seminars: 'Climate politics in the shadow of war'

Speaker: Professor Jan Selby (Professor of International Politics and Climate Change, University of Leeds)

The Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy, and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG) is hosting a seminar series throughout the 2025-26 academic year.

How does war matter for climate change and global climate action? This presentation sets out a framework for research and thinking on it, and offers a series of arguments about the salience of war for climate politics, today and in the decades to come. I advance four main arguments: that historically, climate actors have mostly been reluctant to enter into discussions of war, for a variety of partly understandable and part questionable reasons; that war is nonetheless having huge, reverberating, direct and indirect impacts on climate change and climate action; that these impacts range from the deeply destructive, to the positive and transformative; and, given all this, that serious climate action demands an ethico-political posture which, perhaps paradoxically, is simultaneously anti-war and anti-militarist, and cognisant of the necessarily war-like character of the battle against fossil fuels. These arguments draw on the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and on interviews with climate policymakers and campaigners conducted in late 2025 and early 2026.

Seminars take place as hybrid meetings (in person seminars in the DAB - David Attenborough Building + online in Zoom) every Thursday (please check precise time as may vary) during the term. Please register online to receive the Zoom link on the day of the seminar. Everyone is welcome!