You Are Invited, February, 2 2011:
Addressing Social Constructs to Improve Adolescent Health
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Environmental Change and Security Program, Global Health Initiative
Thursday, February 2, 2011, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast
Margaret Greene, Co-Author, Delivering Solutions; Director, GreeneWorks
Denise Dunning, Program Director, Public Health Institute
Jennifer Pope, Deputy Director of Sexual and Reproductive health, PSI
Adolescence is an age of opportunity yet the voices of young girls and boys are often left off the development agenda. More political will and advocacy is needed to overcome negative social constructs that hinder adolescent health. Today’s discussion will highlight opportunities to engage youth and work alongside the community to identify action steps that guide programs and policymakers.
Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks, will present a five-point action plan for empowering girls to address negative social constructs that preclude them from accessing healthcare services. Denise Dunning program director with the Public Health Institute, will present case studies from Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Malawi for overcoming community resistance to empowering girls by training local leaders to advocate for policies and budgets that are supportive of adolescent women. Jennifer Pope, deputy director of sexual and reproductive health at PSI, will present communication and programming strategies to meet the health needs of adolescent boys and girls.
If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.
Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.
Topics:
You Are Invited
What Would It Take To Help People and the Planet?
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
People living in the most biodiverse areas of the world tend to be poor, isolated, and dependent on natural resources. They often lack reliable access to alternative livelihoods and health services and thus can place stress on these ecologically unique regions.
Conservation efforts will merely slow habitat loss if they don’t fundamentally address the living conditions of the human residents as well as the flora and fauna. But programs to assist these communities have commonly focused on one problem at a time, reflecting the interests of the funders: Environmental groups focus on conservation, while health organizations concentrate on disease. We must ask whether investments to protect biologically rich areas are effective and sustainable if they don’t respond to the many needs of the people who live there.
But the problems faced by people in these remote areas don’t fit our traditional sectors. The way we disburse our funds, divide our bureaucracies, demarcate our disciplines, and measure success ignores the reality of intersecting needs. Such stovepiping can disrespect the communities’ scarce resources, especially their time. It can waste development aid on duplicate supplies and staff. And it can lead us to miss how the solution to one problem (e.g., providing antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS) can be undercut by another (e.g., lacking access to safe water with which to take the pills).
So, what would it take to help particularly vulnerable populations while protecting particularly important ecological systems?
We need to strategically target our help by addressing HELP – health, environment, livelihoods, and population – through a truly integrated approach to sustainable development in these areas. Evidence suggests tackling problems concurrently can be more efficient and effective. Key donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development are increasingly prioritizing integrated responses, providing some funding for sustainable development innovators and supporting evaluation of the results. But we need more evidence that these efforts can achieve results that match or exceed the outcomes of single-sector projects. To rigorously test this approach, more projects must be funded, implemented and analyzed, over longer periods of time and at bigger scales.
To date, some promising projects and research in diverse locations – Ethiopia, Nepal, Madagascar, Rwanda, the Philippines, and Uganda – suggest that the HELP approach offers greater benefits than traditional programs.
In the Philippines, for example, the PATH Foundation Philippines’ Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) program addresses pressing needs for both family planning services and sustainable environmental stewardship in densely populated coastal communities, where local fisheries have been depleted because of increased demand for food. IPOPCORM helps create marine protected areas and promotes alternative economic livelihoods such as seaweed harvesting, thus allowing critical local fish stocks to recover. Concurrently, the initiative mitigates human-induced pressures on the environment and lowers the vulnerability of this underserved population by providing voluntary family planning services. Since its launch in 2001, the IPOPCORM program’s approach has yielded measurable benefits, simultaneously reducing program costs and improving health and environmental outcomes – and outperforming compartmentalized, side-by-side sector interventions.
How can we bring HELP to biodiversity-rich communities? First, we can encourage scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to step outside their stovepipes by producing and distributing manuals, for example, based on lessons learned from existing cross-disciplinary projects. Second, we must bridge the gap between analysis and field-based programs by developing new metrics that better assess the impact of integrated programs. Third, we must open up bureaucratic funding structures by demonstrating not only the short-term savings but also the synergies that bolster long-term sustainability.
The challenges are significant, but I see promising new opportunities for overcoming them. For example, the new Pathfinder International-led projects around Lake Victoria in Uganda and Kenya mark the entry of a respected health organization into the environmental arena and the return of a leading private funder – the MacArthur Foundation – to HELP programs. With some of Africa’s highest population densities, poverty, ethnic diversity, and biodiversity, the Great Lakes region is one of the most volatile intersections of human development and environmental change.
Through these and other community-based, integrated projects, we can truly help people and the planet at the same time.
Photo Credit: "Boy on road east of Addis," courtesy of Geoff Dabelko/Wilson Center.
From the Wilson Center:
Is Foreign Aid Worth the Cost?
Don Wolfensberger, Wilson Center
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Lancaster noted that following World War II, foreign aid became “a two-pronged instrument – one as an instrument of the Cold War and the other as an extension of American values.” It has been a very “intense marriage” between the two, he said, “with one side up and the other side down at different times, as any marriage tends to be.” Truman convinced Congress to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1948 to combat communism, and he was able to gain approval for the Marshall Plan by “scaring the wits out of Congress” about the communist threat.
Aid Under Fire
Congressman Donald Payne (N.J.), who is the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Africa, agreed that the Cold War was the principal reason for our foreign aid programs after World War II, as we provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to our supporters around the world. But, “It’s different today,” he added. “Since the end of the Cold War, more funds are going for humanitarian and development assistance, but it is still directly linked to our national interests. One in five American jobs are tied to U.S. trade, and the growth of our trading partners is our growth as well.”
Payne cautioned that there is “a new group in the House of Representatives who think we should step out of the world. They’ve told their constituents they are going to cut the budget, and foreign aid is an easy target.” Payne noted that polls show the American people think one-quarter or more of the federal budget goes to foreign aid when it is little more than one percent.
