Guest Contributor Tim Hanstad:
Poor Land Tenure: A Key Component to Why Nations Fail
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The murder of five land rights campaigners during the last two months – one in Colombia, three in Brazil, and one in Cambodia – have not captured many headlines, but they are a reminder of the central role land tenure plays not just in rural economic development but also in sparking broadly distributed economic gains throughout a society.
Violence has often been threatened against those around the world who advocate for the land rights of the world’s poor. Even for those who aren’t on the front lines, but rather, like my organization, quietly partner with governments to bring about fundamental and structural change to a country, the hazards can be real.
When I started this work more than two decades ago after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law, a bulletproof vest was as essential as a notebook and pen to conduct fieldwork in certain places.
In fact, three colleagues of Landesa’s founder, Roy Prosterman (including a fellow University of Washington alum, Mark Pearlman), were assassinated while meeting to discuss land rights reform legislation in El Salvador in 1981.
To understand why people continue to risk life and limb to help the poor gain control over the land they depend on and why people are willing to kill to stop them, it helps to review the big picture.
Subsistence Without Investment
Around the world there are more than one billion people who are desperately poor. The vast majority of these poor share two traits: one, they rely on agriculture to survive; and two, they don’t legally control the land they till.
Many are sharecroppers, indentured servants, or informal possessors who struggle to climb out of poverty because they don’t have incentives to invest in their land to improve their harvest and their lives. Their lack of legal control over the land is a huge stumbling block not just for their immediate families, but also for the development of their communities and nations, as highlighted in the wonderful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
The authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, of MIT and Harvard, respectively, make clear that even in the most dysfunctional nations, money is being made – often lots of it – but it is not being distributed widely. These “extractive systems,” they argue, are designed specifically to take wealth from a broad class of people (slaves, farmers, mine workers, etc.) to benefit a much smaller subset (the ruling elite, the landed gentry, etc). Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines, and Burma’s vast timber and mineral resources are all examples of systems that exploit not just labor but sovereign natural resources and funnels those proceeds to a small group with the goal of continually extracting more wealth.
In these settings, the opposition to democratic land-rights reform rarely stems from fears that compensation won’t be fair. Instead the elite fear that giving the poor ownership gives them power and leverage: the power of economic opportunity and to not be exploited, and the leverage to pull children out of the fields and send them into the classroom, to start home businesses, and to be innovative.
The inherent power in land rights, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of families, can be exploited during critical junctures to dramatically change the trajectory of a nation’s history to eliminate the extractive systems.
Moving Growth Forward
Despite frequent opposition from powerful vested interests, there are governments around the world who are trying to move toward more inclusive economic systems that offer opportunity to all. Given the current global rush for land, these efforts are particularly timely and critical.
Among the countries currently undertaking such efforts are India, China, Kenya, and Rwanda.
India, with little fanfare, has launched a variety of promising new programs that aim to provide millions of poor rural families with secure titles. In West Bengal, the government is providing landless families with micro-plots of land and training their daughters in organic agriculture. In Odisha, the government is providing indigenous tribes with title to the land their families have farmed for generations without legal control. Because of these initiatives, hundreds of thousands of families across India are now, for the first time, able to send their children to government residential schools, obtain agricultural training, and defend their investments in their own land.
China is gradually rolling out the implementation of documented, 30-year property rights for farmers as well as considering legislative changes that will more effectively protect those rights from later expropriation. While the stand-off in the fishing village of Wukan last year garnered headlines and is certainly not an aberration, the central government is putting together a framework to try to minimize violations of farmers’ land rights.
Kenya just last month adopted land legislation to fulfill the new constitution’s promise to secure land rights for millions of poor farmers. And Rwanda is in the process of formalizing land rights for rural families throughout the country.
Such reforms have been even more effective when women’s land rights are specifically targeted.
Efforts like these should be celebrated and expanded. And new UN guidelines on land rights endorsed last week can provide direction on the necessary national policies, legislation, and programs. Let’s hope that the deaths of so many who have dared to stand up in defense of the lands rights of the poor do not stop brave officials in governments around the world from making progress in the fight against poverty.
As Acemoglu and Robinson note, “Growth moves us forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded.”
Tim Hanstad is president and CEO of Landesa, a global development non-profit that works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Follow us on Twitter at @Landesa_Global.
Sources: Acemoglu and Robins (2012), Arlington National Cemetery, Columbia Reports, Common Dreams, Food and Agriculture Organization, Landesa, Prosterman et al. (2009), The New York Times, Voice of America.
Video Credit: Landesa Global; Photo Credit: New land rights-holders in India, used with permission courtesy of Deborah Espinosa/Landesa.
Violence has often been threatened against those around the world who advocate for the land rights of the world’s poor. Even for those who aren’t on the front lines, but rather, like my organization, quietly partner with governments to bring about fundamental and structural change to a country, the hazards can be real.
When I started this work more than two decades ago after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law, a bulletproof vest was as essential as a notebook and pen to conduct fieldwork in certain places.
In fact, three colleagues of Landesa’s founder, Roy Prosterman (including a fellow University of Washington alum, Mark Pearlman), were assassinated while meeting to discuss land rights reform legislation in El Salvador in 1981.
To understand why people continue to risk life and limb to help the poor gain control over the land they depend on and why people are willing to kill to stop them, it helps to review the big picture.
Subsistence Without Investment
Around the world there are more than one billion people who are desperately poor. The vast majority of these poor share two traits: one, they rely on agriculture to survive; and two, they don’t legally control the land they till.
Many are sharecroppers, indentured servants, or informal possessors who struggle to climb out of poverty because they don’t have incentives to invest in their land to improve their harvest and their lives. Their lack of legal control over the land is a huge stumbling block not just for their immediate families, but also for the development of their communities and nations, as highlighted in the wonderful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
The authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, of MIT and Harvard, respectively, make clear that even in the most dysfunctional nations, money is being made – often lots of it – but it is not being distributed widely. These “extractive systems,” they argue, are designed specifically to take wealth from a broad class of people (slaves, farmers, mine workers, etc.) to benefit a much smaller subset (the ruling elite, the landed gentry, etc). Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines, and Burma’s vast timber and mineral resources are all examples of systems that exploit not just labor but sovereign natural resources and funnels those proceeds to a small group with the goal of continually extracting more wealth.
In these settings, the opposition to democratic land-rights reform rarely stems from fears that compensation won’t be fair. Instead the elite fear that giving the poor ownership gives them power and leverage: the power of economic opportunity and to not be exploited, and the leverage to pull children out of the fields and send them into the classroom, to start home businesses, and to be innovative.
The inherent power in land rights, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of families, can be exploited during critical junctures to dramatically change the trajectory of a nation’s history to eliminate the extractive systems.
