New Security Beat

A new study published in Conservation Biology (abstract) calculates that more than 80 percent of major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 have taken place in one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. "The fact that so many conflicts have occurred in areas of high biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation warrants much further investigation as to the underlying causes, and strongly highlights the importance of these areas for global security," says coauthor Russell A. Mittermeier. He and lead author Thor Hansen argue that protecting nature during war can help recovery, and call for integrating conservation “into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programs in the world’s conflict zones.”

The Bixby Forum, "World in 2050: A Scientific Investigation of the Impact of Global Population Changes on a Divided Planet" included panels on population's links to war, climate change, and the environment. Malcolm Potts, the chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s Bixby Center for Population Health and Sustainability recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his latest book, Sex and War.

In Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources from the Henry L. Stimson Center, experts from South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East “examine the environmental dangers and policy dilemmas confronting the sustainable management of shared water resources in a warming world”—including the potential for conflict. In the concluding chapter, David Micheli finds that climate change is unlikely to lead to full-scale “water wars,” but warns that “rising climatic stresses on common waters will put new and perhaps unprecedented strains on cooperative governance institutions at the local, national, and international levels.”

Rampant logging fueled Cambodia’s decades-long civil war. Now a new report from transparency watchdogs Global Witness, Country for Sale, claims that the country’s emerging oil and mineral sectors may pose a similar threat. Says Gavin Hayman, “The same political elite that pillaged the country’s timber resources has now gained control of its mineral and petroleum wealth. Unless this is changed, there is a real risk that the opportunity to lift a whole generation out of poverty will be squandered.”

Thirty-three countries have been named “highly vulnerable” to the impact of climate change on their fisheries by a new study published in Fish and Fisheries. In these countries, two-thirds of which are in tropical Africa, fish accounts for 27 percent or more of daily protein intake, compared to 13 percent in non-vulnerable nations. InterPress examines the impact of acidification and rising surface temperatures on the fish stocks of coastal South Africa.

If you’ve visited Rwanda, chances are you’ve seen the country’s famous mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park. The endangered gorillas are such a national treasure that the ceremony when each year’s baby gorillas are named is a huge public event. Yet most foreign tourists never visit the country’s other attractions, which include Akagera National Park in the east and Nyungwe National Park in the southwest.

Destination Nyungwe Project (DNP), which I visited yesterday with the leaders of the East Africa PHE Network, is trying to change all that. It envisions Nyungwe National Park becoming a world-class tourist destination, and improving the livelihoods of the local people in the process. In fact, as project director Ian Munanura sees it, ensuring the park benefits local communities is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s fine to tell people not to cut down trees in the forest, or not to poach endangered animals, but they will continue these activities unless they have another way to make a living.

Nyungwe has a lot to offer; as the largest montane rainforest in Africa, it boasts 13 species of primates, including chimpanzees and colobus monkeys, as well as nearly 300 species of birds. It also has a relatively well-developed network of hiking trails. DNP is working on several projects intended to boost the park’s tourism appeal, including an interpretive visitor center, high-end tented campsites, and a rainforest canopy walk on a bridge suspended between two towers.

As these larger projects are constructed, DNP—which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and implemented by International Resources Group, Family Health International, and the Wildlife Conservation Society—is also working to improve the health, livelihoods, and environmental management of the local communities. A health coordinator works with local clinics to improve maternal and child health, family planning and reproductive health, and hygiene. Health and family-planning activities are key to ensuring the park’s survival because high population growth, and the resulting demand for land, is one of the key threats to the park, says Munanura. A small-grants program provides micro-loans to local people for sustainable livelihoods, such as setting up cultural tourism attractions or producing soap, lotion, and oils from forest products.

Nyungwe National Park still struggles to attract tourists, as it lacks the luxury accommodations offered at Volcanoes National Park. But according to Munanura, 80 percent of visitors to Nyungwe hear about it through word-of-mouth, suggesting that those who do visit are extremely satisfied with their experience. These visitors would probably be even more satisfied knowing that their vacations were helping communities escape from poverty and disease. We will be following the progress of this innovative project with interest.

Rachel Weisshaar is attending the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. She will be posting daily updates on the New Security Beat throughout the week (see days one and two).

Photo: Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

“Demography will have a greater role in defense planning in the future,” says Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba in this short video preview of her article, “Population in Defense Policy Planning,” now appearing in the 13th issue of Environmental Change and Security Program Report. “Robert Gates has put a lot of emphasis on development as a key to peace, and Africa Command may be the area that brings together issues of demography, the environment, and development, and sends those observations back up the higher levels at DOD,” she observes. Sciubba, Mellon Environmental Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College, and six other demographic experts analyze the links connecting population and environmental dynamics to conflict in a set of commentaries on "New Directions in Demographic Security.”

“The road to inaction is paved with research reports,” said Marya Khan, our Population Reference Bureau facilitator, opening today’s East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network workshop on bridging the research-to-policy gap.