Nevertheless, there has been bipartisan support for former President Bush’s HIV/AIDS initiative in Africa which is showing remarkable results in reducing deaths from the disease. Payne added that aid to Africa is showing results in the number of economies that are doing well despite the global economic downturn.
Payne expressed frustration with the inability to enact a foreign aid authorization bill in the last several Congresses because the measures became weighted down with all manner of policy riders that were both partisan and controversial. Consequently, our foreign relations operations are solely dependent on the annual appropriations bills which tend to become encumbered as well with troublesome riders.
The Dangers of “Nation Building”
Charles O. Flickner, Jr., a 28-year Republican staff member on the Senate Budget Committee and then the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee in the House, presented a more skeptical view, saying foreign aid is not worth the $35 billion it is costing us each year, even though some of the programs have been successful and should be continued. The biggest problem in recent years, he said, has been the amount of money wasted on projects in Iraq and Afghanistan without adequate planning or execution. Money was being virtually shoveled out the door in amounts the host countries did not have the capacity to absorb, said Flickner, and as a consequence we have witnessed a lot of failed projects and corruption.
Smaller projects, which the U.S. government and private aid donors are better at, have a greater chance for success because they do not overwhelm the capacities of host countries. He cited some of the scholarships and technical training programs available for foreign nationals as being among the most worthwhile in building internal leadership capacity for the future in developing countries.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran agreed on the amount of wasted aid dollars being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he has covered as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He told the story of a small, dirt-poor town in Afghanistan he visited in where the bazaar was bustling with new shops and goods, and people were freely spending money on modern electronics, motor bikes, and clothes. The town was the beneficiary of a massive U.S. aid program that provided seed money for farmers to grow crops and created day labor jobs for the residents of the area. A contractor was authorized to spend $30 million on the economic development of the town during the U.S. counterinsurgency surge and that came to roughly $300 per person. It was clear to the USAID official on the ground and to the reporter that the experiment would not be sustainable over the long-term, even though there was a temporary sense of economic activity and prosperity.
Future Vulnerabilities
The panel seemed to agree that it was unfair to blame USAID for these failures since they were thrown into situations overnight they were not prepared to manage in countries that were not capable of absorbing the assistance being directed at them – all in the midst of ongoing conflict. The real test of whether the new directions being charted by the Obama Administration will work will be on the smaller, more manageable projects in which the host countries have a greater role in shaping and implementing.
Lancaster listed four vulnerabilities in the future course of U.S. foreign aid that should be avoided, including trying to merge our various interests through the State and Defense Departments with our aid programs in countries like Pakistan, where the institutions are weak and corrupt; the danger of creating an entitlement dependency through funding of HIV/AIDS drugs, where we will be guilty of causing deaths if we reduce funding; the danger of attempting to undertake too many initiatives at once, such as food aid, global health, climate change, and science and technology innovations, while simultaneously trying to reform the infrastructure of USAID; and trying too hard to demonstrate results from aid given the difficulty of disentangling causes and effects and gauging success over too short a time frame.
Event Resources:
Don Wolfensberger is director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center.
Building Commitment to Family Planning: Indonesia
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Wilson Center
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
While the two other countries profiled in this series, Rwanda and Iran, have only reinvigorated their family planning programs within the past 20 years, Indonesia’s story begins in the 1960s. In this respect, the world’s fourth most populous country is classified among the pioneers of family planning in the developing world and has been described as a “world leader” and “one of the developing world’s best.” An extensive community outreach program combined with a centralized government that made family planning a priority were key to Indonesia’s success story.
Jakarta Pilot and Religious Support Motivates National Scale-up
For a decade and a half after the struggle for independence from the Dutch ended in 1949, the government of President Sukarno ruled out any government support for family planning. According to a Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) report, the rate of contraceptive use among married women at the time was essentially zero. Fertility rose slightly during this period, from an average of 5.5 in the early 1950s to 5.6 children per woman a decade later. However, in 1965, Sukarno was overthrown, and the next year, a military general named Suharto assumed power in an uprising that left as many as half a million people dead.
Suharto’s regime would last until 1998. Though he operated with a “heavy hand” amidst personal corruption, Suharto also aggressively pursued economic development and brought about a policy shift towards promoting family planning. Despite initial reservations – Suharto believed that the people would oppose family planning on religious grounds – various domestic and international advisers convinced him otherwise.
General Ali Sadikin, the governor of Jakarta – a city of three million even then – was particularly influential in convincing Suharto. According to Australian demographer Terence H. Hull, who has written extensively about population issues in Indonesia, Sadikin was “quickly learning demographic lessons in his attempts to renovate a city with poor housing, schooling, transport, and basic services,” and he began to regularly speak out about the challenges that rapid population growth posed to his goals of urban development.
Hull reports that a second integral event in the early years was a 1967 meeting between government officials and Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, and Hindu leaders representing four of the country’s major religions. Following the meeting, a pamphlet called “Views of Religions on Family Planning” was published, representing “a tipping point when national consensus around the morality of birth control was turning from strongly negative to strongly positive.”
A Strong Coordinating Board Reaches out to Communities
By late 1968, efforts were in place to scale up the family planning program in Jakarta to the national level. The National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN in Indonesian) was created and quickly became entrenched throughout the country thanks to generous funding, including from international donors.
The BKKBN’s emphasis on the community level, which ensured that family planning services and awareness-generating activities were reaching people around the country through multiple channels, was a key factor in the program’s achievements. The organizations involved in promoting family planning messages at the community level included youth, women’s and religious groups, employers, and schools, with high-level support reiterated regularly by the president. Hull described the BKKBN’s efforts as “a true collaboration because the program emphasized institutions not normally associated with family planning, but did so in a way that was both socially acceptable and socially invigorating.”
