DOE Calls for online colabrative network or ‘knowledge ecosystem’

Since mid-2007, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence has sponsored three unclassified international conferences to consider the requirements for meeting the challenges involved in anticipating and understanding the security-related consequences of energy and environmental dynamics. This report synthesizes the presentations and conversations that took place at the 12 March 2008 conference, the third of these meetings. It highlights the insights and the strategic imperatives that emerged from the conference.



Recent patterns of demographic change, energy consumption, and environmental degradation have unleashed powerful forces capable of destabilizing natural ecosystems, regional economies, and political regimes. Because energy supply and use are built on complex interlinkages of environmental processes and manmade technological systems, environmental change carries potential risks (second- and third-order effects) to regional and global security. There are already early warning signals