Erika Weinthal

Erika Weinthal
Duke University | DU

PhD

About

102
Publications
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3,541
Citations

Publications

Publications (102)
Article
The adverse effects of man-made climate change and protracted conflict intensify rural-to-urban migration in many developing countries. This article examines the impacts of climate and conflict migration on urban environments and on migrants themselves. To trace the distinctive pathways by which climate change and conflict drive migration as well a...
Article
Libya’s fossil fuel wealth has dominated its political economy and state institutions since the 1960s and paid for large-scale, centralized water and energy infrastructures. Since the 2011 revolution, these infrastructures have been at the center of Libya’s protracted conflict. Unlike other protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa i...
Article
Our complex, globalized world has created an environment that presents new challenges to countries striving for peace and security. While inter-state wars have become less frequent in the last 50 years, civil wars have become more common and intractable. Recognizing this changing reality, the post-Cold War academic and political discourse emphasize...
Article
Installation of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) solar is expected to change the electricity landscape in the U.S. through reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating global warming, as well as eliminating environmental impacts from fossil fuels utilization. Given the high-water intensity of fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydropower, the transition to so...
Chapter
The natural environment continues to be a casualty of war and a weapon in war. Yet the effects of war on civilian populations and environments remain understudied in compara tive environmental politics (CEP). This chapter surveys the different ways that the envi ronment and natural resources are linked to armed conflict and to preparations for war...
Research
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has exposed the brutal strategy of seeking to bombard cities into submission, in part through targeting civilian infrastructures. Since the invasion began on February 24, Russian forces have used explosive weapons with wide-area effects in large, populated areas. Russian air strikes have cut off heat, water, and ener...
Article
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From academics to practitioners, many voices have amplified an increasingly popular narrative posing a climate–conflict–migration nexus. This essay reviews the literature on climate security, exploring the human security impacts of climate change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with particular attention to the scholarly literature on vul...
Book
Energy and water have been fundamental to powering the global economy and building modern society. This cross-disciplinary book provides an integrated assessment of the different scientific and policy tools around the energy-water nexus. It focuses on how water use, and wastewater and waste solids produced from fossil fuel energy production affect...
Article
Introduction to the concepts of energy-water nexus, water withdrawal, water consumption, and impaired water
Article
An overview of the evolution of different fossil fuel sources, including coal, conventional and unconventional (tight) oil, oil sand, conventional natural gas, unconventional shale gas, and coalbed methane. The chapter provides the data on energy flows and evaluates the global energy consumption for understanding the magnitude of these developments...
Article
This chapter explores the coal–water nexus with evaluation of the chemical hazards in coals and the magnitude of their emission with coal combustion, the quantity of water use for coal mining and processing and implications for water quality, with an emphasis of the formation of coal mine effluents such as acid mine drainage and the large water-imp...
Article
Energy and water have been fundamental to powering the global economy and building modern society. This cross-disciplinary book provides an integrated assessment of the different scientific and policy tools around the energy-water nexus. It focuses on how water use, and wastewater and waste solids produced from fossil fuel energy production affect...
Article
Energy and water have been fundamental to powering the global economy and building modern society. This cross-disciplinary book provides an integrated assessment of the different scientific and policy tools around the energy-water nexus. It focuses on how water use, and wastewater and waste solids produced from fossil fuel energy production affect...
Article
The chapter explores the water–energy nexus associated with conventional and unconventional (tight) oil exploration, provides water-intensity values associated with conventional oil drilling and enhanced oil recovery, and hydraulic fracturing. The chapter explores the source, volume, geochemistry, and water quality issues of conventional and unconv...
Article
This chapter presents the anthropogenic global water cycle: the overuse of natural water resources has led to a water deficit that has been further exacerbated by global warming and increasing drought intensity induced by fossil fuel use, combined with large water use for fossil fuels, increased energy generation for water transfer and treatment, a...
