Completed and Ongoing Projects

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This symposium was established in 2021 to consider opportunities for Chinese-American cooperation to address issues of climate and environmental security in a time of geopolitical competition. It is co-hosted by Climate and Environmental Security, LLC and the Songyun Forum, Shanghai Institutes for International Strategic Studies (SIISS). Our agreement was recently renewed for the years 2025-7, and participation has been extended to other Indo-Pacific experts in climate change and national security, whose nations have a stake in U.S. -- China engagement in the face of an emergent, existential threat.

With renewed emphasis on climate security by the Biden administration, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command established a Climate Change Impacts Program under the management of the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management in Honolulu. Climate and Environmental Security, LLC provided expert assistance to the center, developing a draft mission statement, work plan, and job descriptions for staffing, while contributing science-based content for briefings and training documents.

In 2021, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Northwest Institute for Eco-environment and Resources (NIEER) awarded a research grant, to CES to assess “Mongolian Sand and Dust Storms’ Impacts on Asia-Pacific Environmental Security.” A final report was submitted in September 2022. An edited version was published in Security Nexus..

In 2025, the project was renewed in response to an invitation by the Mansfield Foundation to form a panel as part of the Mansfield Forum on Energy and Climate: Air Quality, to be held in Mito, Japan, in July 2025. The panel brought together the principal investigators from CES and NIEER with new colleagues from Mongolia and Japan to develop a policy paper for addressing the trans-Pacific human health threats posed by the complex phenomenon of “Yellow Dust.”

Dr. Scott Hauger, Principal and CEO, served as a guest professor in this two-week course sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the UN Environment Program and the International Desert Research Association, in Beijing and Naiman, Inner Mongolia. He lectured on "Desertification and the Environmental Security Domain,” and "Mongolian Sand and Dust Storms’ Impacts on Asia-Pacific Environmental Security,” and served as a resource in multidisciplinary discussions and in field visits to research and test sites in the Horqin Sandy Lands. Students were faculty members and graduate students from across Africa and central Asia.