New Security Beat

As the impacts of climate change on national security are beginning to receive attention at the highest levels of government, climate-security experts must avoid oversimplifying these complex connections, said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

"Today, with climate change high on the political agenda, powerful actors in the security community are assessing its potentially dangerous effects on conflict and military readiness," Dabelko said. In “Planning for Climate Change: The Security Community’s Precautionary Principle” in the journal Climatic Change, Dabelko views the defense community’s interest in climate change as an understandable development. “Climate change poses threats and opportunities that any risk analysis calculation should take seriously—including the military’s planning efforts, such as the Quadrennial Defense Review,” he says.

"However, it is important to remember that in the mid-1990s, advocates oversold our understanding of environmental links to security, creating a backlash that ultimately undermined policymakers’ support for meeting the very real connections between environment and conflict head-on. Today, ‘climate security’ is in danger of becoming merely a political argument that understates the complexity of climate’s security challenges.”

In a new op-ed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dabelko offers some advice to scientists, politicians, and the media:
• Don't oversimplify the links between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism.
• Don't neglect ongoing natural resource and conflict problems.
• Don't assume we know the precise scale and location of climate-induced migration.
• Don't forget that climate mitigation efforts can introduce social conflict and needs to be factored into both mitigation and adaptation efforts.

"There is a new opportunity to use increased public attention to highlight the relationship between natural resources, climate, and security," Dabelko writes. "But redressing the climate-security link requires avoiding some of the pitfalls that impeded progress the last time environment and security shared the spotlight."

“The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution,” write Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in the lead article of this Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine.

In this special issue devoted to “Saving the World’s Women,” five articles document global failures and personal horrors, but also offer forward-looking solutions from the individual to the institutional. As the subtitle says—“changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything”— this vital effort can help us not only improve the lives of women, but meet larger goals including international security, global health, and economic development.

Christian Aid’s “Growing Pains: The Possibilities and Problems of Biofuels” finds that “huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.”

Framing the climate change debate in terms of national security could help advance climate legislation in Congress, argues a New York Times editorial, one week after its front-page article on the topic. In letters to the editor, James Morin of Operation FREE calls climate change the “ultimate destabilizer,” and retired Vice Admiral Lee Gunn warned that the “repercussions of these changes are not as far off as one would think.”

Researchers at Purdue University’s Climate Change Research Center found that climate change could deepen poverty, especially in urban areas of developing countries, by increasing food prices. “While those who work in agriculture would have some benefit from higher grains prices, the urban poor would only get the negative effects.” Of the 16 countries studied, "Bangladesh, Mexico and Zambia showed the greatest percentage of the population entering poverty in the wake of extreme drought.”

India’s 2009 State of the Environment Report finds that almost half of the country’s land is environmentally degraded, air pollution is increasing, and biodiversity is decreasing. In addition, the report points out that almost 700 million rural people—more than half the country’s population—are directly dependent on climate-sensitive resources for their subsistence and livelihoods. And furthermore, “the adaptive capacity of dry land farmers, forest dwellers, fisher folk and nomadic shepherds is very low.”

Surveys completed by a Cambodian national indigenous peoples network find that “five million hectares of land belonging to indigenous minority peoples [have] been appropriated for mining and agricultural land concessions in the past five years,” reports the Phnom Penh Post.

The Economic Report on Africa 2009 warns that despite declining food prices, “many African countries continue to suffer from food shortage and food insecurity due to drought, conflicts and rigid supply conditions among other factors.”

A response to Bjørn Lomborg’s “Climate engineering: It's cheap and effective”

The famous mathematician John von Neumann called climate engineering a “thoroughly ‘abnormal’ industry,” arguing that large-scale interventions, including solar radiation management, were not necessarily rational undertakings and could have “rather fantastic effects” on a scale difficult to imagine. Tinkering with the Earth’s heat budget or the atmosphere's general circulation, he said, “will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done”—and possibly leading to “forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined.”

Almost four decades later, Yale economist William Nordhaus used geoengineering scenarios in his dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model to calculate the balance between economic growth (or decline) and climate change, as part of a 1992 National Academy of Sciences study on the policy implications of greenhouse warming. Calling geoengineering a hypothetical technology that could “provide costless mitigation of climate change,” Nordhaus came to the controversial conclusion that geoengineering produces major benefits, whereas emissions stabilization and climate stabilization are projected to be worse than inaction. He believes that geoengineering is, at present, “the only economically competitive technology to offset global warming.”