Article
The chapter evaluates the origin of natural gas, the principles of hydraulic fracturing, and provides the magnitude of water use for hydraulic fracturing, conventional gas drilling, and electricity generation. The chapter presents the changes of the water footprint of hydraulic fracturing and water intensity over time in the USA and China. The chap...
Chapter
Full-text available
Environmental peacebuilding is an emerging and rapidly evolving field, and there is value in articulating a broad, integrated definition of the field to support its ongoing development and evolution.
Article
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The effects of conflict on public health and ecosystem well-being are understudied and rarely figure in public debates about war-making. Protracted conflicts are particularly damaging to people and environments in ways that are inadequately documented. In recent wars in the Middle East and North Africa, parties to the conflicts have induced hunger...
Article
Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice that addresses a range of environmental issues facing communities, non-state actors, and nation-states. It draws not only on the disciplinary study of politics and policy, but, as this volume shows, is enriched by interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, ge...
Article
The natural environment continues to be a casualty of war and a weapon in war. Yet the effects of war on civilian populations and environments remain understudied in comparative environmental politics (CEP). This chapter surveys the different ways that the environment and natural resources are linked to armed conflict and to preparations for war ac...
Book
Full-text available
The complexities and scope of environmental issues have not only outpaced the capacities and responsiveness of traditional political actors but also generated new innovations, constituencies, and approaches to governing environmental problems. In response, comparative environmental politics (CEP) has emerged as a vibrant and growing field of schola...
Article
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Environmental peacebuilding is a rapidly growing field of research and practice at the intersection of environment, conflict, peace and security. Focusing on these linkages is crucial in a time when the environment is a core issue of international politics and the number of armed conflicts remains high. This article introduces a special issue with...
Article
Full-text available
Many modern conflicts, from Iraq to Yemen, have emerged as brutal wars in which state and non-state actors directly and indirectly target a wide array of civilian infrastructures, including water, energy and food systems. Similar to many twentieth-century wars, a common feature of the wars in the Middle East and North Africa in the twenty-first cen...
Article
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Reuse of oilfield‐produced water (OPW) for crop irrigation has the potential to make a critical difference in the water budgets of highly productive but drought‐stressed agricultural watersheds. This is the first peer‐reviewed study to evaluate how trace metals in OPW used to irrigate California crops may affect human health. We modeled and quantif...
Article
This paper examines copy-and-paste regulating in hydraulic fracturing (HF) fluid disclosure regulation across US states. Using text analysis, cluster analysis and document coding, we compare HF regulations of twenty-nine states and two “model bills” drafted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Environmental Defen...
Article
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The consecutive occurrence of drought and reduction in natural water availability over the past several decades requires searching for alternative water sources for the agriculture sector in California. One alternative source to supplement natural waters is oilfield produced water (OPW) generated from oilfields adjacent to agricultural areas. For o...
Article
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Water and energy are closely linked in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) through coupled networks of infrastructure. This review explores the water‐energy nexus of infrastructure to explicate different patterns of development and de‐development in the MENA. First, the review highlights why states, donors, and firms have long built large‐scale...
Article
In the aftermath of conflict, managing water is critical, as access to water and sanitation is necessary for meeting basic human needs, restoring livelihoods, ensuring food security, rebuilding the economy and promoting reconciliation. This article argues that governance is critical for meeting the challenges in the water sector in post‐conflict se...
Article
In this article, we evaluate competing environmental knowledge claims in U.S. hydraulic fracturing (HF) regulation. We conduct a case study of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) rule-making process over the period from 2012 to 2015, which was the first attempt to update federal oil and gas regulations in thirty years. Our study addresses a gap i...
Article
Full-text available
State and non-state actors across many protracted conflicts and prolonged occupations in the Middle East and North Africa have systematically targeted civilian infrastructures. We use the cases of the West Bank and Gaza, characterized by more than five decades of occupation and periods of intermittent violent conflict, to analyse how the targeting...