Moving Growth Forward
Among the countries currently undertaking such efforts are India, China, Kenya, and Rwanda.
India, with little fanfare, has launched a variety of promising new programs that aim to provide millions of poor rural families with secure titles. In West Bengal, the government is providing landless families with micro-plots of land and training their daughters in organic agriculture. In Odisha, the government is providing indigenous tribes with title to the land their families have farmed for generations without legal control. Because of these initiatives, hundreds of thousands of families across India are now, for the first time, able to send their children to government residential schools, obtain agricultural training, and defend their investments in their own land.
China is gradually rolling out the implementation of documented, 30-year property rights for farmers as well as considering legislative changes that will more effectively protect those rights from later expropriation. While the stand-off in the fishing village of Wukan last year garnered headlines and is certainly not an aberration, the central government is putting together a framework to try to minimize violations of farmers’ land rights.
Kenya just last month adopted land legislation to fulfill the new constitution’s promise to secure land rights for millions of poor farmers. And Rwanda is in the process of formalizing land rights for rural families throughout the country.
Such reforms have been even more effective when women’s land rights are specifically targeted.
Efforts like these should be celebrated and expanded. And new UN guidelines on land rights endorsed last week can provide direction on the necessary national policies, legislation, and programs. Let’s hope that the deaths of so many who have dared to stand up in defense of the lands rights of the poor do not stop brave officials in governments around the world from making progress in the fight against poverty.
As Acemoglu and Robinson note, “Growth moves us forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded.”
Tim Hanstad is president and CEO of Landesa, a global development non-profit that works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Follow us on Twitter at @Landesa_Global.
Sources: Acemoglu and Robins (2012), Arlington National Cemetery, Columbia Reports, Common Dreams, Food and Agriculture Organization, Landesa, Prosterman et al. (2009), The New York Times, Voice of America.
Video Credit: Landesa Global; Photo Credit: New land rights-holders in India, used with permission courtesy of Deborah Espinosa/Landesa.
Guest Contributor Janet Edmond:
Philippines’ Bohol Island Demonstrates Benefits of Integrated Conservation and Health Development
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Sponsored by the USAID-supported BALANCED Project, the study tour was organized by our partner, PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. (PFPI), to show the benefits of health organizations working hand-in-hand with conservation groups in areas vulnerable to environmental destruction. Together with mayors and city administrators from around the Verde Island Passage, another strategic marine region of the Philippines, I saw firsthand how local men and women are struggling to improve their families’ quality of life.
Remote communities often lack access to and knowledge about basic medical services, including reproductive health information on how to increase the years between births to ensure healthier mothers, children, and families. In areas like the Philippines, where people are heavily reliant on their natural resources for both sustenance and their livelihoods, beyond the health benefits, access to reproductive health services can also contribute to protecting local biodiversity by slowing growth rates to more sustainable levels.
PFPI is working with municipal, executive, and legislative officials – particularly health, agriculture, and environment officials – and local community associations to deliver an integrated package of population, health, and environment (PHE) interventions.
PFPI helps setup community-based programs composed of adult peer educators, who promote the links between smaller family size and better health; volunteers who work with fishing families to reduce destructive environmental practices and promote alternative livelihoods; and distributors who serve as outlets for PHE information and family planning and reproductive health commodities. Youth peer educators also work to deliver integrated messages to young people, encouraging planned families and small business development in order to break the existing cycle of poverty. Taken together, these synergistic interventions help men and women increase their abilities to better manage their environment and reduce pressures on already-fragile marine resources.
Our study tour to Bohol included visiting several PFPI sites in communities in the northern provinces of Ubay and Bien Unido, some of the poorest areas on the island. In parts of Ubay, according to a provincial official, the poverty rate is an alarming 75 percent. But the people here are clearly motivated and articulate a bold vision of improving their children’s future in terms of health, education, livelihoods, and food security.
During one visit, we heard from a young man who ferries passengers on his motorcycle across town. He spoke passionately of how, as he drives people around, he also talks to them about the benefits and options for limiting family size and promoting a healthy environment.
On our visit to a distant island surrounded by a marine protected area abutting the Danajon bank, we listened to women who talk to their neighbors about the need to improve family health, protect the environment from destructive human activities, and also provide family planning commodities for a small fee. Along the way, we also met an elderly man whose arm had been lost to dynamite fishing years ago. The municipal coastal resources manager explained that although the destructive practices had been outlawed years ago, the need for food often trumps health and safety concerns. As part of the BALANCED Philippines Project, PFPI and community partners are working with the fishermen to respect the protected area’s boundaries, implement improved fishing practices, and develop alternative livelihoods.
By the end of the study tour, the mayors and local officials from the Verde Island Passage clearly understood and were convinced of the need to better integrate and link health and conservation efforts to reduce pressure on coastal resources. They are already implementing their “action plans” with support from Conservation International Philippines and PFPI, through the BALANCED Philippines Project, to integrate family planning and health activities into marine conservation and livelihoods efforts. These local actors are making a significant difference in the lives of their neighbors, friends, and families, by giving them the tools to manage their resources and bodies, building bridges across sectors, and confronting the main threats to biodiversity in this unique country.
Despite the success of these and other integrated population, health, and environment programs, many conservation professionals shy away from addressing reproductive health issues, considering them too sensitive or outside of their organizations’ mission.
But since 2000, approximately 400,000 people have joined the 1.1 billion already living in fragile ecosystems worldwide. Though the natural population growth rate in these areas has undergone a significant drop – from 1.6 percent in 2000 to 1.3 percent today – a significant unmet need for health services remains and growth will continue. The intersection of people and nature in these areas will therefore play a significant role in the success or failure of conservation efforts in the years to come. Integrated PHE programs are not only good for the environment, but they further development efforts by providing valuable health services and encouraging sustainable alternative livelihoods.
Janet Edmond is the director of population and environment at Conservation International and the deputy director for outreach and advocacy for the BALANCED Project.
Photo Credit: Fisherman showing his daily catch in the Verde Island Passage, used with permission courtesy of Giuseppe Di Carlo/Conservation International.
Valerie Hudson and Chad Emmett: Women’s Well-Being Is the Best Predictor of State Stability
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
“The best predictor of a state’s stability and security is the level of violence against women in society,” said Texas A&M University’s Valerie Hudson in this interview with ECSP. That link is “based on rigorous empirical analysis,” she said. “There’s something to it. It’s not just political correctness.”
Hudson is the co-author of Sex and World Peace, which she launched with Chad Emmett (also interviewed) at the Wilson Center last month. The book is the product of 10 years of research by Hudson, Emmett, and co-authors Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, and Mary Caprioli. In the world of gender studies, “one of the things that we quickly discovered was that anecdotes abound, but anecdotes do not add up to data,” Hudson said.