Bjørn Lomborg, trained in political theory and notorious for attempting “to redirect global priorities away from current environmental concerns,” downplayed climate change in his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. He has now changed his tone, admitting in a Globe and Mail op-ed that “global warming means more people will die from the heat”—and advocating the apparent cost-effectiveness of planetary climate engineering. In his op-ed, he presents dichotomous choices that are not mutually exclusive: Shall we plant trees? Cut emissions? Adapt? Or “focus on a technological solution to warming?”

Isn’t it more reasonable to pursue the first three strategies simultaneously, with new energy technologies and efficiencies? As MIT atmospheric scientist Ron Prinn said, “How can you engineer a system whose behavior you don't understand?”

Lomborg’s article cites an un-refereed economic analysis by Eric Bickel and Lee Lane that reaches the same conclusion as Nordhaus did in 1992 by tinkering with his DICE model. Climate modeler Alan Robock calls their work “a biased economic analysis of geoengineering,” and warns that solar radiation management would cause increased damage to the stratospheric ozone layer and may in fact shut down the Indian monsoon. Any reduction in the sun’s direct radiation will cripple solar power generators and turn the blue sky milky white, even on a “clear” day. Since this type of geoengineering would also block starlight, it would mark the end of ground-based astronomy and the end of stargazing as we know it; only the brightest stars would remain visible in the night sky.

The “tiny investment” in climate engineering Lomborg is advocating as an alternative to carbon emission reductions means the oceans would continue to acidify by absorbing carbon dioxide. I don’t have enough space to critique the plan to create a post-modern El Niño with 1,900 robotic ships in the Pacific Ocean spraying sea-water mist.

In the 1830s the meteorologist James Espy was laughed out of Congress for proposing a $1:$2,000 cost/benefit ratio for making “artificial volcanoes” to enhance rainfall. He wanted to set fire to the Eastern deciduous forests, but he had not taken into account the indirect costs. Neither has Lomborg or his economists.

At a recent National Academy of Science meeting on geoengineering, planetary scientist Brian Toon told the audience that we don’t have the technology to engineer the planet. I added that we don’t have the wisdom either. Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief.

James Rodger Fleming, a former Wilson Center Fellow, is a historian of science and technology at Colby College and author of Fixing the Sky, soon to be released by Columbia University Press.

I have a few responses to Will Rogers' thoughtful critique of my report, "Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era."

Rogers says that "the report could be read as inferring that the Department of Defense (DoD) has an unnecessarily oversized budget": that's true. I think a single country that spends 43 percent of the world's total military budget—more than the next 14 countries put together—and whose spending has nearly doubled since FY 2000 to the highest level in real terms since World War II, could find some ways to provide for the common defense with less money. Rogers rightly points to the Obama administration's efforts to cut the budget, citing the cancellation of the F-22. The administration has proposed the most ambitious set of cuts to unneeded weapons systems since the end of the Cold War. However, it has not proposed reinvesting some of the savings in averting climate change. Given the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of climate change as a major global security threat, and the enlarged role the Department of Defense is assigning to this threat in their strategic planning, it should.

Rogers is concerned that my accounting of climate-change expenditures omitted some of DoD's spending. This is a valid point, but I wanted to avoid double-counting. I used DoD's own figures for its budget total, which would include, for example, DARPA's budget. I tried to solve the problem by acknowledging DoD's efforts, and providing a table of examples from all service branches. Maybe a better way to solve the double-counting problem would be to add a new category to capture military expenditures on climate change, including personnel costs, and deduct it from the other two.

Overall, Rogers’ real concern seems to be what he calls the “conceptual error” of contrasting military security with climate security. My point is that while the U.S. military is taking steps to reduce its emissions, its main job is to solve problems through military force. And it is warning that the problem of climate change is going to make this job much harder. As the intelligence services are telling them, either solve this problem by stemming rising global temperatures, or prepare to grow the military—a lot—to deal with the effects. It's the old story of an ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure.

I am baffled at Rogers’ claim that pointing this out "makes climate change more like a domestic policy issue and less like a legitimate national security concern.” My point is that this legitimate national security concern needs more resources, and is best addressed largely by means other than military force.