Book
Full-text available
This textbook accompanies the massive open online course (MOOC) on Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace. Conflicts over natural resources and the environment pose some of the greatest challenges in 21st century geopolitics, presenting serious threats to human security at the local, national, and international levels. Nonetheless, natural res...
Article
Research on socially responsible investing (SRI) and investor-led governance, especially in the climate sector, suggests that shareholders adopt social movement tactics to influence corporate governance, including building networks, engaging directly with corporations and lobbying regulators. Further, research on corporate transparency and financia...
Article
Scholars have identified many determinants of regulatory outcomes in unconventional oil and gas development, but few have focused on industry structure. We examine the effects of company size and ownership on revenue sharing outcomes in North Dakota (ND), drawing on political economy bargaining models. We examine firm-level characteristics of ND’s...
Article
Resource-constrained households are often forced to make complex tradeoffs across multiple environmental health risks. In the Ethiopian Rift Valley, households face tradeoffs between relatively plentiful but fluoride-contaminated groundwater sources and seasonally-variable surface water sources having greater bacteriological risks. We assess factor...
Article
Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to have severe impacts on national economies and individual livelihoods, particularly for the world’s poorest populations. Measures to address climate change include both mitigation to reduce emissions and adaptation to climate change impacts. Prior to the Paris Conference of Parties 21 in 2015, few low-inc...
Article
Full-text available
In India, human-wildlife conflict (HWC) around protected areas (PAs) has magnified social conflict over conservation and development priorities. India introduced financial compensation for HWC as a policy solution to simultaneously promote human security while protecting biodiversity. We evaluate compensation as a mitigation policy for HWC around f...
Article
In India, human-wildlife conflict (HWC) around protected areas (PAs) has magnified social conflict over conservation and development priorities. India introduced financial compensation for HWC as a policy solution to simultaneously promote human security while protecting biodiversity. We evaluate compensation as a mitigation policy for HWC around f...
Article
Human–wildlife interactions affect people's livelihoods, attitudes and tolerance towards wildlife and wildlife reserves. To investigate the effect of such interactions on people's attitudes and livelihoods, we surveyed 2,233 households located around four wildlife reserves in Rajasthan, India. We modelled respondents’ attitudes towards wildlife and...
Article
Full-text available
The extraction of unconventional oil and gas—from shale rocks, tight sand, and coalbed formations—is shifting the geographies of fossil fuel production, with complex consequences. Following Jackson et al.’s (1) natural science survey of the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing, this review examines social science literature on unconve...
Article
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Research in conflict studies and environmental security has largely focused on the mechanisms through which the environment and natural resources foster conflict or contribute to peacebuilding. An understudied area of research, however, concerns the ways in which warfare has targeted civilian infrastructure with long-term effects on human welfare a...
Article
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Can visualization tools and applications help scholars of global environmental politics and governance understand problems that are complex, linked, and cross-scalar—the critical characteristics of contemporary environmental problems? Surprisingly, such tools have been rarely used in this literature despite widespread availability and use in other...
Article
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Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the U.S. Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long-standing "policy monopoly": a form of stability in policy agenda-setting in which a specific manner...
Article
In Canada's Yukon Territory, a legislative committee was tasked with assessing the risks and benefits of hydraulic fracturing. The committee designed an extensive participatory process involving citizens and experts; however, instead of information access and public hearings fostering an open dialogue and trust, these two channels failed to de-pola...
Article
Plans to replace an aging diesel backup energy plant with liquid natural gas (LNG) generators in Whitehorse, Yukon, resulted in a public outcry, involving community meetings, massive petitions, and demonstrations. Are these civil society protests just a case of a local siting dispute – a response to an unwanted industrial site in an urban neighborh...