In the program’s first two decades, the contraceptive prevalence rate for modern methods rose from almost nonexistent to 44 percent, and fertility subsequently fell from 5.5 to 3.3 children per woman. These changes are widely attributed to robust government sponsorship from the highest levels, together with effective grassroots implementation that fostered support from nearly all sectors of society.
In subsequent years, Indonesia experienced rapid economic and social development. Per capita income increased more than 20 times over between 1966 and 1996, with initial growth largely due to oil revenues. Other development indicators also improved dramatically. The literacy rate is now over 90 percent, nearly all girls attend school, and half of women are members of the labor force. However, Hull cautions against proclaiming the family planning program the primary causal factor in these successes. Family planning and other development programs would not have been as effective, he says, without changes in the political structure, which steadily became more centralized and stable in its oversight of a very heterogeneous society.
A Recent Plateau
In the early 2000s, the family planning program was decentralized to district and municipal levels, in line with political reforms aimed at diminishing the role of central hierarchy nationwide. District leaders were charged with planning, budgeting, and implementing family planning and other primary health services. In accordance, BKKBN modified its strategies to become even more community-oriented. Still, observers judge the family planning program to have “weakened” following decentralization.
With strong logistics, popular support, and donor assistance, contraceptive use continued rising during the years of political transition. By 2002-2003, 57 percent of married women were using a modern contraceptive method and the fertility rate had reached 2.6 children per woman. However, these indicators remained unchanged in the next national survey, conducted in 2007. Fertility in Indonesia is at the median for Southeast Asia – higher than Thailand and Vietnam and lower than Cambodia and the Philippines.
The Program Moves Forward
As democracy became more secure in the early 2000s, the country’s next generation of leaders kept sight of demographic issues. In 2005, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stated, “High population growth without rapid economic growth will result in poverty and setbacks … Large numbers of children and high populations will only bring advantages if they are skilled.” BKKBN and the Ministry of Health worked with USAID, public health researchers, NGOs and others to develop national family planning standards for quality of care, which were devised and implemented in the early 2000s.
Judging the program’s achievements to have been substantial and its momentum sustainable, USAID graduated Indonesia from population assistance in 2006, after 35 years. Though gaps remain, women’s fertility preferences are largely being met.
Today, 80 percent of all births are intended, and unmet need for family planning – the share of married women who wish to delay or prevent pregnancy but are not using contraception – stands at nine percent, two percentage points below the average for Southeast Asia and all developing countries. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s demographic profile looks much different than it might have. At the time of graduation, USAID reported that without its long-standing and well administered family planning program, Indonesia’s 2006 population would have been larger by 80 million people, or 35 percent.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Sources: Demographic and Health Surveys; Hull (2007); Management Sciences for Health; New York Times; UN Population Division; USAID.
Photo Credit: “Jakarta,” courtesy of flickr user frostnova.
Eye On:
Richard Black: Future Climate-Migration Interactions Will Stress Cities, “Trap” Vulnerable Populations
Monday, January 30, 2012
“In a 50 year time span, climate change, in particular, is likely to have a quite a strong impact on the drivers of migration,” said Richard Black, professor of human geography at University of Sussex and lead author of Migration and Global Environmental Change: Future Challenges and Opportunities. “But in a way that is different to what has been understood until now.”
The report, produced by the UK Government Office for Science’s Foresight Programme, makes some important distinctions, however. First, Black said, we must understand that “migration is already occurring in the world, and whilst many people are likely to leave areas that are of environmental risks, many millions of people are currently moving towards areas of environmental risk,” particularly in Asia but also in Africa where many urban centers are in low-elevation coastal zones.
Second, “many millions of people do not migrate…and indeed are sometimes unable to do so,” Black pointed out. “One of the consequences of climate change is that it will be likely that poorer people in many parts of the world will be even less able to move.” These “trapped” populations are often located in dryland areas which “dominate many of the world’s poorest countries, including Africa and Central Asia,” the report reads.
What does this mean for policymakers? According to Black, there are two key implications of the report:
- Given there continues to be movement of people to areas of environmental risk, the policy community, particularly the international development community, should begin to focus more on large urban cities. “Cities in poor countries are already failing their citizens in the provision of water and adequate shelter,” he said, and migration will only intensify these problems.
- “Not only is it difficult to stop migration, but [it] is actually part of the solution,” said Black. In fact, as noted by others, migration may be a useful adaptation mechanism for climate change.
Topics:
Africa,
Asia,
climate change,
development,
environment,
Eye On,
land,
migration,
population,
urbanization,
video
From the Wilson Center:
Call for Papers: Reducing Urban Poverty
Friday, January 27, 2012
The themes of this year’s competition are land markets, global climate change, and youth.
Land Markets: The absence of efficient land and housing markets and lack of secure tenure for both renters and owners are impediments to urban and economic development in developing cities. Papers on this topic should explore strategies and approaches that would enable property markets to function better and would provide increased security of tenure and strengthened property ownership rights.
Global Climate Change: Papers should examine how urban populations, especially the poor, are coping with the impacts of climate change, and provide strategic policy analysis to better understand how cities can become more resilient to climate change impacts.
Youth: Most of the youth of the developing world are now or will soon be living in urban areas. Unfortunately, they are often growing up in the poorest urban areas – informal settlements and slum communities where their opportunities for advancement are limited by a variety of negative factors. Papers focused on youth should explore ways to build capacity so that you can develop knowledge and skills, find gainful employment, and participate more fully in society to advance economic growth and social development.
Winning papers from each category will be published and the authors invited to Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2012 for a policy workshop with subject matter experts. Additionally, one grand prize winner will be asked to present his or her work at the World Urban Forum (WUF). WUF was established by the United Nations to examine rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies, climate change, and policies. The sixth WUF will be held from September 1-7, 2012 in Naples, Italy and will be focused on “The Urban Future.” In addition to the Washington conference and publication of his or her paper, the grand-prize winner will be invited to present his or her winning paper on a panel at the World Urban Youth Assembly at WUF on September 1st and 2nd.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is February 20, 2012.