At the Environmental Change and Security Program, we know all too well that even the best program or most dramatic research findings don’t stand a chance of being implemented unless they are communicated to policymakers in succinct, persuasive formats. Yet researchers often neglect to convey their results to decision makers and donors, assuming they won’t be interested or won’t appreciate their methodologies, explained Khan. Furthermore, researchers are often hesitant to draw out the policy implications of their findings, believing this is policymakers’ responsibility, while policymakers tend to think this is researchers’ duty—so these critical implications are often never explored.

Today’s sessions aimed to empower the PHE working groups from Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya to develop their own strategies to bridge the research-to-policy gap. The groups brainstormed policy communications objectives they wished to achieve—such as officially launching their country PHE network—as well as concrete outcomes that would contribute to accomplishing those objectives—such as convincing representatives from various national government ministries to join their network.

Rachel Weisshaar is attending the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. She will be posting daily updates on the New Security Beat throughout the week (see yesterday's post).

Photo: Members of the Kenya PHE Working Group discuss communications strategies. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

“The climate issue also very clearly illustrates the whole complexity of the security issue,” says Henrik Selin. “Arctic melting is a national security issue in the traditional national security kind of way.” In this podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program, Selin, assistant professor of international relations at Boston University, and Stacy VanDeveer, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, sat down with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko to discuss the resonance of climate change in the U.S. security community.

VanDeveer and Selin were in Washington to speak at a January 12 event, “Governing the Climate: Lessons From the National Conference on Climate Governance.” VanDeveer has frequently coauthored articles with Dabelko, including “It's Capacity, Stupid: International Assistance and National Implementation” in Global Governance, “European Insecurities: Can’t Live With ’Em, Can’t Shoot ‘Em” in Security Dialogue, and “Environmental Cooperation and Regional Peace: Baltic Politics, Programs, and Prospects” in Environmental Peacemaking.

Startling new research in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science & Technology shows that fossil groundwater in southern Jordan is radioactive at levels up to 2000% higher than the international drinking water standard. That the radioactivity is naturally occurring is little consolation for Jordanians—and perhaps for residents of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, who sit atop the same sandstone Nubian aquifer system.

The shocking findings in "High Naturally Occurring Radioactivity in Fossil Groundwater from the Middle East" by Duke University’s Avner Vengosh and colleagues should be cause for major concern. As Vengosh, a geo-chemistry professor with long-standing research collaborations with Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian colleagues, wrote in an email: “Most of the Jordanian population is not using the fossil water for drinking—for now. Only few thousand people in Aqaba and Karak might be currently exposed to this water. However, Jordan has launched a huge water project to transfer the water from the aquifer in the south to the capital Amman, which would expose a large population to this water.”

According to Vengosh, although these specific findings are limited to the water groundwater under in Jordan, Saudi Arabia is using groundwater from the same aquifer (the Saq) extensively, mostly for agriculture but also for drinking. In this arid part of the world, countries have turned to nonrenewable fossil groundwater as one of the few remaining options. As stated in the article’s abstract, “These findings raise concerns about the safety of this and similar nonrenewable groundwater reservoirs, exacerbating the already severe water crisis in the Middle East.”

Vengosh shared the findings with Jordanian authorities ahead of publication. While it is hard to predict the social, economic, and political reactions to this news, it is easier to anticipate the effects of sustained consumption of water contaminated with radium isotopes. Vengosh says exposure to much lower levels of radium resulted in higher frequencies of bone cancer in a New Jersey community.

Photo: Avner Vengosh. Copyright Duke University Photography.

Rwandan Minister of Natural Resources Stanislas Kamanzi officially launched the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network this morning, stating that Rwanda’s highest-in-Africa population density of 365 people per square kilometer—which he argued leads to environmental degradation and poor human health in both rural and urban areas—compels an integrated approach to development. Kamanzi said that Rwanda’s National Environment Policy and national development plan, Vision 2020, both recognize population-health-environment (PHE) links, and he expressed Rwanda’s commitment to implementing the recommendations of the First Inter-ministerial Conference on Health and Environment in Africa, which was co-hosted by the World Health Programme and the UN Environment Programme in Gabon in August 2008.

The men and women at this conference—who hail from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda—are the best and brightest practitioners of integrated development in East Africa. Even so, Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) challenged them to truly let down their disciplinary boundaries, limit their use of sector-specific jargon, and instead think holistically about the links between population, health, and environment.

Each country in the East Africa PHE Network has its own working group, and they detailed their impressive accomplishments since the East Africa PHE Network was founded at a November 2007 conference in Addis Ababa:

• The Rwandans helped conduct an assessment of PHE linkages and projects in Rwanda, and also recruited new working-group members, such as the Ministry of Health and various universities.
• The Ugandans helped carry out a similar assessment in their country; they also had newspaper articles published on their programs and convinced a radio station to grant them a one-hour time slot twice a month for PHE programming.
• The Kenyans engineered the inclusion of two environmental variables—land holdings and food security—in the Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey. They also successfully petitioned the Kenyan government and the UN Population Fund to include PHE language in their seventh country program.
• The Ethiopians formalized their working group into the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE) and gained the support of Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis. By convincing many of the country’s largest associations of environmental and health professionals that it is in their best interest to coordinate their efforts, CIPHE has built an email list of more than 2,000 individuals.

