The Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) will be hosting the award-winning climate change author, GU-Q professor Anatol Lieven, for a virtual public lecture titled ‘A New Political Strategy for the Struggle to Limit Climate Change’ at 4pm today.
In a lecture based on his latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case, a 2020 Financial Times Book of the Year in the environment category, Dr Lieven will set out a new political strategy to mobilise support for the effort to limit climate change.  
The event is part of the CIRS Environmental Studies Initiative focusing on human-induced climate change which features GU-Q faculty members with core expertise on the environment working with a global network of scholars to produce new research findings, reports, journal articles and public events. GU-Q dean Dr Ahmad Dallal said, “This event builds on our previous initiatives at CIRS that address important questions related to environmental issues, and underscores GU-Q’s renewed commitment to engagement with the public on our environmental research efforts, because we are all stakeholders in the effort to work towards an ecologically sustainable future.”
At the lecture, the author will be refocusing the debate about climate change on the national rather than the global level. “While international agreements and movements are valuable, in the end their purpose is to get states to act, because (as the pandemic response demonstrated) only states can take the measures and mobilise the resources required. For this to happen, states and their populations have to be convinced that climate change is not just a threat to humanity in general, but a danger to the vital interests and the long-term survival of their own nations,” Dr Lieven said.
Registration for the online event is available at https://www.qatar.georgetown.edu/event/ClimateChange.
At GU-Q, Dr Lieven teaches classes on international relations, foreign policy and nationalism.