Article
Unconventional shale gas development holds promise for reducing the predominant consumption of coal and increasing the utilization of natural gas in China. While China possesses some of the most abundant technically recoverable shale gas resources in the world, water availability could still be a limiting factor for hydraulic fracturing operations,...
Article
Climate change is expected to have particularly severe effects on poor agrarian populations. Rural households in developing countries adapt to the risks and impacts of climate change both individually and collectively. Empirical research has shown that access to capital—financial, human, physical, and social—is critical for building resilience and...
Article
This review analyzes the methods being used and developed in global environmental governance (GEG), an applied field that employs insights and tools from a variety of disciplines both to understand pressing environmental problems and to determine how to address them collectively. We find that methods are often underspecified in GEG research. We und...
Article
Scholars have started to grapple with what might be termed “new”, or second-wave, global environmental governance. It is problem-focused, requiring careful attention to theory. The study of global environmental governance has increasingly identified complexity, scale, and linkages as core characteristics, yet few scholars directly tackle these chal...
Article
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The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is generally considered to be making adequate progress towards meeting Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which calls for halving the proportion of the population with inadequate access to drinking water and sanitation. Progress towards achieving Target 10 is evaluated by the Joint Monitori...
Article
Water resources assume a unique and varied role in post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding. This article examines the ways in which water, sanitation and infrastructure play an integral role in meeting basic human needs, maintaining public health, supporting livelihoods at the household and community level, and in fostering economic recovery and l...
Article
Full-text available
Through an examination of global climate change models combined with hydrological data on deteriorating water quality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), we elucidate the ways in which the MENA countries are vulnerable to climate-induced impacts on water resources. Adaptive governance strategies, however, remain a low priority for political...
Article
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, local environmental activism in Central Asia was widespread. While environmental activists had managed to create mutually beneficial alliances with the titular elite during the Soviet period, these alliances disintegrated as the Soviet successor states became increasingly integrated into the international...
Article
Although fresh water only comprises 2.5 percent of all water resources worldwide, it is essential for sustaining human life. Yet, approximately 1.1 billion people lack access to any type of safe drinking water. As a direct consequence, about 1.6 million people die every year from waterborne illnesses (e.g., diarrhea and cholera) of whom 90 percent...
Article
This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they chose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, wh...
Article
Both international forest and climate negotiations have failed to produce a legally binding treaty that addresses forest management activities - either comprehensively or more narrowly through carbon capture - due, in part, to lack of US leadership. Though US cooperation is crucial for facilitating both forest and climate negotiations, the role of...
Article
In the United States, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulates most groundwater used for drinking water. The Act covers most urban areas but because it does not cover small water systems, it implicitly exempts nearly half of those living in rural America. In large measure, monitoring required by the SDWA has illustrated the prevalence of natura...
Article
Most political scientists and economists unequivocally accept the proposition that abundant mineral resources are more often a curse than a blessing, particularly for developing countries. We argue that the widely accepted contention that an abundance of mineral resources and the influx of external rents generated from these resources during boom p...
Article
Countless studies document the correlation between abundant mineral resources and a series of negative economic and political outcomes, including poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weakly institutionalized states, and authoritarian regimes across the developing world. The disappointing experience of mineral-rich countries has genera...
Article
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In this paper, we consider a three-stage game in the context of a competing exporters model to compare and contrast the effects of discriminatory and uniform (Most Favored Nation, MFN) tariffs on countries' choice over environmental standards for varying degrees of pollution spillovers. Because of the presence of punishment effects and stronger own...
Article
The rapidly growing population in the Middle East and the ensuing increase in exploitation have led to the degradation its renewable aquifers. In turn, countries in the Middle East have been forced to search for alternative resources like non- renewable (fossil) groundwater and to develop new technologies such as desalination. Here, we show that mo...
Article
Israel and the Palestinian Authority share the southern Mediterranean coastal aquifer. Long-term overexploitation in the Gaza Strip has resulted in a decreasing water table, accompanied by the degradation of its water quality. Due to high levels of salinity and nitrate and boron pollution, most of the ground water is inadequate for both domestic an...