The working-group members face steep challenges: lack of financial and human resources; little time to devote to strengthening awareness of and support for PHE; and the absence of long-term strategic plans. Yet they are remarkably hard on themselves despite these difficulties. The Kenyan group even calculated, down to two decimal points, what percentage of their original goals they had achieved. If only all organizations were so scrupulous and transparent!

Rachel Weisshaar is attending the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda, which is hosted by PRB and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. See other posts on the New Security Beat: “East Africa PHE Network: Translating Strong Results Into Informed Policies,” “Rwanda: More Than Mountain Gorillas,” and “Specialty Coffee Project Brings Jolt of Attention to Agriculture, Health in Rural Rwanda.”

Photo: Stanislas Kamanzi, Rwandan Minister of Natural Resources, opens the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network. Photo courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, based on the work of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding, summarizes the links between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding, and includes 14 case studies of how natural resources affect—or are affected by—conflict.

The authors of “On Population Growth Near Protected Areas” come to an opposite conclusion from Wittemyer et al., who found a pattern of higher population growth near protected areas in Africa and Latin America. “To understand the disagreement, we re-analyzed the protected areas in Wittemyer et al.’s paper. Their results are simply artifacts of mixing two incompatible datasets,” write the authors. “Protected areas may experience unusual population pressures near their edges; indeed, individual case studies provide examples. There is no evidence, however, of a general pattern of disproportionate population growth near protected areas.”

“The President and I agreed to a new initiative that will further cross-border cooperation on environmental protection and environmental security,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, announcing plans for a U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue.

Scientists at Purdue University have teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive map of U.S. CO2 emissions.

Mark Weston, who writes for the Global Dashboard blog, posted an edited version of a recent talk he gave on West African demography and security.

“Human-animal conflicts have assumed alarming proportions in the region,” Asghar Inayati, a regional wildlife warden in Kashmir, recently told Inter Press Service (IPS) News. Since India and Pakistan gained independence in 1949, both sides have fought for control of the territory. Not only has the decades-long conflict claimed 100,000 lives (by some estimates), it has also displaced animals from their natural habitats, sparking violent encounters with local people and threatening many species’ survival.

According to IPS News, in the last three years, more than 49 people and 404 animals have died as a result of human-animal conflict in Kashmir. With their habitats increasingly fragmented by deforestation, periodic skirmishes, a fenced line of control, and human settlements, displaced animals have strayed into local communities, feeding on livestock and crops. In retaliation, many local farmers hunt, capture, and kill wildlife. “These conflicts are a major threat to continued survival of many species,” says A. K. Srivastava, the chief wildlife warden.

Kashmir is home to several critically endangered species, including the Kashmiri red stag and the snow leopard. As IPS News reports, wildlife wardens are approaching the problem from both sides, increasing farmers’ awareness of the importance of wildlife, while also helping them build better livestock pens and barricades to keep predators at bay. Wardens are also using aversion techniques to keep animals away from human habitats. But with critically endangered species like the Kashmiri red stag on the brink of extinction—with approximately only 150 left in the world—conservation efforts need to be stepped up to save indigenous animals from extinction.

Rapid urbanization, deforestation, and environmental fragmentation have made human-wildlife conflict a pervasive problem in many countries. Deforestation in Indonesia has triggered conflict between local farmers and the critically endangered Sumatran tiger; the tigers feed on local livestock, igniting deadly retaliatory attacks by farmers. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, elephants are increasingly forced to compete with humans for access to freshwater and vegetation, often losing that fight to their human competitors.

“Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda” recommends a comprehensive approach to curbing human-wildlife conflict that includes environmental conservation, family planning, basic health care, and support for sustainable livelihoods. By curbing the pace of environmental fragmentation and degradation, developing countries can preserve—and benefit from—their rich biodiversity.

Photo: In Kashmir, a decades-long conflict continues to spark human-animal conflict that threatens the region’s endangered species and rich biodiversity. Courtesy of flickr user Julie Starr.

In the annual threat assessment he presented last week to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair named the global economic crisis—not terrorism—the primary near-term threat to U.S. national security, prompting accusations of partisanship from the Washington Times. Yet as the U.S. Naval War College’s Derek Reveron notes, “the economic turmoil of the early 20th century fueled global instability and war,” and today’s economic collapse could strengthen extremists and deprive U.S. allies of the funds they need to deploy troops or increase foreign assistance to vulnerable regions.

Further down the list of potential catastrophes—after terrorism, cybersecurity, and the “arc of instability” that stretches from the Middle East to South Asia—the assessment tackles environmental security threats. The four-page section, which likely draws on sections of the recent National Intelligence Council report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, summarizes the interrelated natural-resource and population challenges—including energy, food, water, demography, climate change, and global health—the U.S. intelligence community is tracking.