To combat that discrepancy the authors created the WomanStats Project, a database of more than 324 variables from 175 countries. Using indicators such as the physical security of women, trafficking in women, sex ratio and son preference, equity in family law, polygyny, female genital cutting, and age of marriage, the authors were able to assess women’s well-being on both a micro-scale and between nations.
Comparing this data to the Global Peace Index, the authors found that contrary to conventional wisdom, “the best predictor of a nation’s stability and security is not their level of democracy, it’s not their level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ they belong to,” said Hudson. It’s violence against women.
“We think that there is a link between what’s happening at the micro level with women in the country and what kind of behavior you’re seeing from the state on the world stage.” Given that link, she added, improving the status of women could do more to enhance a state’s security than, “say, exporting democracy or exporting free market capitalism.”
The Obama administration seems to recognize this link. “What’s exciting is that the United States is developing a national action plan to implement this kind of mainstreaming of women into national security, diplomacy, and foreign policy contexts,” Hudson said, adding that “we feel that we could provide the information that would help make this a grounded and effective action plan.”
However, bottom-up initiatives will also play an important role in improving women’s equality and security, said Emmett. As a geographer and Middle East specialist, he pointed out that there are a lot citizen initiatives “coming out of the Islamic world where Muslim women themselves are implementing change, are taking action, are doing things.”
Hudson sees the WomanStats Project as a tool that women around the world can use in their efforts towards equality. “Our feeling is that we want to lower the barriers for people from all walks of life to begin to see and access information on the situation of women…and we’re able to provide that.”
Hudson is the co-author of Sex and World Peace, which she launched with Chad Emmett (also interviewed) at the Wilson Center last month. The book is the product of 10 years of research by Hudson, Emmett, and co-authors Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, and Mary Caprioli. In the world of gender studies, “one of the things that we quickly discovered was that anecdotes abound, but anecdotes do not add up to data,” Hudson said.
To combat that discrepancy the authors created the WomanStats Project, a database of more than 324 variables from 175 countries. Using indicators such as the physical security of women, trafficking in women, sex ratio and son preference, equity in family law, polygyny, female genital cutting, and age of marriage, the authors were able to assess women’s well-being on both a micro-scale and between nations.
Comparing this data to the Global Peace Index, the authors found that contrary to conventional wisdom, “the best predictor of a nation’s stability and security is not their level of democracy, it’s not their level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ they belong to,” said Hudson. It’s violence against women.
“We think that there is a link between what’s happening at the micro level with women in the country and what kind of behavior you’re seeing from the state on the world stage.” Given that link, she added, improving the status of women could do more to enhance a state’s security than, “say, exporting democracy or exporting free market capitalism.”
The Obama administration seems to recognize this link. “What’s exciting is that the United States is developing a national action plan to implement this kind of mainstreaming of women into national security, diplomacy, and foreign policy contexts,” Hudson said, adding that “we feel that we could provide the information that would help make this a grounded and effective action plan.”
However, bottom-up initiatives will also play an important role in improving women’s equality and security, said Emmett. As a geographer and Middle East specialist, he pointed out that there are a lot citizen initiatives “coming out of the Islamic world where Muslim women themselves are implementing change, are taking action, are doing things.”
Hudson sees the WomanStats Project as a tool that women around the world can use in their efforts towards equality. “Our feeling is that we want to lower the barriers for people from all walks of life to begin to see and access information on the situation of women…and we’re able to provide that.”
Reading Radar:
Improving Food Security Through Land Rights and Access to Family Planning
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
From the Wilson Center:
The Global Water Security Assessment and U.S. National Security Implications
Monday, May 21, 2012
“Water will affect our ability to protect our environment, achieve food [security], provide energy security, and respond to climate change,” said Maria Otero, Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the Department of State.
Otero was joined by Kerri-Ann Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs; Casimir Yost and Maj. Gen. Richard Engel, USAF (ret.), of the National Intelligence Council; Ellen Laipson, director and CEO of the Stimson Center; Alexandra Cousteau of Blue Legacy and a National Geographic emerging explorer; and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
The United States, Otero asserted, possesses a unique capacity to provide its global partners with the “science and technology to really…make a difference…at a scale that is significant.”
The Intelligence Assessment
Water problems in countries important to the United States are likely in the next 10 years, Engel said. “Failure to properly deal with this [will] result in agriculture degradation, productivity-wise, in certain countries that will affect them locally and effect global markets and also disable their ability to really succeed economically.”
The National Intelligence Council (NIC), which directed the intelligence community-wide assessment, looked most closely at the strategically important states that cover “the geography between the Nile and the Mekong, where there was a clear intersection of U.S. national security interests and risks to water availability,” said Yost.
Looking out to 2040, they examined three global drivers for water scarcity: population growth, economic development, and climate change.
In the near-term, economic development and population growth are “the more significant drivers as compared to climate change,” said Engel. However, “beyond 2040 that equation might change significantly.”
Water challenges could trigger social disruption, and in some states where other stressors exist, state failure is possible, Engel said. He pointed out that if these states are stressed, one impact will be that “they won’t be able to support…U.S. policy objectives.”
In other instances, water may be used as leverage between states; for example, “one state would potentially develop its water activity first and deny another state the access to that water.” Or, we could see “water potentially being used as a weapon” by terrorists or by states seeking to marginalize sections of their own populace, said Engel.
Water as a factor in more traditional conflicts between states was seen as unlikely, but plausible, in the next decade.
Diplomacy and Engaging Across Sectors
Several years ago, “getting outside the boundaries of traditional security and traditional definitions of national security was hard,” Laipson said. But “it’s not a hard sell anymore; people really…understand the interconnectedness of hard security and soft security.” Working on these connections requires engaging across sectors and scales and opening up the floor to many different actors.
It is important “to make sure that everybody sees a stake and that this isn’t being done to accrue power or prestige to the United States,” said Laipson. “We’re in the mix with everybody else to try to solve the problem.” “People have to have a more wide-angle lens view of who are the stakeholders,” she said. In many states, “when you bring the water engineers and the hydrologists together…they don’t want to become political actors, they don’t want to be dragged in to brief the prime minister or face the press.”
On behalf of the Department of State, Otero reiterated five priorities for water security, as laid out by Secretary Hillary Clinton: building cross-scale institutional capacity, increasing diplomatic efforts, mobilizing financial support, promoting science and technology, and building sustained partnerships.
At this intersection of diplomacy and development, said Jones, “you have to deal with the issues of the local economies ability to produce what it needs in terms of food and energy and…about how you reach out to other donors and other partners.”