For detailed competition guidelines and requirements, and further information on the sub-topics, please see the full call for papers.
Image Credit: “Split by yelowcap,” courtesy of flickr user yelowcap (Vladimir Kaštier).
New Security Beat Is Five Years Old
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Five years ago, in January 2007, we launched New Security Beat. Since then we’ve established a strong editorial focus on a key but neglected niche: where population, environment, and security meet.
Too little attention is given to this complex nexus. To fill that gap, we’ve worked to create a safe space for discussing the connections between these diverse topics. New Security Beat brings members of different disciplines – health, natural sciences, and international relations – together to find common ground at the intersection of their issues.
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| ECSP’s Sean Peoples, Meaghan Parker, and Schuyler Null accepted the Population Institute’s Global Media Award for Best Online Commentary at a January 12 ceremony in New York City. |
Too little attention is given to this complex nexus. To fill that gap, we’ve worked to create a safe space for discussing the connections between these diverse topics. New Security Beat brings members of different disciplines – health, natural sciences, and international relations – together to find common ground at the intersection of their issues.
As the planet becomes more crowded and we become more connected, it is ever more important that we understand:
- How gender and reproductive health are connected to the environment and development;
- How the environment and natural resources are linked to conflict and cooperation; and
- How population and demography impact war and peace.
Dozens of experts present their research and expertise at Wilson Center events each month. But capturing their insights and sharing them with those of you outside the room is difficult. Our series of short, embeddable video interviews, posted on YouTube and the blog, brings these experts’ work to a wider audience and serves as an online archive for researchers, students, and teachers. Some recent examples include:
- Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explains the basics of demographic security
- Peter Gleick finds population dynamics key to sustaining water supplies
- Janani Vivekananda on how climate change exacerbates social, economic, and political stresses
If you’re working on new research, policies, or projects on population, environment, and security, we invite you to join us and contribute your thoughts on these important and often overlooked connections. Email a brief pitch to our web editor, and help us make the next five years as informative as the first.
Photo Credit: Population Institute.
Move Beyond “Water Wars” to Fulfill Water’s Peacebuilding Potential, Says NCSE Panel
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Most of the audience raised their hands. The panelists – as one might expect with a set-up like that – proceeded to explain why they were mistaken.
What Makes a Water War
Carl Bruch, who co-directs international programs at the Environmental Law Institute, started by saying history shows that inter-state “water wars” are “highly unlikely.” He pointed to Aaron Wolf’s and Peter Gleick’s work cataloguing the role of water in conflict throughout human history that shows it is difficult to find even a single conflict that was fought solely over the fundamental resource.
For example, climate change may bring changes in rainfall, and some studies have found a correlation between lack of rainfall and conflict, but there is no causation, said Bruch. “It’s a question of governance,” he said. If lack of rainfall caused conflict, there would have been war across the Sahel in 2003; instead, it only happened in Darfur, which lacked a government able to deal with the challenge (similar observations have been made about the relationship between drought and famine in the Horn of Africa).
Kent Butts, professor and director of the National Security Issues Group at the U.S. Army War College, said that some things have changed that might make conflict over water more likely in the near future. In light of water’s relatively fixed supply, he cited growing human population – the UN median projection is now more than nine billion people by 2050 – and consumption as a key challenge, as well as the uncertain condition of key treaties. The Nile Basin Initiative is on rocky ground – with Ethiopia agitating for a greater share of flow and both Egypt and South Sudan dealing with new governments – and the Himalayan watershed is under stress as demand increases across the region. Butts also pointed to the tremendous number of new dams – many of which no longer need to abide by World Bank conditions as they can get Chinese loans and other bilateral funding – as an emerging challenge that may upend the positive historical trend.
Climate change, too, will likely bring water to the forefront in many areas of the world. “The changing climate changes the dynamics of security in a country,” Butts said. How able a country is to adapt to those changes will quickly expose weak, fragile, or corrupt regimes, threatening stability in some places.
Butts also warned that, though vehemence over water sharing has mainly been confined to rhetoric between countries up until now, that’s no reason to give it short shrift – it’s possible some countries may become trapped by their own public posturing, narrowing their responses to more bellicose options.
Jaehyang So, manager of the Water and Sanitation Program at the World Bank, pointed out the sheer number of people affected by water issues – nearly one-third of all people on Earth lack access to safe drinking water, she said – as evidence that water should be given more credence as a security issue, if perhaps as human or community security, rather than national or international security.
Similarly, Sandra Ruckstuhl, senior specialist for sustainable development at Group W Inc., said that though it’s true that international conflict over water has been rare, “conflict over water at the local level is something that’s been going on for a long time and has been a real divisive force.”
Coordination Can Create Pathways to Peace
If water can be a contributing factor to conflict in some places, it’s also a pathway to peace, the panelists agreed.
“This is a great opportunity,” said Bruch. “We see water as incredibly cross-cutting in the peacebuilding process.” He pointed to water programs’ effects on health, food, energy, gender issues, and economic development as reasons to make them a priority in post-conflict settings.
“The peacebuilding value of water is tremendous,” agreed Butts. “Water quality, as opposed to quantity, can be a major peacebuilding issue,” he said, as it’s a shared benefit.
More than material aid, Salzberg said that people in post-conflict settings most frequently ask the State Department for expertise. Because water issues cut across so many sectors, that’s difficult to provide, said Bruch, but the environment and security community needs to find ways to better coordinate. “In post-conflict countries, one of the highest priorities, if not the highest priority, is access to clean water,” he said.
Paul Faeth, senior fellow at CNA, pointed to the start of funding for the Senator Paul Simon Water for Poor Act, which provides at least $125 million in aid to sub-Saharan Africa alone, as a good policy step towards acknowledging water’s role in human security.