The world will face mounting resource scarcity, warns Blair. “Access to relatively secure and clean energy sources and management of chronic food and water shortages will assume increasing importance for a growing number of countries. Adding well over a billion people to the world’s population by 2025 will itself put pressure on these vital resources,” he writes.

Drawing on the conclusions of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the impacts of global climate change to 2030, Blair portrays climate change as a variable that could place additional strain on already-stressed agricultural, energy, and water systems: “We assess climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.” Direct impacts to the United States include “warming temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and possible increases in the severity of storms in the Gulf, increased demand for energy resources, disruptions in US and Arctic infrastructure, and increases in immigration from resource-scarce regions of the world,” writes Blair.

Africa, as usual, is the last of the world’s regions to be analyzed in the assessment. Blair notes that “a shortage of skilled medical personnel, deteriorating health systems, and inadequate budgets to deal with diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis” is threatening stability in sub-Saharan Africa, and explains that agriculture, which he rightly calls “the foundation of most African economies,” is not yet self-sufficient, although some countries have made significant improvements in infrastructure and technology. He highlights ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia as the most serious security challenges in Africa. He fails to note, however, that all four have environmental/natural resource dimensions (see above links for details).

An article in Conservation Letters examining the effect of war on wildlife in Cambodia finds that “the legacy of conflict for wildlife can be profound and destructive. To address post-conflict challenges more effectively, conservation must be integrated within broader peacebuilding processes, including disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of combatants.”

New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin shares a recent nightmare on his blog, Dot Earth: If human beings achieve inexpensive, renewable energy, will this spur environmentally destructive population growth and consumption?

“Today, one-third of the world’s population has to contend with water scarcity, and there are ominous signs that this proportion could quickly increase,” writes the International Water Management Institute’s David Molden in the BBC’s Green Room. “Up to twice as much water will be required to provide enough food to eliminate hunger and feed the additional 2.5 billion people that will soon join our ranks. The demands will be particularly overwhelming as a wealthier, urbanised population demands a richer diet of more meat, fish, and milk.”

“Climate Wars” is a three-part podcast series by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Circle of Blue has launched the online radio series “5 in 15”; one episode features water expert Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, while another highlights Mark Turrell, CEO of technology company Imaginatik.

Bringing clean water and improved sanitation to the billions who lack them is “not a question of money, it’s not a question of technology, it’s a question of governance, of commitment, will—all of those things. And that, in many ways, is the worst part of the world’s water crisis,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, at the February 4, 2009, launch of The World’s Water 2008-2009: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Gleick began by showing No Reason, a short video produced by the Pacific Institute and Circle of Blue for this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which examined water issues in several sessions.

What is the Water Crisis?

According to Gleick, the global water crisis comprises many problems, including:

• The failure to meet basic human needs for water, which leads to diseases like cholera and typhoid;
• Local water scarcity and resource depletion;
• Contamination by industrial and human wastes;
• The effects of climate change and extreme events;
• Reduced production of food, goods, and services caused by water scarcity, poor water quality, or inequitable water allocation;
• Ecosystem degradation and destruction; and
• Threats to international, national, and subnational security posed by conflict over water.

Three Kinds of Peak Water

Because water is a largely renewable resource, we will not completely run out of water. However, Gleick warned that non-renewable water sources such as fossil aquifers are limited. Thus, “peak non-renewable water” could occur if we use fossil groundwater faster than it is recharged; by some estimates, 30-40 percent of today’s global agricultural production comes from non-renewable water, which will become increasingly difficult to extract, said Gleick. “That’s a real challenge from a food point of view, especially in a world that is going from 6.5 billion to 7 billion to 9 billion people.”

Eventually, we will also run up against the ecological and economic flow limits of renewable water sources, which include streams and rivers, Gleick said. And before either non-renewable or renewable peak water, we could reach “peak ecological water,” which occurs when using additional water “causes more ecological damage than it provides human benefit, and the total value of using more water starts to decline,” he explained.

China: Water Challenges Writ Large

China’s stunning economic growth in recent years has come “at an enormous environmental cost…to their air quality, to human health, and especially to water resources,” said Gleick. China’s water is over-allocated, poorly managed, and severely polluted by industrial and human wastes. Desertification in northern China is increasing rapidly, due to deforestation and the excessive withdrawal of groundwater. According to Gleick, some companies have cancelled plans to build plants in China because they cannot obtain sufficient water of high enough quality.

Public protests over environmental degradation in China are becoming increasingly common. According to Gleick, there have been as many as 50,000 protests over environmental issues in a single year, with the majority of these relating to water quality or allocations.

Solutions to the Water Crisis

Gleick recommended a series of actions:

• Develop more water sources, while ensuring that environmental and community concerns are addressed;
• Improve water infrastructure, including the installation of low-flow toilets and efficient drip-irrigation systems;
• Improve water-use efficiency;
• Update the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act to include new contaminants, and actively enforce the standards already in place;
• Price water more accurately, with the understanding that water is a human right and should be subsidized for basic human needs;
• Improve and expand public participation in environmental decision-making; and
• Strengthen water institutions and improve communication between them.