Despite the difficulty, outreach efforts are critical because local actors are often the most knowledgeable, Laipson said. She pointed to the example of the Mekong River, which is shared by millions who, despite not seeing themselves as national security actors, possess critical knowledge about the river system and what future changes might mean for their livelihoods and stability.
Protecting Water to Protect People
In some countries the water security story will be all about cooperation, while in others, there is a real need for concern, said Laipson. “Water problems get managed at the sub-national level and at the super-national level. So, you have water authorities that can do the right thing in part of the national territory, even if at the national level, the policies aren’t so great.”
“The real world is going to be about the disaggregated realities,” she asserted.
Capturing these nuances is difficult said Engels. “Not enough hydrological models are available globally to really understand what’s taking place,” and often the data that is available is simply too aggregated to provide a detailed understanding.
Community-level stories help illustrate the real impact of scarcity and quality issues that sometimes seem abstract, said Cousteau. “We hear a lot about the ‘global water crisis,’” she said. “Part of it is a very immediate human tragedy that we have to address…but we don’t talk enough about the coming human tragedy if we don’t look at these river systems and maintaining their integrity…to support healthy communities.”
These changing river systems “have to satisfy demands from a lot of different, both powerful and not powerful interests,” Cousteau said. “We need to continue looking at these rivers as ecosystems…and understand it’s the systems that provide us with buffers.”
Institutionalizing the protection of these buffers and ecosystem services make a real difference to the security of individuals and of states, she argued. For example, Botswana’s Okavango delta “still exists because, in spite of the fact that the water originates in Angola, which was torn apart by civil war [and] runs almost 2000 miles to the Okavango delta passing through Namibia, which is a desert nation, they have recognized that the Okavango delta needs to exist.” People in all three countries have established a trans-basin commission designed to make cooperative decisions about the watershed system.
Encouraging this sort of collaboration is critical to avoiding water-related conflicts, which have thus far been extremely rare.
“Nearly every sector of human activity relies on water resources,” said Harman, yet “freshwater has no direct substitute.” Taken in aggregate, the bottom line, Otero asserted, is that “left unaddressed, water challenges worldwide are going to present a threat to U.S. security interests.”
Event Resources
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.
You Are Invited, May 21, 2012:
Family Planning and Results-Based Financing Initiatives: Opportunities and Challenges
Friday, May 18, 2012
Environmental Change and Security Program, Global Health Initiative
Monday, May 21, 2012, 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC
5th Floor Conference Room
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast
Ben Bellows, Associate, Reproductive Health, Population Council Kenya
Beverly Johnston, Senior Policy Advisor, United States Agency for International Development
Lindsay Morgan, Senior Health Analyst, Health Systems 20/20
Results-based financing (RBF) is a non-monetary or cash exchange that is made to a patient, caregiver, or manager as an incentive to use or deliver priority health services, such as family planning. With deadlines for the Millennium Development Goals rapidly approaching, the international community is increasingly turning to RBF as a method for assessing investments and scaling up maternal and reproductive health services in developing countries.
The impact of RBF on health outcomes is mixed. The discussion will evaluate how RBF affects the supply and demand-sides of family planning, highlight new research from the field, and address the future of RBF at USAID.
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 conference room. 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
From the Wilson Center:
ECSP Report 14: Afghanistan, Against the Odds: A Demographic Surprise
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen for the Wilson Center
Friday, May 18, 2012
A few months ago, Elizabeth Leahy Madsen broke down Afghanistan’s first-ever nationally representative survey of demographic and health issues in a two-part series here on the blog. Now, we’ve published her analysis in a rich new policy brief format. It is the first issue of Environmental Change and Security Program Report 14, the latest volume of ECSP’s flagship publication.
In “Afghanistan, Against the Odds,” Madsen examines the surprising results of this fall’s demographic survey and how the country’s statistics compare to neighboring Pakistan.
“Just as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined,” writes Madsen, “their demographic paths are more closely parallel than we might have expected. For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not.”
The publication of this brief marks the re-launch of ECSP Report as an online-only volume, with individual issues scheduled to be released throughout the year. Forthcoming ECSP Report 14 briefs will address the demographic roots of the Arab Spring; the links between population dynamics and environmental resources like water, biodiversity, and food; and the potential impact of climate change mitigation efforts on conflict.
Published since 1996 in hard copy and online, the new ECSP Report will now be available on the Wilson Center website, New Security Beat, and Issuu. You can read the previous 13 volumes of the ECSP Report on the Wilson Center website.
Download ECSP Report 14: “Afghanistan, Against the Odds” from the Wilson Center.
In “Afghanistan, Against the Odds,” Madsen examines the surprising results of this fall’s demographic survey and how the country’s statistics compare to neighboring Pakistan.
“Just as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined,” writes Madsen, “their demographic paths are more closely parallel than we might have expected. For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not.”
The publication of this brief marks the re-launch of ECSP Report as an online-only volume, with individual issues scheduled to be released throughout the year. Forthcoming ECSP Report 14 briefs will address the demographic roots of the Arab Spring; the links between population dynamics and environmental resources like water, biodiversity, and food; and the potential impact of climate change mitigation efforts on conflict.
Published since 1996 in hard copy and online, the new ECSP Report will now be available on the Wilson Center website, New Security Beat, and Issuu. You can read the previous 13 volumes of the ECSP Report on the Wilson Center website.
Download ECSP Report 14: “Afghanistan, Against the Odds” from the Wilson Center.
From the Wilson Center:
Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Co-author Chad Emmett joined Hudson, along with Jeni Klugman, the World Bank’s director of gender and development, and Richard Cincotta, demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center, to discuss the security implications of gender inequality and potential policy responses.
The Paradox of Missing Women
The basis of the book – applying a gender lens to international security – followed from early feedback from her colleagues at Brigham Young University, who suggested that if her goal was to understand the reasons for “blood spilt and lives lost,” she would do better to look at ideological conflict rather than women’s security.
In response, she made a simple comparison of deaths from conflict and the number of “missing women” in the world. Looking at “as many [conflicts] as I possibly could,” Hudson said she totaled 152 million deaths in 20th century fighting. By comparison, the United Nations Population Fund reported that at the turn of the century – just “one generation, if you will, of the century” – 163 million women went missing from Asia alone.
The missing women phenomenon is “a significant paradox” in global development, said Klugman. “On the one hand there have been enormous advances in terms of life expectancy, but at the same time, relative to boys and men, there’s still enormous excess mortality.”
“We see females who are missing at birth – and that’s the fairly well-known problem of sex-selective abortions…in China and India,” she continued. “And then we have girls who die before they reach their fifth birthday…inadequate water and bad sanitation…and then of course we still have fairly high rates of maternal mortality, which are affecting women of child-bearing age.”
