Environmental change and security project. (Forum).

The Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, established by Congress in 1968 as a memorial to the nation's 28th president, fosters scholarship and intellectual exchange among scholars and policy practitioners. In 1994, the center launched the Environmental Change and Security Project (ECSP), which hosts meetings and publishes books and journals, all with the goal of providing a neutral forum for stakeholders to explore issues related to the environment, population, and security. The ECSP has established a website, located at http://ecsp.si.edu/, to further this goal.

In 1997, the ECSP formed the China Environment Forum. This group coordinates meetings and publications focusing on the environment with respect to U.S.-China relations. Forum meetings bring together participants from a broad spectrum of affiliations; the focus is on how to tackle the most important environmental and sustainable development issues confronted by China and ways to foster international governmental and nongovernmental organization cooperation on these issues.

The China Environment Forum link takes visitors to the annually published China Environment Series. Each issue of the series contains several feature articles and a "Commentary/Notes From the Field" section that provides an outlet for work by new China studies scholars and researchers. Topics covered have included water pollution, public transportation, energy use, and changes faced by Chinese environmental groups and news media. Each issue also provides summaries of China Environment Forum meetings, an in-depth inventory of governmental and nongovernmental environmental work being conducted in China, and a bibliographic guide to pertinent literature.

The China Environment Forum page also has a link to an electronic version of Climate Action in the United States and China, a recent report from the Woodrow Wilson Center and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This document analyzes how the titular countries have reduced carbon emissions by millions of tons each year and how, despite these measures, such emissions are still rising. The report is available in both Chinese and English.

But the ECSP doesn't focus just on China. Back on the main ECSP page, clicking on the Meetings link takes visitors to a list of the most recent meetings the project has sponsored. These include discussions on finding the connection between population growth and global water problems. Also included are speeches by experts and policy makers on such topics as how enlarging the European Union could impact environmental quality and policies in Central and Eastern Europe, and setting an agenda for the World Summit in Sustainable Development. Selecting any event title directs visitors to background information on the meeting topic and an overview of the meeting's proceedings. The Current Events page also features a compilation of links related to individual meetings, such as personal webpages of the speakers and those of associated organizations.

From the homepage, visitors can also register to join the ECSP-FORUM list server, an archived and searchable e-mail group that allows scholars and policy makers to share their latest research results, discuss current policy trends, and debate how to best address the complex issues surrounding the conjunction of the environment, population, and security.