Another barrier to sustainable water management, said Jaehyang So, are subsidies: “There is no water system in the world that doesn’t have some subsidy attached to it,” she said. This creates incentives for misuse, which – though the human right to water should always be preserved – appropriate pricing schemes for industrial and agricultural use might go a long way towards curbing. (Of course, resolving that tension is easier said than done.) An infamous example is groundwater pumping in Yemen – primarily for the non-food crop, qat – which has gone on unsustainably for years, agitating internal divisions and prompting experts to predict that the country will become the first in the modern world to literally run out of water.
In concluding remarks, Butts called for moving beyond simple labels for conflict to better understand the complexity of water systems, create prosperity and stability, and better advance U.S. interests around the world.
The excerpts above are only a small slice of the conference; see the full agenda for panelists and topics covered, and follow the conversation on Twitter (#NCSEconf). We also posted thoughts on some of the previous panels and a gallery of pictures from around the conference to flickr.
Photo Credit: Jaehyang So and Carl Bruch, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.
Eye On:
UNEP Maps Conflict, Migration, Environmental Vulnerability in the Sahel
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
UNEP’s maps analyze 40 years of data to pinpoint where the region’s most at-risk populations are located based on environmental, population, and conflict trends dating back to 1970. In a single map pinpointing the Sahel’s 19 hotspots, UNEP synthesizes subnational data from four environmental indicators over time – rainfall (from 1970 to 2006), temperature changes (1970 to 2006), drought (1982 to 2009), and flooding (1985 to 2009) – which are then layered on top of population trends (1970 to 2010) and conflict data (1970 to 2005) in order to identify the region’s most insecure areas.
Composite Vulnerability
At first glance, the map can appear hard to decipher; it is flooded with different colors and symbols, each indicating something different about the extent of climate change, migration, and conflict in the region. A Google Earth version of the map (available for download here) makes all this information easier to process by allowing users to select which indicators they want to see mapped out, cutting back on the number of lines, dots, colors, and pie charts the user has to decode.
Given the vast amount of the information being condensed into these maps, the report is a helpful and worthwhile read. For instance, eight hotspots are in places with growing populations and another seven are located in places that have experienced conflict; altogether, 4 of the 19 hotspots have both past conflict and growing populations. The report digs deeper into the confluence of climate, conflict, and migration by discussing case studies that highlight how the three intersect in local communities (at the same time, the report is careful to avoid suggesting that there is a causal relationship between the three issues.). In Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, for example, tensions have been mounting between northern pastoralists and southern farmers as each group has moved further and further afield in search of water and arable land to sustain their livelihoods.
Holes In the Data
While the hotspot maps include a wealth of information, the report makes clear that it is by no means exhaustive. Rising sea levels are, for instance, a major impending threat to coastal populations in the Sahel, but only the downloadable Google Earth map – not the hotspot map in the report or the Google Earth map as presented online – incorporates this factor. Compounded with a skyrocketing population in the coastal areas – the coast between Accra and the Niger delta is expected to be “an urban megalopolis of 50 million people” by 2020, according to the report – an increase in sea levels could have a huge impact on the region’s stability.
The report also readily admits that the datasets for population trends and conflict have shortcomings. Population data is largely based on censuses, which both the report and its data sources (UNEP’s African Population Database and the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) acknowledge can be inconsistent in their accuracy. Additionally, after 2000, population data is based on projections rather than estimates, which, as last year’s update from the UN Population Division showed, have often proven inaccurate, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Regarding conflict, the UNEP report is straightforward in admitting its limits. The report lacks data on small-scale conflict (fewer than 25 battle deaths, following the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s threshold that separates conflicts from lower-level violence), even as it acknowledges that such conflict is “often the first to occur” when climate change threatens communities’ access to resources and livelihoods.
Ultimately, however, these maps give valuable data on specific locations that are uniquely vulnerable to trends in population, climate, migration, and conflict. They add focus to the conventional wisdom that climate change will impact the region’s stability, and, taken together, the maps and the report provide a valuable resource for scholars and policymakers attempting to craft adaptation policies that take into consideration these complex links.
Sources: Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University's Earth Institute, UNEP, Uppsala Conflict Data Program.
Image Credit: UNEP.
Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission
Ethan Goffman, SSPP Blog
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
In a time of polarized politics in the United States, over the environment and just about everything else, an overlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national security apparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environment and Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. With the early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in an increase in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic, those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage in speculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t really occurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action against potential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.
The concern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept of security from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands as food and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the military has already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energy security, economic security, environmental security, and national security are all inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,” explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.
One obvious linkage is the connection of our oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict in politically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in the Middle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is a matter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. The Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries, underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan, the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependent on large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algal jet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for more icebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resource exploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.
Continue reading on the SSPP blog.
Photo Credit: Sherri Goodman and Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.
You Are Invited, January, 25 2011:
Sustainable Solutions for the Planet’s Energy Challenge
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Brazil Institute, Environmental Change and Security Program
Wednesday, January 25, 2011, 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast
Greg Kats, President, Capital E, and author of Greening Our Built World
Daniel Kammen, Professor of Public Policy, Energy and Resources Group, University of California Berkeley; and Former Chief Technical Specialist, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, The World Bank
The environmental challenges of climate change, energy demands, and natural resource loss continue to mount. World population hit 7 billion on Halloween last year and is projected to go to 10 billion if not more. The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest in 130 years of recorded global temperatures and 2010 was the warmest year yet recorded. Extinction rates are 1,000 times base rates. The Amazon had the greatest drought in recorded history in 2010. Droughts, floods, wildfires, and intense tropical storms are becoming more frequent. These challenges call for action at a planetary scale.
The “Managing Our Planet” seminar series – developed jointly by George Mason University and the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Brazil Institute – addresses planetary scale problems and solutions.
If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.
Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.