The good news is that the Obama administration is about to release its own climate change budget, probably by the end of August. It will account for spending from both the Recovery Act and the regular budget, as mine does. It will undoubtedly be a more accurate accounting than mine, though it will not capture some categories I believe should count as climate-change spending, such as new allocations for mass transit.

My accounting of the relative balance of military versus climate security spending could certainly use refining, and I thank Rogers for helping me think through how to do this.

Miriam Pemberton, Ph.D. is a research fellow with the Foreign Policy In Focus Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her latest report is "Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Transition from the Bush Years to the Obama Era."

“I have had a woman say to me, ‘This PHE [population-health-environment approach] makes sense to me because I do not live my life in silos. I live my life in a way that all these things are integrated, and what you are saying to me makes sense, because my life is one of integration,’” said the Sierra Club’s Roger-Mark De Souza, in his lilting Trinidadian baritone.

De Souza, whom I interviewed recently about his contribution to ECSP’s Focus series, is a great storyteller. Whether recounting his conversations with a tsunami survivor in Thailand, a mayor of a small Filipino community, or a Tanzanian journalist, De Souza brings to life their daily struggles to meet basic needs. His tales are packed with lessons for development practitioners tackling multiple and overlapping challenges in poor rural communities.

“When I see communities have a better understanding of how these issues interact and have an impact on their lives, they become very energized, and very enthusiastic and want to make a difference,” De Souza told me.

His latest article, "The Integration Imperative: How to Improve Development Programs by Linking Population, Health, and Environment," summarizes the advantages of integration. “PHE offers a step in the right direction—a flexible, innovative way for policies and programs to keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world—and lays the foundation for empowering our children to manage these changes for generations to come.”

“Knowing is not enough; you must act and let your government know that family planning is a right and saves lives,” said Maurice Middleberg of the Global Health Council at a recent event in Chapel Hill.

The other panelists at “How Can Family Planning Efforts Help Us Achieve the Millennium Development Goals?” (Dr. Martha Carlough of UNC, Dr. Ward Cates of Family Health International, and Pape Gaye of IntraHealth International) all provided compelling statistics demonstrating the effectiveness of family planning as an intervention that addresses the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

MDGs 4, 5, and 6 – reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, respectively – all have obvious connections to health and woman’s reproductive health. An unmet need for family planning, which is measured as the percentage of women of reproductive age who desire to space or limit their births but are not using contraception, can undermine the achievement of these goals.

For example, very early motherhood not only increases the risk of dying in childbirth, it also jeopardizes the well-being of surviving mothers—and their children, too. A child born to an adolescent mother has a greater risk of dying in infancy or childhood.

“Contraception is the best-kept secret in HIV prevention,” said Dr. Cates, who cited research that found that “current contraceptive use in sub-Saharan Africa prevents an estimated 577,200 unplanned births to HIV-infected mothers” and thus prevents the birth of an estimated 173,000 HIV-infected infants each year.

Family planning can help meet the other MDGs, including ending poverty and hunger (Goal 1); providing universal primary education (Goal 2); and promoting gender equity (Goal 3). Young mothers frequently miss out on education and socio-economic opportunities. Being able to make their own decisions about family planning and reproductive health can empower women and improve gender equity. When women are given equal opportunities for education, health, and employment, they are more likely to invest in the education and care of their children. This helps them break the cycle of poverty, hunger, and disease.

Although the MDGS don’t include any formal targets for sexual and reproductive health, the UN Millennium Project has stated that the MDGs cannot be achieved in low-income countries without access to sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning. The panelists agreed that family planning is a cost-effective intervention that provides broader positive benefits for development.

But the real strength of their presentations lay in the personal stories behind the statistics. Middleberg closed the discussion with a story about a woman in Latin America who told him that she loves her husband but was afraid of him every time he touched her. Now, after having undergone sterilization, she no longer worries and can love her husband with no fear of becoming pregnant.

A mother of six interviewed in a 2009 news article about the Philippines’ new family planning bill said, "How can one keep on having children? We don't earn enough to feed them, much less send them to school." New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviews a Haitian woman with 10 children in a dramatic video interview, “Saving Lives with Family Planning.”

Underlying all of these facts and stories is the belief that one’s health and well-being, including access to family planning, is a right. But as Middleberg said, believing is not enough.

EngenderHealth, an international reproductive health organization working to improve the quality of health care in the world’s poorest communities, is asking Americans to create a video explaining why we should care about international family planning. Contribute your thoughts on YouTube’s Video Volunteers project.