Where a woman lives also affects her security, or lack thereof, at different stages of her life, said Emmett. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, relatively balanced sex ratios suggest that females are safer as babies than in South Asia, where ratios skew in males’ favor. As mothers, however, women may have a “more favorable status” in the Middle East and North Africa than sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, given the region’s relatively low maternal mortality rates, he said.
“A Clash of Gender Civilizations”
Looking at these inequalities, Hudson and Emmett, along with co-authors Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill and Mary Caprioli, put the standard question of whether a state’s security affects the security of its women “on its head,” said Hudson, and instead asked “does the security of women impact the security of states?”
Do gender inequities make problems like food insecurity and famine more likely? Do they make poverty, disease, demographic problems, poor governance, and conflict more likely?
In short, the authors say 10 years of empirically-based, interdisciplinary research indicate the answer is yes. “Perhaps the engine of state conflict is actually a clash of gender civilizations,” Hudson said, and not the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington put forth in his seminal 1993 article.
Looking at health, for instance, the authors found that “the larger the gender gap, the higher the AIDS rate and the higher the rate of infectious diseases,” said Hudson. “And the larger the gender gap, the lower the life expectancy not just for women, but for men.”
Conversely, “the smaller the gender gap, the lower the infant mortality rates, the lower the child malnutrition rates.” Tying the two together, she asked, “might inequitable treatment of women make disease and ill health more likely for the nation?”
The authors repeated that analysis across the board: states with a larger gender gap and fewer rights for women tend to have higher levels of both perceived and actual corruption, lower national incomes, higher and less sustainable fertility levels, and a greater likelihood of both inter- and intra-state violence. Conversely, a smaller gender gap and stronger women’s rights are linked with more durable peace agreements, lower infant mortality and child malnutrition rates, a greater focus on social welfare issues, and higher levels of trust in government.
Convincing the Unconvinced: “A Tough Order”
If gender inequality is one of conflict’s “tap roots,” Hudson continued, “then maybe we would have more success in helping the international system be more peaceful if we concentrated…more on holding nations accountable to their obligations under CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women].”
That goal, however, “is a tough order,” said Cincotta, who was the discussant on the panel. “What we’re talking about is in a world governed by men, largely, countries governed by men, who appeal for their power largely to communities also controlled by men – how do you convince them that giving up some of their power is in their best interest?”
Cincotta pointed to a specific conclusion the authors drew in the book: that states would welcome greater scrutiny of potential rights violations once they understood the connection between stronger women’s rights and stronger state security.
“That to me is a real stretch,” he said. “You’re asking for [states] to say ‘okay, I’m going to bring in [women and human rights defenders], and allow these reports to be made, and I’m going to be better off for it.’”
“[The authors] start out from the beginning warning you that this is the beginning of a long venture and that they can’t prove causality with all the things that they talk about…but they point to certain relationships that are worth thinking about.”
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Progress
Although states may be hesitant to adopt a gendered approach to improving state security, Emmett said women are taking the lead in fostering bottom-up momentum for greater equality. For example, in Saudi Arabia, women activists are pressing the government to be allowed to drive; in Afghanistan, girls are persevering in the face of acid attacks to attend school; and Somali women are raising the call to end female genital mutilation.
The international community also has a role to play, said Klugman. The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report focused on gender inequality for the first time in its 35-year history, and for the first time made “the explicit recognition that these [gender] gaps do not disappear with [economic] growth.” Achieving greater equality will depend on activists and policymakers at every level, and in all sectors, working in tandem, she said.
“You can intervene if you like in one domain, for example making a formal policy change,” Klugman said, “but unless you’re thinking about what’s happening with respect to the other norms…you’re not really going to realize the hoped-for gains.”
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Dot-Mom:
Adenike Esiet: Building Support for Improving Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health in Nigeria
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
“In Nigeria, young people under the age of 25 are driving the HIV epidemic…and that’s been the opening place for people to begin to say, ‘let’s address the issues of young people’s sexual and reproductive health,’” said Adenike Esiet, executive director of Action Health Incorporated in Lagos, during an interview with ECSP.
On any number of health indicators, girls suffer disproportionately. “For every one boy in the age bracket of 10 to 24 who is HIV positive, there are three girls who are HIV positive,” Esiet said. “Over 60 percent of cases of complications from unsafe abortion reported in Nigerian hospitals are amongst adolescent girls. In fact in literature, 10-15 years ago, this was described as ‘a schoolgirl’s problem’…and it’s still an ongoing problem.” She added: “And for girls too, the issue of sexual violence is huge. It goes largely unreported but it’s occurring at epidemic levels.”
Esiet spoke on an adolescent health panel during the April 25 “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center. Progress is slow on these issues, in large part because “there’s a whole lot of silence about acknowledging young people’s sexuality,” she said.
Adults “want to believe [adolescents] shouldn’t be sexually active.” Turning a blind eye to adolescent sexuality can mean that efforts “to provide access to education or services is hugely resisted by practitioners who should be doing this.”
Action Health works to fill the gap that emerges. “Our work covers advocacy, community outreach, and service provision for young people,” said Esiet.
“Our primary entry road in to work with young people is creating access to sexuality education and youth friendly services. And in the course of trying to do that, we have to do a whole lot of advocacy with government and also with ministries or education and ministries of health and youth development.”
The group has worked with government officials and agencies to establish a nationwide HIV education curriculum and paired with local healthcare providers to increase access to “youth-friendly” sexual and reproductive health services. Funding shortages and insufficient resources have hampered the curriculum’s success, though, and the pervasive attitude against youth sexuality has limited the reach of services, she said. Ultimately, “there are a whole range of issues that truly need to be addressed” for outreach efforts to be successful.
On any number of health indicators, girls suffer disproportionately. “For every one boy in the age bracket of 10 to 24 who is HIV positive, there are three girls who are HIV positive,” Esiet said. “Over 60 percent of cases of complications from unsafe abortion reported in Nigerian hospitals are amongst adolescent girls. In fact in literature, 10-15 years ago, this was described as ‘a schoolgirl’s problem’…and it’s still an ongoing problem.” She added: “And for girls too, the issue of sexual violence is huge. It goes largely unreported but it’s occurring at epidemic levels.”
Esiet spoke on an adolescent health panel during the April 25 “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center. Progress is slow on these issues, in large part because “there’s a whole lot of silence about acknowledging young people’s sexuality,” she said.
Adults “want to believe [adolescents] shouldn’t be sexually active.” Turning a blind eye to adolescent sexuality can mean that efforts “to provide access to education or services is hugely resisted by practitioners who should be doing this.”
Action Health works to fill the gap that emerges. “Our work covers advocacy, community outreach, and service provision for young people,” said Esiet.