Topics:
You Are Invited
You Are Invited, January, 25 2011:
Is a Food Crisis Brewing in the Sahel?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Africa Program, Environmental Change and Security Program
Wednesday, January 25, 2011, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
6th Floor Auditorium
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast
Dramane Coulibaly, Team Leader, European Union Technical Assistance, Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS)
Greg Gottlieb, Bureau for Food Security, USAID
Jacques Higgins, Deputy Director, U.S. Relations Office, World Food Program
Steve McDonald, Director, Africa Program, Wilson Center
Michele McNabb, President, Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
Eric Munoz, Senior Policy Advisor, Oxfam
Ben Safari, Regional Technical Advisor, Commodities and Supply Chain Management, Catholic Relief Services
John Scicchitano, Program Manager, FEWSNET
John Sewell, Senior Scholar, Wilson Center
Meera Shekar, Lead Health Specialist, Africa Region Technical Health Unit, World Bank
Emmy Simmons, Board Member, Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
John Staatz, Michigan State University
While African nations and the donor community struggle to mitigate famine in the Horn of Africa, concern is growing that drought in the Sahel will trigger a food crisis of comparable proportion in West Africa by the spring of 2012. However, experts caution against misdiagnosing food insecurity in the Sahel, for fear that excessive band-aid treatments of emergency food assistance will squander energy and scarce resources that would be better utilized in treating pockets of severe food shortages and building resiliency in the region. With input from American and African experts on the Sahel, this event will explore the true nature of the emerging crisis in the Sahel and seek to identify effective responses, including regional trade and resilience-building through agricultural development.
If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.
Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 6th floor auditorium. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.
Topics:
You Are Invited
Dot-Mom / From the Wilson Center:
Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
“Throughout the 2009-2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health lecture series, we always heard the same good news: we know how to save the lives of women and girls. But more political will is needed,” said Calyn Ostrowksi, program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative on December 15 for the launch of the series’ culminating report, Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health.
Joining Ostrowski were co-author Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks; Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the UN Population Fund; Tim Thomas, interim director for the Maternal Health Task Force; and Chaacha Mwita, director of communications at the African Population and Health Research Center.
One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the United States and abroad. The series consisted of 21 separate events, with hundreds of experts sharing their experiences and thousands of participants and stakeholders providing their expertise. The final report captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.
Promoting Social Change
Unlike other health issues, said Green during her presentation on the findings of Delivering Solutions, the field of maternal health requires a holistic and multi-faceted approach; that is, an approach that looks not only at health systems, but also at underlying social factors. The report divides maternal health into three broad categories: social, economic, and cultural factors; health systems factors; and research/data demands.
Looking first at the social, cultural, and economic issues, Greene highlighted the need to improve nutrition and educational opportunities for young women in developing countries. Policymakers must be convinced that investing in women is not just good for women but good for families and children, she said. The participation of male partners and other male family members is also needed to increase access to maternal health services, such as family planning, and promote gender equality. The report pointed to a number of recommendations to promote male engagement:
Health systems and medical resources play an equally pivotal role in reducing maternal mortality as social factors. The report highlights several key areas for strengthening the health system including the expansion of healthcare workers, health finance schemes, technology, and commodity distribution.
One key recommendation is to integrate reproductive health and maternal health supply chains. Four key medicines, oxytocin misoprostol, magnesium sulfate, and manual vacuum aspirators, target the three leading causes of maternal mortality (post-partum hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion). Efforts to improve the distribution of these commodities should be more widely dispersed in developing countries and supported by community-based interventions. Women in urban slums, for example, face unique challenges that are not being adequately addressed.
Additionally, new technologies should be more creatively and effectively used, in particular the use of mobile phones in rural communities.
Many of the policy recommendations offered by the report, as Greene pointed out, are low-cost and highly effective. Yet three significant challenges remain for the field in general:
Chaacha Mwita of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), located in Nairobi has seen firsthand the result of an overburdened and inadequate maternal health system in both his personal and professional life. Mwita endorsed the findings of the series report, emphasizing in particular the focus on transportation systems, male involvement, stakeholder dialogue, and education.
Mwita said that collaboration at all levels is the key to improving maternal health. Policymakers must communicate with researchers, who, in turn, must communicate with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators in the field. The collaborative in-country dialogue series between the Wilson Center and APHRC, he believes, was a highly useful and easily replicable way of encouraging dialogue among relevant stakeholders in the field.
The Big Picture
”Our hope is that we’ve been able to seed discussions,” said Tim Thomas of the Maternal Health Task Force, one of the co-sponsors of the maternal health series. “We hope those seeds will take root and flourish.” Luc de Bernis, senior maternal health advisor of UNFPA, echoed Thomas’ sentiments, emphasizing the need for continued dialogue.
While maternal health has drawn increased international attention, creating political agreement among policymakers is a complex and often difficult process. There has been marked, though uneven, progress in improving maternal health across the globe, but more must be done. The Delivering Solutions report provides a state of the field assessment as well recommendations for existing, easy-to-implement solutions.
Event Resources:Calyn Ostrowski presentation
Video
Joining Ostrowski were co-author Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks; Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the UN Population Fund; Tim Thomas, interim director for the Maternal Health Task Force; and Chaacha Mwita, director of communications at the African Population and Health Research Center.
One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the United States and abroad. The series consisted of 21 separate events, with hundreds of experts sharing their experiences and thousands of participants and stakeholders providing their expertise. The final report captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.
Promoting Social Change
Unlike other health issues, said Green during her presentation on the findings of Delivering Solutions, the field of maternal health requires a holistic and multi-faceted approach; that is, an approach that looks not only at health systems, but also at underlying social factors. The report divides maternal health into three broad categories: social, economic, and cultural factors; health systems factors; and research/data demands.
