Marissa Jordan is the program manager of Carnegie California at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Since 2018, she has been actively involved in various initiatives at Carnegie, including the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, the Europe Program, the Global Order and Institutions Program, the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program, as well as Carnegie’s artificial intelligence research. She holds a master’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution from the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Her previous research has focused on how anti-human trafficking service providers perceive the role of climate change in driving human trafficking in their respective regions.
The 2024 Carnegie California Global Affairs Survey reflects Californians’ heightened concerns about ongoing conflicts and critical elections, including in the United States. It arrives at a tense moment in American democracy and during a critical election year for many of the world’s leading democracies.
Large and midsized cities in California host various institutions that are either global in their own right or serve as nodes within transnational networks of business, diplomacy, and culture. Many of these cities are also engaging, increasingly, in city diplomacy.
On April 16, scientists, academics, and other experts will convene in Riga, Latvia, for the scoping meeting for the Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, to be included in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Westward-looking, often aligned with their fellow Americans, and confident in U.S. global engagement, Californians would prefer that the role of their state and local leaders on the world stage be decided close to home.
It will take a concerted effort at multiple levels—from climate adaptation to recovery funding to police awareness—to prevent climate-related disasters from making society’s battle against human trafficking even more difficult.