“Our primary entry road in to work with young people is creating access to sexuality education and youth friendly services. And in the course of trying to do that, we have to do a whole lot of advocacy with government and also with ministries or education and ministries of health and youth development.”
The group has worked with government officials and agencies to establish a nationwide HIV education curriculum and paired with local healthcare providers to increase access to “youth-friendly” sexual and reproductive health services. Funding shortages and insufficient resources have hampered the curriculum’s success, though, and the pervasive attitude against youth sexuality has limited the reach of services, she said. Ultimately, “there are a whole range of issues that truly need to be addressed” for outreach efforts to be successful.
People and the Planet Study Re-Introduces Demography to Sustainability Debate
John May, Center for Global Development
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Population issues have been conspicuously absent from the discussions on the environmental sustainability of our globalized economy in the run-up to the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, which will take place in Brazil, June 20-22, under the auspices of the United Nations.
Fortunately, the new report, People and the Planet by the Royal Society, should help change this woefully shortsighted approach. The report demonstrates clearly and convincingly that demographic trends cannot be separated from consumption patterns, and that there is no chance to achieve a path of equitable and sustainable development without tackling population growth and consumption at the same time. In short, population and the environment cannot and should not be considered as two separate issues.
This strong and long overdue pitch to bring back the “p” word into the environmental debate is most welcome. In recent decades, international attention has shifted from rapid population growth to other urgent issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, humanitarian crises, climate change, and good governance. But reproductive health and voluntary family planning programs are still very much needed, especially in high fertility countries, and they require political leadership and long-term financial commitment. Broader access to family planning services will be needed to accelerate the decline of high fertility rates, particularly in countries where unmet needs for contraception are high.
Continue reading at the Center for Global Development.
Image Credit: People and the Planet cover, courtesy of the Royal Society.
From the Wilson Center:
Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Environment and Security [Part Two]
Monday, May 14, 2012
Youth in the troubled Niger Delta offer a case in point. Judy Asanti, executive director of Academic Associates PeaceWorks, a Nigeria-based conflict resolution NGO, said that the 2009 amnesty program the government enacted to disarm militants has, paradoxically, incentivized violence among the country’s marginalized youth as they struggle to establish livelihoods for themselves. Seeing the government pay former militants monthly stipends in exchange for disarming, marginalized youth are now motivated to take up arms against the state with the expectation that it will then have no choice but to pay them for peace.
Conflict in the country extends far beyond Niger Delta, however, and is motivated by a number of factors beyond opposition to the oil industry and its negative impact on local development. “Violence in Nigeria is unfortunately quite regular, quite intense, but also quite varied in its motives, in its scope, and in its direction,” said Peter Lewis.
“There is not a single fault line, north-south, Christian-Muslim, Yoruba-Hausa, or any other such simple division that would explain…the majority of violence in Nigeria.”
There is nonetheless a set of “critical issues” that are reflected across the country’s main centers of conflict, said Baker. In the delta region, central Nigeria, and northern Nigeria, “population issues, health issues, and natural resource issues are all critical,” she said.
Land and Climate Challenges
“Nigeria…is not immune to the threat of climate change,” he said. “We have seen Lake Chad dry up, we have seen people lose their livelihoods, and we’ve seen the migration that has come out of Lake Chad into Nigeria.”
How do you plan for this? The answer, Nyong said, is in figuring out how to “sustain green growth in the face of poverty alleviation.” The upcoming Rio+20 meetings will be an important forum for exploring alternatives, he argued. “We cannot continue on the development paradigm that we have chosen.”
George Akor, senior program manager at the Women Environmental Programme, pointed out the specific gendered impacts of environmental stress. “Climate change impacts, such as water scarcity, and falling agricultural productivity, may disproportionately affect women and girls,” he said, drawing from the 2010 Nigerian Millennium Development Goals Report.
“Women make up some 60 to 80 percent of [the] agricultural labor force in Nigeria – they play a very important role in this sector,” said Akor. Yet they rarely own the land because it is largely a patrilineal society. This disconnect reduces the capacity of Nigeria’s communities to adapt to challenges such as population pressure, severe erosion, uncontrolled logging, land subsidence, flooding in the coastal and riverine states, and drought and desertification in the north, he said.
“Water, land, and biodiversity are under severe pressure,” and that stress is manifested in crop failure, declining yields, and increased work time required for less food and less income. Women’s livelihoods are directly affected by these issues, said Akor.
The urban environment also faces pressure from poor land management, shoddy construction, and the continued growth of slums in major cities.
Industrial activities, such as illegal mining in the north-west, which received media attention after the discovery of widespread lead poisoning, and oil pollution from spillage and gas flares, are also serious environmental issues, Akor said.
Water Mismanagement and Government Opacity
“Water and sanitation isn’t really a hot topic in Nigeria,” said Ameto Akpe of Nigeria’s BusinessDay newspaper. Yet, “every year, almost 200,000 kids under the age of five die from drinking unsafe water [and] many more fall terribly sick from water related diseases like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever.” Akpe described challenging authorities on the lack of safe water and routinely receiving answers that were evasive and nonchalant. “It’s something you see over and over again,” she said.
“The water sanitation crisis…is less about the lack of the resource, or even the lack of funds, and more about poor and faulty management failures that have dramatic consequences,” said Akpe. She pointed to a project in the city of Makurdi on the banks of the river Benue, where tens of millions of dollars have been spent on a new water treatment facility in an area that lacks the infrastructure to actually distribute the water to residents.
How could such an oversight occur? The reasons are complex, but corruption and a lack of transparency in government financing are major issues, she said. Despite government promises that 75 percent of Nigerians will have access to clean drinking water by 2015, the water budget has been repeatedly slashed since 2010. It is now 65 percent of what it used to be, Akpe said.
Reasons for Optimism in a Rising Civil Society
The growing rift between Nigerians and their government spilled into the open in January when thousands protested the end of the government’s long-standing fuel subsidy, which caused prices for food, fuel, and transportation to skyrocket overnight. Although there have been protests in response to oil price hikes in the past – notably in 1988 and 2000 – this round was markedly different, said Akwe Amosu, an Africa policy analyst with the Open Society Foundation.
The mood of the January protests was encapsulated by a student quoted in Reuters, said Amosu. “He said, ‘the bottom line is we don’t trust the government to do what they say anymore.’” Paired with the unequal distribution of recent growth, that distrust is reorienting public opinion and galvanizing civil society. Within weeks, the protests prompted the government to reign in the cutbacks and simply reduce, rather than repeal, the subsidy.