Article
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In 1998 the European Union (EU) revised its Drinking Water Directive, which is responsible for regulating the quality of water in the EU intended for human consumption. Specifically, the EU added a new standard for the element boron in drinking water (1 mg/l). Yet, because of scientific uncertainty concerning the causes and magnitude of the boron p...
Article
Within the past few decades, the water quality in many of the coastal aquifers along the Mediterranean Sea has rapidly degraded. Overexploitation of the groundwater basins, particularly during the tourist season, has resulted in the lowering of groundwater tables and increasing seawater intrusion into the aquifers. Countries such as Cyprus and Isra...
Article
The view of institutions as coercion rather than as contracts dominates the comparative politics literature on both institutional creation and the politics of economic reform. The emergence of a collectively optimal tax code in Russia demonstrates the limitations of this emphasis on coercion. This new tax code was not imposed by a strong central le...
Article
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A large literature exists regarding explanations for the emergence of cooperation in the Mediterranean basin, but there is less information regarding the effectiveness of Mediterranean cooperation and its programs. Through a case study of Israel's implementation and compliance with the Barcelona Convention and the Mediterranean Action Plan, we eval...
Article
With the signing of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo Accords) in 1993, the Israelis and Palestinians embarked upon a difficult path to share their joint water resources. Despite international efforts to encourage joint technical projects and institution building, obstacles remain for obtaining a comprehens...
Article
To wage its war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration needed Uzbekistan's help--and promised a lot to get it. But Washington must not let this short-term marriage of convenience give Uzbekistan long-term regional hegemony. The Uzbek regime's authoritarianism fosters Islamic extremism, which in turn exacerbates tensions among Central Asia's unstab...
Book
The Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers of Central Asia flow across deserts to empty into the Aral Sea. Under Soviet rule, so much water was diverted from the rivers for agricultural purposes that salinity levels rapidly rose and the sea shrank. There was an upsurge in dust storms containing toxic salt residue, and a new desert began to replace the sea....
Article
Resource-rich states throughout the developing world are prone to rent-seeking, excessive borrowing, wasteful spending, and unbalanced growth as well as states with weak institutions and authoritarian regimes. Are the five energy-rich Soviet successor states necessarily doomed to repeat this experience, often referred to as the “resource curse”? Th...
Article
The literature on resource-rich states leaves a key and prior question unexplored: Why and how do states choose to develop their natural resources? The authors address this gap by explaining the divergence in oil and gas development strategies in five energy-rich Soviet successor states. The authors argue that leaders choose development strategies...
Article
Following the Soviet Union's collapse, the Central Asian states introduced new institutions for interstate environmental cooperation in the Aral Sea basin. This article examines why Central Asian elites and the international community could not choose the optimal negotiation set for environmental protection when designing postindependence solutions...
Article
The break-up of the Soviet Union has resulted in unprecedented political and physical transfigurations of several water basins. The disintegration of the Soviet Union transformed the Aral Sea Basin into an international one in which the five Central Asian successor states became stakeholders. The unsettling of political borders in the Soviet Union...
Article
this article is to explain these empirical puzzles and, in doing so, to formulate a broader theory of the initial formation of natural resource development strategies. In short, we argue that state leaders choose energy development strategies based on the domestic constraints they face when they either discover or gain newfound authority over their...
Article
The promotion of local non-governmental organisations (hereafter LNGOs) in the successor states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has increasingly become the focus of international democracy-building efforts, orchestrated through the active involvement of Western non-governmental organisations (hereafter WNGOs). As part of the democratisation...
Article
Full-text available
With the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Israelis and Palestinians have embarked upon a difficult path to share their joint water resources. Despite international efforts to encourage joint technical projects and institution building, obtacles remain for obtaining a comprehensive water agreement. This paper explicates the main problems hin...

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