Looking first at the social, cultural, and economic issues, Greene highlighted the need to improve nutrition and educational opportunities for young women in developing countries. Policymakers must be convinced that investing in women is not just good for women but good for families and children, she said. The participation of male partners and other male family members is also needed to increase access to maternal health services, such as family planning, and promote gender equality. The report pointed to a number of recommendations to promote male engagement:
- Target interventions that educate men about danger signs and pregnancy complications.
- Address pressures that many young married men feel to prove their fertility.
- Inform men about sexual rights and how they relate to the health and wellbeing of their partners.
Health systems and medical resources play an equally pivotal role in reducing maternal mortality as social factors. The report highlights several key areas for strengthening the health system including the expansion of healthcare workers, health finance schemes, technology, and commodity distribution.
One key recommendation is to integrate reproductive health and maternal health supply chains. Four key medicines, oxytocin misoprostol, magnesium sulfate, and manual vacuum aspirators, target the three leading causes of maternal mortality (post-partum hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion). Efforts to improve the distribution of these commodities should be more widely dispersed in developing countries and supported by community-based interventions. Women in urban slums, for example, face unique challenges that are not being adequately addressed.
Additionally, new technologies should be more creatively and effectively used, in particular the use of mobile phones in rural communities.
Many of the policy recommendations offered by the report, as Greene pointed out, are low-cost and highly effective. Yet three significant challenges remain for the field in general:
- Six countries – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – account for over half of the maternal deaths worldwide. The unique problems of each of these countries must be addressed and solved.
- Integration of maternal health with existing health services along with an over-reliance on community health workers can overburden weak infrastructure.
- Unnecessary cesarean births are on the rise as more women deliver in private sector facilities. These births cost 2 to 18 times as much as vaginal births and create unnecessary risks for mothers.
Chaacha Mwita of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), located in Nairobi has seen firsthand the result of an overburdened and inadequate maternal health system in both his personal and professional life. Mwita endorsed the findings of the series report, emphasizing in particular the focus on transportation systems, male involvement, stakeholder dialogue, and education.
Mwita said that collaboration at all levels is the key to improving maternal health. Policymakers must communicate with researchers, who, in turn, must communicate with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators in the field. The collaborative in-country dialogue series between the Wilson Center and APHRC, he believes, was a highly useful and easily replicable way of encouraging dialogue among relevant stakeholders in the field.
The Big Picture
”Our hope is that we’ve been able to seed discussions,” said Tim Thomas of the Maternal Health Task Force, one of the co-sponsors of the maternal health series. “We hope those seeds will take root and flourish.” Luc de Bernis, senior maternal health advisor of UNFPA, echoed Thomas’ sentiments, emphasizing the need for continued dialogue.
While maternal health has drawn increased international attention, creating political agreement among policymakers is a complex and often difficult process. There has been marked, though uneven, progress in improving maternal health across the globe, but more must be done. The Delivering Solutions report provides a state of the field assessment as well recommendations for existing, easy-to-implement solutions.
Event Resources:
From the Wilson Center:
New Research on Climate and Conflict Links Shows Challenges for the Field
Monday, January 23, 2012
Levy spoke at a December 19 panel at the Wilson Center on new research on the linkages between climate change and conflict. He was joined by Joseph Hewitt, technical team leader for USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation; Joshua Busby, assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin; and Solomon Hsiang, postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Linking El Niño to Civil Conflict
Princeton University’s Solomon Hsiang recently co-authored a study published in Nature that used statistical analysis to link observable changes in the global climate to conflict outcomes on the ground. The researchers looked at countries strongly impacted by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and compared the onset of civil conflict in those countries during El Niño, relative to the La Niña state.
“[El Niño] is the single dominant pattern of the entire planet’s climate on annual timescales,” said Hsiang. “So what is convenient here from a statistical standpoint is that the climate is going back and forth very rapidly…so there haven’t been major socio-political changes over that time horizon.”
The study found that conflict risk for a given region doubled during the hotter and drier El Niño state, from an average of around three percent to six percent. “You can make a variety of different assumptions about what kind of statistical model you are using and you generally always get the same estimate,” said Hsiang. “The correlation between the global climate and conflict seems to be very, very robust to a variety of choices…It’s one of the most robust results I have seen in any of the statistical literature.”
Nevertheless, “our study doesn’t say anything about why El Niño might be linked to conflict,” Hsiang clarified. “We are just showing an association. Climate is not the only thing driving conflict in these countries…it exacerbates an existing problem.”
Identifying Chronic Vulnerability in Africa
Working at the University of Texas at Austin, Josh Busby presented the Climate Change and African Political Stability program, a composite index mapping climate security vulnerability in a region with rising strategic significance and low adaptive capacity. The index incorporates not only physical exposure but also demographic, socio-economic, and political indicators.
“We focus on situations where large numbers of people could be exposed to mass death from climate-related hazards,” said Busby. He identified southern Somalia, South Sudan, and much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as among the most vulnerable regions, relative to the rest of Africa.
These areas might not necessarily appear as the most vulnerable from a strictly climatic point of view, Busby said, but the composite analysis brings them into focus. For instance, many factors, including governance and a strong La Niña year, contributed to the famine Somalia experienced this year. Although the precise role of climate change is unclear, from a chronic vulnerability perspective, southern Somalia remains an area of concern, he said.
Understanding Pre-Existing Conditions in Vulnerable States
The Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID has commissioned research looking at the relationship between countries that are conflict affected, countries that are fragile, and countries that are highly vulnerable to climate threats, said Hewitt: “We wanted to better understand which countries are likely not to have the capacity, or likely not to have the ability, to manage the stresses and strains of climate threat.”
“[Fragile states] are already characterized by many, many different challenges that contribute to causes of conflict, just aside from climate change itself,” Hewitt pointed out. “Any understanding of the relationship between climate change and conflict needs to understand how climate change is in some sense filtered through all of these existing characteristics.”
