Short-term extreme weather events such as storms or floods as well as long-term transformations of climatic conditions change environments and human habitats in the long term. In unstable regions affected by armed conflicts, they can become so-called “threat multipliers” (e.g. through tightening of food security due to climatic changes), also in high-income countries they can tie up capacities and investments for adaptation and resilience building in the medium and long term and in exceptional cases even fundamentally endangering the very existence of states or sub-state regions, as some island states in the South Pacific are increasingly finding out. On the other hand, the geopolitical upheavals due to the war in the Ukraine also make it clear that, for example, a policy geared towards adaptation of the energy supply of highly complex industrial societies via renewable energies alone is associated with considerable security policy risks, which means that the creation of really sustainable, holistic strategies remains complicated. This insight applies to the international political level as well as to the regional and local challenges arising from climate change and security policy. The most populous federal state in Germany explicitly faces them, at the same time there is extraordinary (research) potential here to develop holistic and sustainable solutions.

The conclusion of the first day of the Bonn Future Labs 2022, which is being carried out in cooperation with the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy for International Politics, the IDOS and the Bonn Alliance for Sustainability Research, will be a public discussion event in English under the heading “Assessing Climate and Security Research in North Rhine-Westphalia”.

The event takes place as part of the presentation of the first results of the research project “Sicherheitsforschung.NRW”, which summarizes a mapping project of scientific work in the broad field of security in the federal state that is financed by the state government and is unique in Germany and Europe. Leading representatives of institutions from North Rhine-Westphalia researching pressing sustainability issues discuss and analyze the regional role of actors in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and at the UN location in Bonn in the field of climate and security research. The general public can participate in this high-level format digitally.

The Bonn Future Lab is a new multi-day format consisting of two core segments: First, an international conference day, which will focus on global megatrends, especially from a security but also from a development perspective (in 2022: “Climate Change and Security”). In a second step, this international conference day will be combined with a Strategic Foresight Workshop, in which the techniques and methods of strategic foresight will be conveyed to young multipliers (“decision-makers of the day after tomorrow”), who have previously gained an insight into the current scientific debates through the expert discussions with renowned national and international experts.