Lisa Basalla, MPH, is a research associate with the Carolina Population Center. She graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a MPH focusing on reproductive and adolescent health. She has worked with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Communications Programs on its reproductive health knowledge management project as well as a HIV-prevention behavior change communication project in Malawi.
Photo: A billboard promoting family planning in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. Courtesy flickr user olerousing.

The Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet shows that global population numbers will reach 7 billion in 2011. Among its key findings, PRB notes that “population growth is one root cause of increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the complexity of the mechanisms through which demographic factors affect emissions is not fully taken into consideration in many analyses that influence governments’ climate change mitigation efforts.”

The Guardian reports that U.S. marines have launched an energy audit of American military operations in Afghanistan, the first such assessment to take place in a war zone. “Some 80% of US military casualties in Afghanistan are due to improvised explosive devices (IEDS),” the article elaborates, “and many of those placed in the path of supply convoys.” DoD’s Alan Shaffer recently told ClimateWire, “nearly three-quarters of what convoys move in Afghanistan's treacherous terrain is fuel or water.”

The Department of State released an inspection of the operations of the Bureau of African Affairs that identifies a rift between U.S. diplomats and the U.S. military’s recently established African Command (AFRICOM). As the Wilson Center’s Steve McDonald told Bloomberg.com, “It got off to a hugely bad start…Part of it was tied up with policies of the Bush era, where our own security concerns far overrode any sensitivities to local considerations.”

T. Paul Shultz of Yale University’s Economic Growth Center evaluates population and health policies, looking specifically at “the causal relationships between economic development, health outcomes, and reproductive behavior.”

Oxfam’s “The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific” includes recommendations for adapting and mitigating climate change in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific island nations—a region “where half the population lives within 1.5 kilometers of the sea.”

Update: Read a response by Miriam Pemberton

"The Obama administration…has identified the task of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as one of its top priorities,” writes Miriam Pemberton in a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era.”

According to Pemberton’s analysis, the Obama administration has significantly bolstered spending related to climate security, shrinking the gap between military and climate security spending from 88:1 under the Bush administration’s FY2008 budget to 65:1 under Obama’s FY 2010 budget.

According to Pemberton, the gap is even smaller—9:1—if one includes the appropriations in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. However, this one-time boost is fleeting. While much of the Recovery Act “provides funding for long-term projects, such as high-speed rail systems, [funding] will need to be sustained if emissions reduction targets are to be met,” Pemberton argues.

At face value, “Military vs. Climate Security” is an important assessment that illustrates how seriously the Obama administration is taking the threat of global climate change. But with that said, several words of caution are in order.

First, the author seems to oversimplify military spending, and the report could be read as inferring that the Department of Defense (DoD) has an unnecessarily oversized budget. Regardless of one’s general opinion of military spending levels, the United States is still engaged in two wars that require high levels of funding to ensure that our armed forces have the equipment to operate efficiently, safely and successfully – and the means necessary for a safe drawdown in Iraq. And while military spending has increased between FY2009 and FY2010, the White House has made significant inroads with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees “to terminate or reduce programs that have troubled histories or that failed to demonstrate adequate performance when compared to other programs and activities needed to carry out U.S. national security objectives,” such as cutting new orders for the F-22 program.

Second, Pemberton may be overstating the gap between military and climate change spending, as her premise would require a more rigorous assessment than is apparent in this report. According to her calculations in Appendix C, DoD is spending only $31.12 million on climate change-related programs and activities: $14.3 million on programs related to research, development, testing, and evaluation by the Army; and $16.82 million on similar programs by the Navy. But these figures do not come near to quantifying DoD’s full efforts.

Take, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is spending approximately $100 million of its $3 billion annual budget on projects related to alternative energy (and this does not even include its classified energy projects).

It is also unclear how personnel have been quantified. According to Christine Parthemore of the Center for a New American Security, today there are far more people at DoD who are looking seriously at climate change, equating to a considerable expense of man- hours. The 2008 Defense Authorization Act, for example, requires DoD to assess the impacts of climate change on its facilities, capabilities, and missions, and to incorporate its concerns into its major strategic documents, including the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which is now underway.

“Does this assessment count all alternative energy efforts as working toward climate security?” wonders Parthemore. The U.S. Air Force is expanding its energy office, which is working to increase energy efficiency – funding a “new generation of energy-efficient unmanned aircraft,” for example – and developing lower-carbon aviation fuels.