On the other hand, many countries identified as highly vulnerable to climate change are not necessarily considered fragile. Despite the predicted changes in climate for these places, they have sources of conflict mitigation and resilience that will likely be able to handle the strains posed by climate change, Hewitt said. “We really want to try and understand what is happening in these countries. How are those countries positioned to confront those stresses, identify coping strategies, and adapt?”
“Any programming that is done to address the consequences of climate threats needs to be attentive to the connections between the program and any pre-existing characteristics that either mitigate conflict or in some sense make the society more vulnerable to conflict” said Hewitt.
Projecting Into the Future
Columbia University’s Marc Levy noted that a strong case for linking climate stress to increased risk of conflict can be made by better explaining the causal chain that leads from environmental change to societal stress. According to the 4th IPCC Assessment, climate change will increase stress on a number of biophysical processes and systems relevant to human societies, such as agriculture, water, ecosystems, and disease. A body of research shows that these natural stresses make societies more vulnerable, consequently increasing their risk of conflict.
Nevertheless, these conclusions are limited by data, according to Levy. Referencing Hsiang et al.’s study, he noted that “there are very few other things that you could measure in a large-end statistical global time series test than inter-annual variability and civil war.” And, importantly, climate change will alter the conditions that the study focused on. “By focusing on variability we know what happens to societies when you get variations around a mean, but we have almost no basis for figuring out what happens when the mean changes,” he said.
“I think we need to firm up our knowledge base by looking more explicitly at how these things operate in high-risk countries. And perhaps start thinking about some customized approaches that might be relevant in high conflict risk countries that wouldn’t necessarily be on the radar outside of those countries,” Levy concluded.
Event Resources:
Image Credit: Joshua Busby/Climate Change and African Political Stability Program.
Integration, Communication Across Sectors a Must, Say Speakers at 2012 NCSE Environment and Security Conference
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health
At the conference’s lead-off plenary, Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), Rosamond Naylor (Director, Stanford’s Center on Food Security and Environment), and our own Geoff Dabelko highlighted the challenges and opportunities of addressing the diverse yet interconnected issues of climate, energy, food, water, and health.
“We need to embrace diversity regardless of the complexity,” said Dabelko, and “abandon our stereotypes and get out of our stovepipes.” Government agencies, academics, and NGOs must be open to using different tools and work together to capture synergies. “If we know everyone in the room, we are not getting out enough,” he said.
“We have to be concerned with every level – national, state, tribal, regional, down to the individual,” said Gerstein. DHS recognizes that climate change affects all of its efforts, and has established three main areas of focus: Arctic impacts; severe weather; and critical infrastructure and key resources.
For Coca-Cola, “managing the complex relationship among [food, water, and energy] is going to be the challenge of the 21st century, said Seabright, who noted that the business community is “seeing a steady increase in the internalization of these issues into business,” including as part of companies’ competitive advantages and strategies.
Similarly, we must offer opportunities and not just threats, said Dabelko, such as exploring climate adaptation’s potential as a tool for peacebuilding rather than simply focusing on climate’s links to conflict. We need to “find ways to define and measure success that embrace the connections among climate, water, and energy, and does not try to pretend they aren't connected in the real world,” he said.
Communicating Across Sectors: Difficult But Necessary
Next, Sherri Goodman (Executive Director, CNA Military Advisory Board), Nancy Sutley (Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality), Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (Climate and Energy Security Envoy, UK Ministry of Defence), and Susan Avery (Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) called on governments, militaries, and institutions to move away from traditional, vertically segmented responsibilities to address today’s environmental and security challenges.
“We live in an interdependent, connected world,” Morisetti said, but communicating that is a challenge. Militaries are likely to have new, broader missions, including conflict prevention, he said, which makes communications all the more important.
Science is moving from reductive to integrated outlooks to better address larger, systems-wide challenges, said Avery, but communicating results of this research to the public, and across and between disciplines, is difficult.
Confronting these communication and education challenges, particularly the difficulties of conveying the probability of various risks, is a key focus of the Council on Environmental Quality, said Sutley. “We confront the challenge of risk communication every day and it’s not limited to climate change,” she said.
Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Climate and Conflict
The common argument is that climate change will lead to scarcity – less arable land, water, rain, etc. – and scarcity will lead to conflict, said Kate Marvel (Lawrence Livermore National Lab). But the link between scarcity and conflict is not that clear. It’s “very important to treat models as tools, not as magic balls,” she said. Developing better diagnostics to test models will help researchers and observers sort out which ones are best.
Kaitlin Shilling (Stanford University) called on the environmental security community to move beyond simple causal pathways towards finding solutions. After all, rolling back climate change is not an option at this point, she said; to find solutions, therefore, we need more detailed analysis of the pathways to violence.
The most common types of climate-conflict correlations are not likely to directly involve the state, said Cullen Hendrix (College of William and Mary). Traditional inter-state wars (think “water wars”) or even civil wars are much less likely than threats to human security (e.g., post-elections violence in Kenya) and community security (e.g., tribal raiding in South Sudan). For this reason, the biggest breakthroughs in understanding climate and conflict links will likely come from better interactions between social and physical scientists, he said.
Because the many unique factors leading to conflict vary from place to place, a better way to assess climate-conflict risk might be mapping human vulnerability to climate change rather than predicting conflict risk in a given place, said Justin Mankin (Stanford University). While human reactions are very difficult to predict, vulnerability is easier to quantify.
Yu Hongyuan (Shanghai Institute for International Studies) compared the concerns of U.S. and Chinese officials on climate change. Polling results, he said, show Chinese officials are most concerned with maintaining access to resources, while American policymakers focus on climate change’s effects on global governance and how it will impact responses to natural disasters, new conflicts, and humanitarian crises. Given the centrality of these two countries to international climate negotiations, Yu said he hoped the “same issues, different values” gulf might be bridged by better understanding each side’s priorities.
Schuyler Null, Lauren Herzer, and Meaghan Parker contributed to this article.
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.
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