Photo: Peter Gleick. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

For more information, including a webcast of this event, visit ECSP's website. To receive invitations to future events, e-mail ecsp@wilsoncenter.org.

A House-Senate conference committee, with significant input from the White House, is currently striving to produce a compromise stimulus bill that will satisfy all three players. One item that won’t be in the bill is funding for family planning, which was nixed from the House version late last month. The proposal to include money for contraception—which would have been part of a bundle of funds to help states with Medicaid costs—faced high-profile opposition from conservatives, who argued that it would not stimulate the economy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to the criticism, countered, “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now…one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

It turns out that the debate over whether population growth is a net gain or loss for the economy has been going on for decades. According to Population Matters: Demographic Change, Economic Growth, and Poverty in the Developing World (see ECSP event), edited by Nancy Birdsall, Allen Kelly, and Steven Sinding, in developing countries, rapid population growth slows economic growth, and rapid fertility decline reduces poverty. Furthermore, as described in “Poor Health, Poor Women: How Reproductive Health Affects Poverty,” research by Margaret Greene and Thomas Merrick found that poor reproductive health—which includes unmet need for family planning—negatively impacts certain measures of poverty, including health and educational attainment.

Academics aren’t the only ones exploring these concepts; the popular press has also taken on the question of how population growth affects economic growth. The Christian Science Monitor published “Can Obama’s family-planning policies help the economy?,” which Population Connection’s Marian Starkey criticized for failing to adequately answer the question in its headline. MarketWatch published an op-ed contending that population growth is the world’s biggest economic problem. On the other side of the debate, the Wall Street Journal argued, “A smaller workforce can result in less overall economic output. Without enough younger workers to replace retirees, health and pension costs can become debilitating. And when domestic markets shrink, so does capital investment.”

Population-poverty links are incredibly complex, and it’s worth paying attention to the different dynamics between—and among—developing and developed countries, as well as the distinction between the larger goal of economic growth and the more targeted aim of jumpstarting an economy out of a recession. Nevertheless, policymakers don’t have to be flying blind when it comes to the question of whether access to contraceptives affects economic growth. Demographers and economists have been studying these relationships for a long time, and although they may never have complete answers, they have already come up with some valuable insights.

This is an exciting time to be working global public health, with more attention and money going to the field in the last decade than perhaps ever before. In the past, the struggle has been to direct more money and attention to these issues, but recent efforts have focused more on maximizing funds’ impact—by strengthening health systems, focusing on prevention, and finishing so-called “unfinished agendas” in maternal health, child mortality, and family planning. In my remarks at a recent panel on foreign policy challenges facing the 111th Congress, I focused on four issues: infectious diseases, neglected health issues, funding, and capacity building.

Spotlight on Infectious Diseases

No issue has dominated the global agenda in recent years as much as infectious disease. Three of the biggest challenges in this area are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. Every year brings 2.7 million HIV infections, 9 million TB infections, and nearly 300 million cases of malaria.

The recent response to these diseases has been significant, even incredible. The single biggest initiative, the President’s Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), was authorized in 2008 for $48 billion over five years. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria has allocated more than $10 billion in its campaign against these three diseases. The Presidential Malaria Initiative spent $30 million in 2006, a sum that will grow to $500 million in 2010. And the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization will commit nearly $4 billion by 2015. These sums are unprecedented, and have improved delivery of drugs, bednets, and health services. Much more progress is needed, but the achievements of recent years are truly impressive.

Neglected Health Concerns: Child Survival, Maternal Health, Family Planning

Great strides have been made in child survival. Annual child deaths dropped from 20 million in 1960 to 10 million today, but everyone agrees this is still 10 million too many. Infant and under-five mortality is usually caused by illnesses we know how to prevent and treat—pneumonia, diarrheal disease, and malaria, with under-nutrition often a contributing factor. Proven interventions include vitamin A supplements, use of insecticide-treated malaria bednets, safe drinking water, measles immunization, and early and exclusive breastfeeding.

Similarly, there has been significant progress in reducing the number of women dying in pregnancy or as a result of childbirth, otherwise known as maternal mortality. But this progress has stalled, almost to a stop. Maternal mortality claimed the lives of 536,000 women in 2005, only 40,000 fewer than in 1990 – a decline of less than 1 percent. Successful interventions for maternal health are well-known, and include access to health care before and after delivery and the presence of a skilled birth attendant during delivery.

Family planning is a third, oft-cited “unfinished agenda.” Nearly all developed countries, and indeed many developing countries, have completed or made much progress along the demographic transition—that is, the shift from large families with short life expectancies to small families with longer lives. In some countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, however, this transition has stalled. Continued population growth may make challenges such as food security, poverty, and conflict more difficult to overcome.

