A Pivotal Moment for Climate Policy

In early May, Israel faced its second major wildfire in a month, as flames tore through the woodlands around Jerusalem, forcing the shutdown of the central region and the cancellation of Independence Day celebrations. Conference Chair, Professor Alon Tal, Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies and a leading environmental advocate, explained that once a rare occurrence, such fires have become far more frequent, reflecting a broader international pattern.

“In the past, fires of this magnitude maybe happened once a decade,” Tal noted. “But like California, Israel’s fire service now reports a tripling of high-risk fire days — ultra-dry conditions paired with high winds. This is an international phenomenon. This past year, Canadian fires destroyed 45 million acres of woodlands — seven times the annual average. Israel has received a wake-up call about the impacts of the climate crisis.”

Across two days of programming, the conference will bring together 25 Israeli experts to discuss potential solutions alongside colleagues from Los Angeles and California. “This is not just a policy conversation. This is about how we prepare our communities for an uncertain future,” Tal said. “Both Los Angeles and Tel Aviv are confronting real environmental risks, but they also have the innovation ecosystems and civic infrastructure needed to respond creatively. We have a lot to learn from studying them side by side.”

Comparing Los Angeles and Tel Aviv offers scholars and policymakers unique insights, Tal believes. “These are two of the most creative cities in the world. They both have thriving tech sectors and liberal city governments with resources and professional expertise. At the same time, they face comparable challenges: they are both dryland cities on rising coastlines, where heat waves are becoming more treacherous. Bringing their top experts together at Stanford has tremendous merit.”

Rethinking Climate Governance at the City Level

Tal emphasized that local governments are increasingly bearing the burden of climate adaptation, especially in societies marked by inequality and demographic complexity. “The changing climate brings new challenges that cities need to be ready for. And they aren’t,” he said. “Most people live in cities — they need the tools (and the budget) to reduce new risks. The LA fires have left enormous human suffering in their wake, just like the climate-driven floods in New Orleans, Houston, and New York City did. So, the question is: what steps should cities take proactively to avert disasters and maintain stability?”

While Tal emphasized the immediate environmental threats, Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and director of the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, framed the discussion within a broader governance context. “It is often said that ‘all politics is local,’ and there is a policy corollary to that. While we need national policies and international coordination to reduce fossil fuel emissions and accelerate the transition to renewable energy, the challenges of climate adaptation and resilience are also deeply local and must be met at that level. This is a great opportunity for all of us to learn from two cities on the front lines of the challenge in our respective countries — Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.”
 

A Vision for Collaborative Learning

The event also reflects the broader goals of Stanford’s Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program, launched in 2023 to foster cross-disciplinary analysis of Israel and its unique position as a regional influence and geopolitical actor. The program appoints an Israel-based scholar to serve as a visiting fellow at FSI for a recurring three-year term. The fellow will teach courses related to some aspect of Israel’s politics, society, economy, modern history, technological development, and/or regional or international relations, as well as advise students and collaborate with faculty interested in Israel and the Middle East.

Diamond emphasized the significance of the conference in fulfilling the program’s mission. “One of our key goals in the Israel Studies Program is to engage scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders in Israel, not only individually but collectively based on their expertise. And we seek to promote functional and scholarly interaction and mutual learning. This conference is a historic opportunity to advance this mission in the realm of climate resilience.”

Tal also highlighted the significance of hosting the conference at Stanford. “Stanford has become the world’s leading academic center for researching critical ecological problems like biodiversity and climate change. The Doerr School of Sustainability and the involvement of Nobel laureate Steven Chu as a keynote speaker make this an unparalleled opportunity for collaboration.”

Building a Lasting Impact

Tal hopes the conference will catalyze new approaches to addressing climate impacts. “It’s clear that new environmental conditions require new strategies and technologies. Seeing practical solutions firsthand is crucial, but they don’t matter without policies that enable cities to step up their climate mitigation game. Success stories need to be shared.”

The conference outcomes will be documented in a special issue of the academic journal Sustainability, ensuring that insights resonate beyond the event itself. “By focusing on urban policies and highlighting both successes and failures, we aim to chart pathways for cities to live with global warming while mitigating emissions to address the root causes,” Tal said.

Diamond further expressed his hopes for the conference’s impact. “We hope participants will not only take away specific ideas and strategies from the two cities and countries but also connections that can be of mutual practical value going forward. We want to underscore that Israel and California, with their similar climates and start-up cultures, have a particularly rich set of possibilities for collaboration and mutual learning.”

Community members and members of the public are invited to participate in this pivotal conversation. To view the full agenda and register, visit the conference website.

