The Office of the Secretary of Defense's Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment (SMA) division recently released a white volume on National Security Challenges: Insights from Social, Neurobiological, and Complexity Sciences. The volume includes a chapter by CCAPS researcher Cullen Hendrix on the use of a human security perspective to measure state fragility. Dr. Hendrix, assistant professor at the College of William and Mary, co-directs the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) with CCAPS researcher Idean Salehyan.

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(Kerri Battles, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs) Christian Peratsakis came to the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin in 2010 to take part in ground-breaking research into how climate change affects political stability in Africa. "This research has completely changed my experience and my focus in development," said Peratsakis, who was already an experienced researcher in the field of climate change and development before joining more than 80 other graduate students in the LBJ School research.

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(Lisa Friedman, E&E reporter)  The United States has flipped the switch on a $350 million power project to light up one of Africa's poorest countries.The aid to Malawi from the Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC), a congressionally funded development institution, was reinstated this month after a suspension sparked by concerns over human rights violations and violent government response to citizen protests.

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Version 2.0 of the CCAPS mapping tool is featured in Lauren Herzer's piece, Visualizing Complex Vulnerability in Africa: The CCAPS Climate-Conflict Mapping Tool, on the New Security Beat. The blog highlights CCAPS as a collaborative research program and describes the dynamic tool as a valuable resource for researchers to examine the intersection of environmental, social, and political factors in Africa. New Security Beat is a blog of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

CCAPS researchers Kerry Cook and Ned Vizy have designed and run mid-century climate projection simulations for Africa. The climate projections are generated using a regional climate model focused on Africa, allowing the researchers to optimize the model to be more accurate for the African continent than current global models and to produce projections at higher resolution. The future simulations focus on the mid-century to better align with policy planning horizons.

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The CCAPS program released the fully geo-coded Version 3.0 of the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) today, adding events through 2011 and geo-referencing the entire dataset to provide latitude and longitude coordinates for more than 7,900 conflict events. SCAD provides the first systematic tracking of a broader range of social and political unrest including strikes, riots, protests, communal conflict, and other social disturbances in Africa.

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The CCAPS program released a working paper by Dr. Ignatius A. Madu on the Spatial Vulnerability of Rural Households to Climate Change in Nigeria. Dr. Madu's paper was produced as part of the CCAPS program's Call for Papers on environmental security, which was open exclusively to scholars from and based in Africa.

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In the summer issue of ArcUser, Esri writer Karen Richardson explores how CCAPS is using GIS to better learn how climate change, conflict, and aid intersect. Richardson's article, Understanding How to Bolster the Security of Vulnerable Populations, provides an overview of CCAPS and how the collaborative research program's mapping tool allows users to visualize data while providing the most comprehensive view of climate change and security in Africa.

Joshua Busby notes in Lisa Friedman's article in the Scientific American that the Sahel will have an additional 76 to 100 heat wave days by mid-century. According to Busby, "We're going to start seeing physical changes outside the bounds of normal human experience in a region that has already experienced quite a lot of variance in weather. What that means on top of more critical instabilities are unknown, and I think it gives us some pause about how we extrapolate about the past patterns for the future."

The CCAPS program released a new research brief today based on field research assessing how local actors conceptualize climate change vulnerability and how well these realities are captured by the program’s vulnerability model. In “Ground Truthing” Vulnerability in Africa, LBJ School of Public Affairs graduate student Jared Berenter and CCAPS researcher Joshua Busby test, or ground truth, the validity of CCAPS’ remotely generated vulnerability assessments. The full report on this field research is also available on the CCAPS website.

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