There are sharp differences between Presidents Bush and Obama on this issue. President Obama recently reversed the Mexico City Policy and reinstated $34 million in annual funding to the UN Population Fund. He will likely be pressed to do much more: Five former directors of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Population and Reproductive Health recently issued a report recommending an increase in family planning funding from $457 million in FY2008 to 1.2 billion in FY2010.

Funding: Coordination and Flexibility

The massive sums of money going to global health require improved coordination. The number of actors is striking: Within the U.S. government alone, they include USAID, PEPFAR, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Add in foreign governments, large foundations like Gates and Packard, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the Global Fund, and the situation is even more complex. Aligning regional and topical priorities will continue to be critical. Hopefully, the likely rewriting of the Foreign Assistance Act will also provide greater coherency.

Funding not only needs to be better-coordinated, it also must be more flexible. Too often, funds are directed to specifically treat one disease, neglecting important contributing factors such as poverty, environmental factors like water, and the quality of the health system itself. An example of a program becoming more flexible is PEPFAR, which added “wraparound” components such as prevention of malaria, pneumonia, and diarrheal diseases to its menu of services, thus better meeting the multifaceted problems of fund recipients.

Many argue that PEPFAR needs to become more flexible still, putting increased emphasis on preventive services, allowing for more country-specific flexibility, and transitioning from an emergency response to a sustainable response. Another example of interest in flexible funding is the prospect of modifying the Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act to incorporate water, sanitation, and health issues.

Strengthening Health Systems

The short- and long-term viability of health programs depends on national and local health systems that can deliver results. A solid public health infrastructure requires the presence of sufficient trained health care workers, effective health policies, availability of supplies, good health finance systems, and strong delivery of health information.

I have left out many aspects of global health that deserve attention—including specific diseases, health’s broader role in development and diplomacy, and issues that affect health like infrastructure and the environment—but I hope this is a useful outline when looking at future health concerns and priorities. We have made great strides in some areas, but much remains to be done. I hope Congress will continue to fund global public health priorities, recognizing that improving the health of the world is in our own national interest.

Photo: Gib Clarke (second from left). Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Global sea level is projected to rise between 7 and 23 inches by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Recent melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has prompted geophysicists at the University of Toronto and Oregon State University to warn that global sea level could rise 25 percent beyond the IPCC projections. These catastrophic long-term predictions tend to overshadow the potentially devastating near-term impacts of global sea-level rise that have, in some places, already begun.

“Much of the world’s cropland—especially in the developing world—is close to sea level and near the shore,” writes Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. As sea level rises, salt water seeps into tidal estuaries and groundwater aquifers, dramatically changing the salinity of the water, drying out land, disrupting agriculture, and limiting freshwater availability.

Salt water infiltration into coastal freshwater aquifers, known as “extended salt wedge,” threatens both marine life and terrestrial vegetation. In Bangladesh, extended salt wedge is already causing panic. “It's already too salty for traditional crops,” farmers told Nature. “This area was all [rice] paddy before. Now, no paddy…The trees look nice, but the coconut trees—there are no coconuts on them.”

Bangladesh’s Sundarbans mangroves, one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots, are “breeding grounds for fish and shrimp, and a refuge for the last few hundred remaining wild Bengal tigers.” But these mangroves need slightly salty water, so even a modest rise in sea level could harm them. Meanwhile, freshwater fish farms that sustain food stocks for local residents are threatened by salt water contamination that displaces or kills the fish. “If it gets more salty here, this population will not be able to live here. No paddy, no fish,” says Matthew Digbijoy Nath, a farmer near the southwestern coast. “How will people live?”

India is also already feeling the impact of sea-level rise. Mangroves have begun to appear 60 miles further from the delta than where they usually regenerate, suggesting that their usual spot has become too salty. This has severe implications for both inland and coastal residents who are protected by mangroves during severe storm surges. Climate experts have warned that climate change could produce more frequent and severe storms in India, and without mangrove regeneration along the delta, local communities could be devastated.

Meanwhile, salt water contamination in the Ganges, India’s largest river, is threatening freshwater ecosystems. Experts have “already spotted more saline water fish in the river,” says Pranabes Sanyal, the eastern India representative of the National Coastal Zone Management Authority. At the same time, changes in the Ganges’ salinity are “turning vast farmlands barren in the country’s east,” as adjoining groundwater aquifers become too saline and dry out the soil.

But near-term sea-level rise is a problem for the developed world, too. For instance, along the Gulf Coast of the United States, bio-diverse wetlands “support the region’s large commercial and recreational fishing industries.” Changes in the salinity of these wetlands could severely disrupt these commercial activities and threaten the livelihoods of fishermen—as in Louisiana, where “commercial fisheries account for about 30 percent of the nation’s total fish catch.”

In other low-lying marshes and wetlands, like the Florida Everglades, slight sea-level rise could cover soils and vegetation that “naturally store water, filter sediment and pollutants from fresh water supplies, and help stabilize shorelines by reducing erosion and storm surges.” Elsewhere, salt water could infiltrate “groundwater supplies and threaten landfill and hazardous-waste sites” near coastal communities.