“There is a rising level of expectations that…is changing the way that people think,” said Amosu. “People are beginning to feel more acutely the difficulties around poverty, around jobs, around lack of services.” Those rising expectations are contributing to a level of discourse on governance that is unparalleled in the country’s recent history, and which, if sustained, could help brighten the country’s future.
“Nigeria’s never been this divided since the civil war, and yet the country has never been this united in protest in its history,” she said, quoting ActionAid’s Hussaini Abdu. “And I think that speaks to the idea that people are getting a handle on the idea that they are a critical part of holding the nation to account.”
Event Resources:
Stuart Kent contributed to this article.
Photo Credit: Lagos slums, courtesy of flickr user smagdali (Stefan Magdalinski). Map courtesy of UNEP; video courtesy of PBS NewsHour.
From the Wilson Center:
Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Demography and Health [Part One]
Monday, May 14, 2012
Youth make up the bulk of society and yet are sidelined by a disproportionate unemployment rate. The vast majority of Nigerians (84.5 percent) live on less than $2 a day as the country’s growing wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. A changing climate, minimal services, and Boko Haram destabilize the country’s north, while environmental degradation, corruption, and resource mismanagement impede progress in the south.
Unmet Demographic Expectations
“Thirty years ago there was an expectation of better progress on demographic transition for Nigeria,” said Scott Radloff, the director of USAID’s Population and Reproductive Health Office. In 1982, he said, the United Nations Population Division estimated that total fertility rates (TFR) would fall from 6.8 children per woman to 4.7 by 2010, and that infant mortality rates would fall from 132 deaths per 1,000 live births to just 57 over the same time period. In reality, TFR fell to just 5.6, while infant mortality slid to 97.
For family planning in particular, Radloff said, “there’s been little to show for [the international community’s] investment. Modern contraceptive prevalence was measured in 2008 at just 10 percent, which is not very different from where it was 20 years ago, or 30 years ago for that matter.”
The country’s population growth will further strain its resources in the coming years, said Bolatito Ogunbiyi, an Atlas Fellow with Population Action International. Nigeria is already 1 of 15 sub-Saharan countries suffering from water shortages, she said, and climate change and population growth are projected to further constrain supply while boosting demand.
Those twin pressures will also make food security efforts more difficult as more people will have to feed themselves with less land and less reliable access to natural resources. “Looking at the effect of climate change with population growth…the situation could get worse in the future,” said Ogunbiyi.
“A Very Important Contradiction”
In recent years, an economic boom has accompanied Nigeria’s population boom, making it one of the fastest growing economies in the world, said the World Bank’s Volker Treichel. On the one hand, that growth is contributing to a small but growing middle class in the country, on the other, there remains “a very important contradiction in Nigeria” between greater prosperity and growing unemployment.
“While there is impressive GDP growth…that growth is not being distributed evenly through the economy,” said Anthony Carroll, vice president of the business consulting firm Manchester Trade, Ltd. “Growth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”
While the boom benefits Nigeria’s wealthy, the country’s youth suffer disproportionately from rising unemployment, said Treichel, with more than 40 percent of the 15- to 24-year-old cohort unemployed. In order to get one of the few formal sector jobs available, youth “keep going back to school and adding another bachelor’s degree, another master’s degree,” he said, “and that’s so difficult, because those jobs just don’t keep growing at the pace that is necessary.”
Adolescent Reproductive Health and Family Planning
“Poverty predisposes adolescents to high risk behaviors and pushes parents to marry off their daughters,” said Adenike Esiet, executive director of Action Health Incorporated in Lagos. Further, “socially prescribed gender roles undermine young women’s agency and their ability to protect themselves.” Such perceptions must be altered she argued, if the country’s human resources are to be full realized.
“These are the young people who will govern Nigeria, with no education, and for the women, limited agency and a [limited] means of managing their own fertility.”
“When we say adolescent sexual and reproductive health, we mean the physical, mental, emotional well-being of young people – that includes the freedom from unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion, maternal death, sexual transmitted infections (including HIV), and every form of sexual violence and coercion,” she said.
In the north, more than two-thirds of girls marry before the age of 20, according to Esiet. “This violates the rights of these young women, because they can’t be consenting if they are minors. These girls are marrying men who are far older than them [and] who have multiple partners,” placing them at risk of contracting sexual diseases and leading to loss of schooling and livelihood opportunities, she said. For every one adolescent boy who is HIV positive in Nigeria, there are three girls.
In addition, “teenage mothers are twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes,” Esiet said, yet more than half of Nigerian girls bear their first child before the age of 20. These newborns are also more likely to die during infancy. “Teenagers are typically physically, emotionally, and economically, unprepared to take care of children because they are still children themselves.”
“A major driver [of poor health outcomes] continues to be the denial amongst adults of the fact that young people are not asexual,” said Esiet. “In the midst of all of these negative sexual and reproductive health indicators, adults will still rather believe that young people should not have access to services or information.”
“What people need is information to take more informed decisions,” said the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative’s Kabir Abdullahi. “Incidentally, that is not what is provided.”
A dearth of facilities, transport, and family planning services, as well as the low priority this area receives in the government budget, has resulted in a shocking maternal mortality rate of 545 women per 100,000 live births, according to Abdullahi.
With a total fertility rate of almost six children per woman and a population set to double over the next 25 years, huge expansions in the health sector are needed even just to maintain the current level of services, he said.
He recommended making health insurance available to those at the community level and focusing on changing “the norm of secrecy around family planning” by encouraging traditional community and religious leaders to reflect on the impact of poor maternal health on their communities.
“Religious leaders have tremendous power of speech,” Abdullahi said. “Because they speak the same language, they understand them, they know them, [and] they have trust in them.”
Accounting for Diversity and Maintaining Commitments
Dr. Zipporah Kpamor, chief of party for the NGO Management Sciences for Health, said the extensive sub-national diversity in Nigeria is an important factor in the lack of progress on demographic and health indicators.
Kpamor explained that a large portion of national health funding is commonly allocated to high profile projects in teaching hospitals and major centers. These projects, she said, fail to benefit the diverse majority of Nigerians.
“The primary key,” said Esiet, “is understanding that when we say adolescents or young people, we’re talking about a diverse population. We have resources and we know what needs to be done, it’s the management of those resources that continues to draw us back as a country.”
All of the speakers explained at length that health solutions require a comprehensive approach, better information, better services, higher quality infrastructure, and a serious focus on gender relations. Yet, the heart of the problem is that the pledges being made have not converted into action.
“We like to say that Nigeria would sign every funky policy, any beautiful policy that comes up – we’re the first to sign,” said Esiet. However, “sticking by the letters of the documents we signed…truly becomes an issue.”
“The truth of the matter is that there’s progress that’s been made in Nigeria, it’s just that progress is just too slow.”