Geopolitical Competition

Dunnmon, a CISAC affiliate and senior advisor to the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, spoke about the “holistic geopolitical competition” among world powers in the AI realm as these systems offer “unprecedented speed and unprecedented scale.”

“Within that security lens, there’s actually competition across the entirety of the technical AI stack,” he said.

Dunnmon said an underlying security question involves whether a given AI software is running on top of libraries that are sourced from Western companies then if software is being built on top of an underlying library stack owned by state enterprises. “That’s a different world.”

He said that “countries are competing for data, and it’s becoming a battlefield of geopolitical competition.”

Societal, Environmental Implications

Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and the director of the Center for Food Security and the Environment, said his biggest concern is about how AI might change the functioning of societies as well as possible bioterrorism.

“Any environment issue is basically a collective action problem, and you need well-functioning societies with good governance and political institutions, and if that crumbles, I don’t think we have much hope.”

On the positive aspects of AI, he said the combination of AI and synthetic biology and gene editing are starting to produce much faster production cycles of agricultural products, new breeds of animals, and novel foods. One company found how to make a good substitute for milk if pineapple, cabbage and other ingredients are used.

Lobell said that AI can understand which ships are actually illegally capturing seafood, and then they can trace that back to where they eventually offload such cargo. In addition, AI can help create deforestation-free supply chains, and AI mounted on farm tractors can help reduce 90% of the chemicals being used that pose environmental risks.

“There’s clear tangible progress being made with these technologies in the realm of the environment, and we can continue to build on that,” he added.
 

AI and Democracy

Persily, a senior fellow and co-director of FSI’s Cyber Policy Center, said, “AI amplifies the abilities of all good and bad actors in the system to achieve all the same goals they’ve always had.”

He noted, “AI is not social media,” even though it can interact with social media. Persily said AI is so much more pervasive and significant than a given platform such as Facebook. Problems arise in the areas of privacy, antitrust, bias and disinformation, but AI issues are “characteristically different” than social media.

“One of the ways that AI is different than social media is the fact that they are open-source tools. We need to think about this in a little bit of a different way, which is that it is not just a few companies that can be regulated on closed systems,” Persily said.

As a result, AI tools are available to all of us, he said. “There is the possibility that some of the benefits of AI could be realized more globally,” but there are also risks. For example, in the year and a half since OpenAI released ChatGPT, which is open sourced, child pornography has multiplied on the Internet.

“The democratization of AI will lead to fundamental challenges to establish legacy infrastructure for the governance of the propagation of content,” Persily said.

Balance of AI Power

Fukuyama pointed out that an AI lab at Stanford could not afford leading-edge technology, yet countries such as the U.S. and China have deeper resources to fund AI endeavors.

“This is something obviously that people are worried about,” he said, “whether these two countries are going to dominate the AI race and the AI world and disadvantage everybody.”

Manuel said that most of AI is now operating with voluntary governance – “patchwork” – and that dangerous things involving AI can be done now. “In the end, we’re going to have to adopt a negotiation and an arms control approach to the national security side of this.” 

Lobell said that while it might seem universities can’t stay up to speed with industry, people have shown they can reproduce those models’ performances just days after their releases.
 

On regulation — the European Union is currently weighing legislation — Persily said it would be difficult to enforce regulations and interpret risk assessments, so what is needed is a “transparency regime” and an infrastructure so civil entities have a clear view on what models are being released – yet this will be complex.

“I don’t think we even really understand what a sophisticated, full-on AI audit of these systems would look like,” he said.

Dunnmon suggested that an AI governance entity could be created that’s similar to how the U.S. Food and Drug Agency reviews pharmaceuticals before release.

In terms of AI and military conflicts, he spoke about the need for AI and humans to understand the rewards and risks involved, and in the case of the latter, how the risk compares to the “next best option.”

“How do you communicate that risk, how do you assess that risk, and how do you make sure the right person with the right equities and the right understanding of those risks is making that risk trade-off decision?” he asked.

The Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program was established in 1982 to provide students with the knowledge and skills necessary to analyze and address complex global challenges in a rapidly changing world, and to prepare the next generation of leaders for public and private sector careers in international policymaking and implementation.

Estimated $18 Billion Reconstruction 

To begin with, projected reconstruction costs to rebuild Gaza currently total $18 billion, said Galit Cohen, director of the Program on Climate Change at the Israel Institute for National Security. She has experience identifying and analyzing risks and opportunities for Israel’s national security in the field of climate change.

Water, sewage, waste, food and air pollution risks abound in Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Cohen said. At least 57 percent of water, sanitation and health facilities in Gaza have been destroyed so far, including desalinization plants, and only 3-7 liters of water is typically available per day for each person, which is well below the recommended minimum of 50-100 liters.