“There’s a certain level of climate change impacts that we can’t stop, so we need to start looking at adaptation measures,” says Doug Howell, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Foundation. In developing countries like Bangladesh, it is not the threat of being underwater that worries people—it is food insecurity and their ability to adapt. And in both the developed and developing worlds, adaptation will be key to sustainability and survival.

Figure: Trends in sea level rise from 1870 to 2006. According to coastal and island tide gauges, between 1870 and 2001, sea level rose 1.7mm annually. That rate of change significantly increased between 1993 and 2006 to an average of 3.1 ± .4mm annually. Courtesy of Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal.

Conflicts among pastoralists over water and land have increased in drought-stricken northeastern Kenya, reports IRIN News.

Country for Sale, a report by Global Witness, alleges that Cambodia’s oil, gas, and mineral industries are highly corrupt.

Foreign Policy features an interview with General William “Kip” Ward, the commander of the new U.S. Africa Command. The New Security Beat covered General Ward’s recent comments on civilian-military cooperation.

Healthy Familes, Healthy Forests: Improving Human Health and Biodiversity Conservation details Conservation International’s integrated population-health-environment projects in Cambodia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor, a new report on climate change and poverty alleviation, synthesizes insights from an August 2008 roundtable convened by Richard C. Blum and the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Program at the Aspen Institute.

“Although the long-term implications of climate change and the retreating ice cap in the Arctic are still unclear, what is very clear is that the High North is going to require even more of the Alliance’s attention in the coming years,” said NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at a seminar on security prospects in the High North hosted by the Icelandic government in Reykjavik.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word,” says UK Sustainable Development Commission Chair Jonathon Porrit, speaking about population’s impact on the environment. Porrit has drawn criticism for his remarks.

A local priest has warned that a Norwegian company’s proposed nickel mines will threaten food security on the Philippine island of Mindoro.

I’m a little over halfway through my brief stay here at the Wilson Center. This fellowship was made possible by CNN: They laid me off, along with my entire science, tech, and environment news team, in December.

We’re not alone: Many reporters and producers like us have found new meaning to the phrase “working journalist.” Non-working journalists now represent a significant piece of the pie.

Rightly or wrongly, many top news executives view beats like science and environment as peripheral to the journalistic mission, or at least to the business plan, of their organizations. Attention to these topics in the general media has a hard time competing with things viewed as more central, whether it’s politics or Paris Hilton.

On Thursday, February 12, in the Wilson Center’s Flom Auditorium, we’ll celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday by discussing how to make sure science and environment reporting doesn’t perish from this earth.

Two of the most accomplished science and environment reporters in Washington will join us: Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press and Elizabeth Shogren (not yet confirmed) of NPR. Seth and Elizabeth were among the best chroniclers of the environmental controversies that marked the Bush era, and are closely tracking the promised “change” that may (or may not) be underway in the Obama administration. Both are alumni of news organizations that have recently seen traumatic change: Seth as a correspondent for the Washington Bureau of Knight-Ridder, and Elizabeth for the Los Angeles Times.

Also on the agenda is the future of journalism itself: Newspapers as we now know them may be terminally ill; TV broadcast news as we know it may be five or 10 years behind. Panelist Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab at American University, will bring her expertise on new- and community-based media. J-Lab is a journalism R&D center, focusing on providing both guidance and financial support to citizen journalism projects. Jan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, will help us see the way to what journalism will look like 10 and 20 years from now.

Space is limited, so RSVP to the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program soon. If you can’t make it to D.C., you can watch the webcast live.

Photo: Peter Dykstra. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Peter Dykstra is the former executive producer for science, technology, environment, and weather at CNN, and a current public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He also writes for www.mnn.com.

"The concept of 'peak water' is very analogous to peak oil...we're using fossil groundwater. That is, we're pumping groundwater faster than nature naturally recharges it," says Peter Gleick in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Gleick, president and co-founder of the Pacific Institute and author of the newest edition of The World's Water, explains the new concept of peak water.

"Climate change is an important issue that can be addressed by all three elements of the national security equation: defense, diplomacy, and development," says Kent Butts, in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Kent Butts, professor of political-military strategy at the Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College, makes the case for considering global climate change a nontraditional threat to security and discusses how the U.S. military is reacting to a changing climate.

“The whole world is aging, and the developed countries are leading the way,” said Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at a January 27, 2009, Wilson Center discussion of his latest report, The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. Demography is as close as social science comes to predicting the future, Howe explained, presenting the geopolitical consequences of demographic trends over the next 50 years. Howe and co-author Richard Jackson, also of CSIS, were joined by Jennifer Sciubba of Rhodes College, who urged them and other demographers to explore how population trends interact with additional variables, such as environmental degradation, economic recession, and conflict.