Continue reading part two of “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines,” on environment and conflict challenges.
Event Resources
- Kabir Abdullahi Presentation
- Anthony Carroll Presentation
- Adenike Esiet Presentation
- Zipporah Kpamor Presentation
- Peter Lewis Presentation
- Bolatito Ogunbiyi Presentation
- Volker Treichel Presentation
- Video
Sources: MEASURE DHS, UN, UN Population Division, UNFPA, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Better nutrition, better education for students,” courtesy of the Gates Foundation. Child mortality map courtesy of UNICEF.
Population-Climate Dynamics: From Planet Under Pressure to Rio
Roger-Mark De Souza, Climate and Development Knowledge Network
Friday, May 11, 2012
In late May, I presented research on population and climate dynamics in hotspots at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, in a session organized by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network. As we prepare for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, I reflect on the roles of population dynamics and climate-compatible development for ensuring a future where we can increase the resilience of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
- Improving our well-being and the future we can have is within our reach: We can take action to improve well-being through specific actions that can produce short term results. This is a key message encapsulated in the concept of climate-compatible development, reflected in many presentations and discussions that I heard at Planet Under Pressure. Even though others were not calling it “climate-compatible development,” the essence and the meaning behind the research was the same – small concrete discrete steps are possible, and taking action on population dynamics is one of them.
- Population is on the agenda: Population issues – growth, density, distribution, aging, gender – were a constant at Planet Under Pressure – and in more ways than just looking at population as a driver. It is clear that there is interest, and a need, to address population as a key component of climate-compatible development.
- But those concerns and issues must be location specific, and must be contextualized for the policy and programmatic environment: Population issues must be framed in the appropriate context – and must move beyond academic exploration. I attended one session where a paper presented an academic supposition of whether we should invest in consumption versus fertility reduction to produce short-term returns for climate, but the analysis was completely devoid of any political, policy, or programmatic truth-testing. We must factor in those considerations when making recommendations, if ultimately we are really looking to make the difference that we can.
Photo Credit: “Urbanization in Asia,” courtesy of United Nations Photo.
Pakistan’s Climate Change Challenge
Michael Kugelman, AfPak Channel
Friday, May 11, 2012
Last month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan’s environmental insecurity.
Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as “the world’s highest waste dump.” Much of this waste-generated from soldiers’ food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan’s chief water source.
Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan’s environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan’s United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan’s land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh’s environment minister said that millions of people across the province face “acute environmental threats.”
Continue reading on the AfPak Channel.
Sources: Daily Times, Dawn.com, Environment News Service, The Express Tribune, The New York Times, Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan.
Photo Credit: “Surveying damage in Pakistan,” courtesy of the U.S. Army.
Guest Contributor Peter Stoett:
A Northern View: Canada’s Climate Claims and Obligations
Thursday, May 10, 2012
However, Canadians, as potential citizens of the next energy superpower, need a more comprehensive and enriching debate. Climate change adaptation measures, at home and abroad, are inevitable, but the issue has largely been ignored by the federal government thus far.
To many Americans, it may seem that Canada has equated energy production with national prosperity, but Canadians are increasingly concerned about the human security and eco-justice implications of ongoing climate change as well. Lack of leadership at the federal level on Kyoto-related energy efficiency and emissions mitigation has been partially offset by actions at the provincial and municipal levels, but climate change is occurring now and it demands a coordinated response from the federal government, the only political apparatus capable of channeling the resources necessary for making a solid contribution to global climate change adaptation.
A moderate predictive scenario suggests that the regional impacts of climate change will be very expensive: the UN projects the global Green Climate Fund will require up to $100 billion a year by 2020. Water stress – too little, too much, or the perception of either – may be the most common theme. Coastal flooding, shoreline erosion, glacier retreat, chronic water shortages, loss of biodiversity and habitat, increased spread of invasive species, extreme weather events; taking preventive action against these (beyond the obvious call for reduced emissions) will be prohibitively expensive for most communities around the globe, including the coastal and northern regions of Canada.
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification has become a conduit for the argument that drought and land degradation related to climate change justifies southern demands for northern investment in initiatives in Africa and elsewhere. As a high emissions per capita nation, Canada has an obligation to contribute to such international efforts.
But I also don’t see why the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north should be denied claims as permafrost thaws and ice-cover vital for subsistence hunting disappears. Citizens of small island states, to whom adaptation may well mean the abandonment of their homeland, have charged willful ignorance or purposeful negligence of their plight; so too might riparian communities along Canada’s many ocean shorelines, lakes, and rivers. Farmers, fishers, First Nations communities: all will need to adapt. We need to start seriously planning ahead to meet climate change scenarios, instead of burying the issue under the tar sands.
Of course, people will adapt to shifting conditions; such is the imperative of survival. And there are many ingenious ways this will materialize. Indeed many mitigation and adaptation strategies blend together as hybrids today. Building more effective alternative energy systems can be seen as much as responses to climate change as preventive measures and involve both public and private sector funding, for example.
However, paying for adaptation is another matter, and here it is vital in my view to stress the potential role of infrastructure spending by the federal government. Much of Canada’s current fiscal restraint is indeed a welcome development if the government cuts back on waste and redundancy, but not if it serves as a veil for sacrificing principles of eco-justice – the idea that those who made the least contributions to and benefit the least from environmental problems should not bear disproportionately higher risks.
Of course there will be nasty disputes ahead about the accounting, accountability, legitimacy, and purpose of climate change adaptation funding for Canada, in or out of the UNFCCC process, but let me draw just a few general conclusions at this stage:
- There is an ethical imperative to contribute to international adaptation funding, perhaps just as great an imperative as traditional efforts to help former colonized countries. It’s not just about money, at least not directly: Canadian technical, policy, and financial expertise should be harnessed for this purpose as well.
- Unlike in other policy areas, there is no way to unload or pass the buck on climate change adaptation efforts: they demand the utilization of centralized resources redistributed throughout the country and through multilateral funding mechanisms.
- Adaptation funding should not, however, supplant more traditional emergency, humanitarian, or environmental funding. It should be seen as a supplement, albeit one with increasing importance, but not as a new form of dependency or gold-rush of aid-with-obligations opportunities. The current government is right to worry about accountability issues.
- But accountability goes both ways: we need at least to get the accounting and communications right on this, thus the need for open dialogue and ongoing consultation. Killing the well-respected National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, which consulted various Canadian stakeholders on key environmental questions, was not a good start.
Peter Stoett is the Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute and professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, Montreal.
Sources: CBC, The Catholic Register, The Huffington Post, International Institute for Sustainable Development, UNFCCC.
Photo Credit: “City, Suburb, Ocean, Mountain,” courtesy of flickr user ecstaticist (Evan Leeson).
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