“In the current situation in regard to the environmental issues, it's about the water security and about the sewage, sanitation and construction waste – all the list of those issues that need to be mitigated and also dealt with,” Cohen said. For example, “there is no active wastewater treatment facility now in Gaza,” and the many unclaimed dead bodies deep in the rubble pose environmental risks as well.

As for solutions, she said, “Trying to build the institutions and the government that can undertake the responsibility of the civil society there” is the first step to working together on a rebuild of Gaza. The goal should be to create a new coalition with the U.S. and countries such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE, and Saudi Arabia (and others) that can undertake a reconstruction of Gaza so Palestinians can live there without enduring an environmental catastrophe.

“This is the only way we can survive here – Israel and all the rest,” Cohen said.
 

Coalition Building

Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, described the sensitive environmental interdependence of countries in the region.

“The streams and rivers originating in Israel and the West Bank originate in Jordan, and in Israel the vast majority of the aquifers of underground water in our region is shared between Israel and its neighbors – between Jordan and its neighbors, and it’s shared between Palestine and its neighbors. That means if there’s an environmental challenge or an environmental issue with the water that we have, one country alone cannot deal with it. Regional cooperation is a must,” he said.

Dr. Hamed has served as the Israeli Ministry of Science’s Deputy Chief Scientist, and later the Acting Chief Scientist, and was the highest ranking Palestinian in the Israeli government. About his current position at the Arava Institute, he said, “We use the environment as a tool. We use science as [a] diplomacy tool to bring people together. We use science to build bridges, to build trust, and to build understanding.”

The regional effects in climate change could be exacerbated by the war in Gaza, he said. “The region that we live in is a hotspot when it comes to climate change, the heat waves, and the sea level rise.”

The warming of the Eastern Mediterranean is increasing, and it is already much higher than any other place in the world, he said. On top of this, climate change often produces migration to other areas, creating possible instability effects for existing populations in the new areas, and statistics show people already have been moving out of Gaza and other countries in the immediate region, likely due to the worsening climate, and in addition now, to the conflict.

He said the intense bombing of Gaza has significantly damaged farmlands, infrastructure, including apartment buildings, the roads, water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants and water wells. “What happened on Oct. 7 happened because of the lack of knowledge of the other side.” 

He added, “This is a great chance for us to rethink what happened and to rebuild a better future for all of us.”
 

Renewable Energy Concerns – or Opportunity?

The war in Gaza seriously affects the prospect of green or renewable energy in the immediate conflict area, said Dorit Banet, who co-founded the Eilat-Eilot Renewable Energy Initiative and has been Israel’s leading government official in the area of renewable energy for two decades.

More than 100,000 Israelis were estimated to be displaced from their homes in southern Israel after Oct. 7. Banet has noted in prior media stories that some in Israel are eying a push to “build back better” by transforming the region into a more sustainable area. Israel has committed to reaching 30% renewable energy by 2030, though that may be difficult.

Banet said at least another 2 gigawatts of solar renewable energy could be immediately produced in one particular Israeli area based on the existing infrastructure – and eventually as much as another 8.5 gigawatts of solar energy. 

This would offer people in the area much more energy resilience, she said. “In such areas, this needs to be totally agreed upon with totally new regulation in Israel.”
 

Promoting Resilience

Victor Weiss, director of sustainability for the Israel National Security Council, said the ongoing war could have a negative impact on the global economy, the availability of budget, and the willingness of countries to allocate resources to climate issues.   

“A regional war is expected to affect fuel markets and lead to damaged supply chains” and the general instability of markets, said Weiss, who was a senior military officer and founder of the Israel Defense Force’s Environmental Unit.

“We have to build a new relationship and partnerships with the other regional countries to promote resilience,” he added.

Weiss said that Israel’s National Security Council recently defined climate issues as a strategic threat to that country’s national security. “The climate chapter was written in the National Security Council Risk Assessment and the main threats were mapped. We are working to define the threats, to formulate the national response to those threats,” he said.

An opportunity exists for Israel, Gaza and every population affected by this conflict to “go forward on the hope of an optimistic future to our region,” he said.

‘Powerful, Informative’

In closing, Prof. Diamond described the discussion as “very powerful, informative and in the end, also moving” for the audience. “There’s going to be a staggering challenge of reconstruction when this war is over, and hopefully we can get started on it as soon as possible.”

Alon Tal added, “We’ve only begun this discussion about the reconstruction. Let’s hope that very quickly we can end the destruction, the death and the suffering, and move forward to a time of renewal.”
 

The full webinar of "Environmental Lessons and Implications of the Gaza War" is available to view below.