Danger: Demographic Decline Approaching

“Populations in most developed countries will not only age, but stagnate or decline,” due to falling fertility and rising longevity, said Howe. Without “sizable immigration,” he warned, the populations of countries like the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan will decline. As developed countries’ populations shrink, they will lose military might, savings and investment, entrepreneurship, and cultural influence. “Voltaire once said that God is on the side of biggest battalions,” Howe reminded the audience.

Developing Toward Greater Peace

Jackson explained that the developing world is in the midst of the “demographic transition”—the drops in mortality and fertility that generally accompany economic and social development. Since 1970, the developing world’s overall fertility rate has declined from 5.1 to 2.9 children per woman, and its overall population growth rate has dropped from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent per year, according to Jackson. Additionally, the median age has risen from 20 to 26 years old, “a cause for hope and optimism about the future,” Jackson argued, as countries with more balanced population age structures tend to be more democratic, prosperous, and peaceful than countries with extremely young ones.

But despite the long-term possibility of a world transitioning toward greater peace and prosperity, the developing world will still experience near-term shocks. The timing and pace of the demographic transition varies widely by country and region, with some countries transitioning too fast or too far, said Jackson. These trends could push developing countries toward social collapse by acting “as a kind of multiplier on all the stresses of development,” explained Jackson—for instance, causing China “to lurch even more toward neo-authoritarianism.”

Crisis of the 2020s

Global demographic trends will converge in the 2020s to make that decade “very challenging,” said Howe. The developed world will undergo hyper-aging, population decline, and flattening GDP growth, along with rising pension and health care costs, Jackson noted. The Muslim world will experience a decade of temporary youth bulges, as the large generation that was born between 1990 and 2000 has children. The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe will implode, and Russia’s geopolitical strength and influence will wane. Meanwhile, China will experience a decade of “premature aging”; due to its one-child policy, it will become “gray” before it achieves the per capita GDP of most aging countries.

Demography and Public Policy

Sciubba praised the report’s comprehensive, policy-friendly approach to demography, but urged the authors to remain true to the nuances of their topic, even in their conclusions and recommendations. “Policymakers like to know what we don’t know and what we do know. And with population aging and national security, often there’s a lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know,” she said. “Going into the future, we need more of an emphasis on places where policymakers can make a difference,” said Sciubba. “Opportunities matter just as much as challenges.”

Photos: Neil Howe, Richard Jackson, and Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

"We recognize that in dealing with climate change, what we do is modest....But unless we get the message out and find partners who can really take it to large scale, our efforts aren't futile, but they're of little value over the next 30 to 50 years, which is indeed the time frame we ought to be thinking on," says Jim Jarvie in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Jarvie, director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps, discusses why humanitarian development organizations must respond to new climate challenges.

An 18-month blockade, three weeks of intense bombardment, and continuing sporadic violence are setting up the Gaza Strip for a “devastating humanitarian crisis,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As of January 31, 1,380 Palestinians had been killed and 5,380 had been injured in the conflict, including many civilians. Additionally, the World Health Organization recently warned that:

Enduring [health] risks include complications and excess mortality in patients with chronic diseases as a result of the suspension of treatment and delayed access to health care during the conflict; diarrhea outbreaks from water-borne and food-borne diseases as a result of the lack of access to clean water and sanitation and the weak public health surveillance system; as well as long-term mental health problems as a result of the conflict.

Slightly more than twice the size of Washington, D.C., with a population of 1.5 million people, the Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated regions in the world. Gaza’s high population density has likely compounded residents’ vulnerability to white phosphorus, a highly flammable chemical that provides smoke screens for troop movements. The outrage provoked by its use by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) stems from the intense, uncontrollable fires it causes. The IDF has admitted to using white phosphorus in Gaza against Hamas and is investigating whether it also used it against residents, which is prohibited by the 1980 Convention on Conventional Military Weapons.

In 2008, prior to the war, the UN Relief and Works Agency reported that despite the humanitarian assistance flowing to Gaza, 51.8 percent of households were below the poverty line, and unemployment was at an unprecedented high of 45.3 percent. Prior to the recent conflict, 80 percent of the population was dependent on aid from the United Nations.

Although the current ceasefire has allowed for a slight increase in access to Gaza, humanitarian agencies and aid workers still struggle to get supplies into the territory. Day after day, truckloads of supplies—everything from food, clothing, and baby formula to blankets, plastic tarps, and technical equipment to draw water from the ground—sit at border crossings in Egypt, waiting for permission to enter Gaza. While Egyptians blame the Israelis for limiting access, Israeli officials claim that the Egyptians have not done enough to coordinate the flood of aid. Regardless of who is to blame, it is clear that limiting the access of humanitarian workers and supplies is having dire consequences for the residents of Gaza.

Photo: Humanitarian cargo waits at the Rafah border crossing on the Gaza-Egyptian border on January 9, 2009. Photo courtesy of Ekram Elhuni (World Food Programme) and Flickr user Peter Casier.

By Lauren Herzer, Program Assistant, Comparative Urban Studies Project, Woodrow Wilson Center.