While Pemberton notes the important strides the U.S. Air Force is making to reduce its emissions, it is unclear whether the Army and Navy’s alternative energy work is being counted towards the total. What about partnerships with private industries, such as the planned 500 MW solar thermal plant in California, which is estimated to cost approximately $1.5 billion (the bulk of which might come from an industry partner)?

In addition, the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act includes a $5 million line item for a new Director of Operational Energy, Plans and Programs that will help sculpt DoD’s energy acquisitions and logistics strategy–and ostensibly contribute to climate security.

Third, Pemberton concentrates on mitigation and mostly excludes adaptation into her assessment. Yet DoD is focusing a lot of time and money on adaptation, which is a critical component of addressing climate change.

Finally, Pemberton makes a fundamental conceptual error by separating climate security from "other" security. Convincing the traditional security community that threats from climate change are as important as traditional security threats is a difficult but necessary task; that security exists beyond the Department of Defense, to include long-term challenges in the strategic and operating environments, such as climate change, demographics and other natural security issues. By contrasting spending on climate security against military security, Pemberton makes climate change more like a domestic policy issue and less like a legitimate national security concern.

That the Obama administration is making significant strides in bolstering climate change-related spending is a positive development. However, by not accounting for the full range of DoD efforts that contribute to climate security, this report falls short. A more rigorous analysis of DoD’s budget would provide a better tally of the department’s work to mitigate and adapt to climate change. A better assessment of the Obama administration’s investment in addressing global climate change would combine both military and climate security spending.

Will Rogers is a research assistant with the Natural Security program at the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan, national security think tank in Washington, D.C. Before that, he was an intern with the Environmental Change and Security Program.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have blamed sinister “foreign powers” for fomenting post-election civil unrest in Iran, but some analysts have fingered another culprit: demography. According to Farzaneh (Nazy) Roudi, program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Population Reference Bureau, two phenomena “provide a backdrop for understanding Iran’s current instability.” First is the country’s youthful population age structure, or “youth bulge”; over 30 percent of Iranians are between the ages of 15 and 29, and 60 percent are under the age of 30. Second is Iran’s surprisingly comprehensive family planning program, which has empowered women to make their own reproductive choices and enter higher education en masse.

“Youth and women are the two agents of change in the country,” said Robin Wright, Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in an interview with The New Security Beat. “The youth bulge and the education of women create a very energetic dynamic that defines politics, the economy, security, and social mores in Iran,” she continued.

This dynamic spurred the post-election protests, a movement that Roudi labels “a manifestation of underlying frustrations” with social and political restrictions, as well as high unemployment. A significant cross-section of the Iranian population—led by but not restricted to young people and women—took to the street, demanding that their voices be heard.

But what were they calling for? And what chance do they have to succeed?

“Youth is clearly Iran’s future,” said Wright. However, she cautioned against making assumptions about what young people desire. “They want their votes to be counted, they want a normal state, and they want to work within the international order,” she explained, “[but] they’re not walking away from the Islamic Republic—not yet, at least.”

Unrest is common in youth-bulge countries, which Foreign Policy’s Richard Cincotta explains are “two-and-a-half times more vulnerable to the onset of political violence or civil conflict than relatively mature populations.” However, Cincotta emphasizes that such movements rarely if ever lead to stable liberal democracy, drawing comparisons between Iran’s current demographic and political situation and that of China twenty years ago—at the time of Tiananmen Square.

Population Action International’s Elizabeth Leahy agrees. Countries with a youthful age structure are “significantly more prone to conflict and much less democratic, on average, than those that had advanced further along the demographic transition,” she says in an article in ECSP Report 13.

However, the success of Iran’s award-winning family planning program—which requires all young couples to undergo a family planning course and makes contraception freely available to the public—has set the country “well on its way to a more balanced age structure,” Leahy reports. And “a mature age structure,” Cincotta relates, “tends to serve as a statistical bellwether for durable liberal democracy.”

So did the clerics unwittingly ensure the elevation of the Republic over Islam by making family planning prevalent in Iranian society?

“I’m very optimistic” that Iran will eventually achieve democratic reform, Wright concluded. “But the question is—how long is ‘eventually’?”


Top photo: A protest in front of the Kluczynski Federal Building Plaza in Chicago on June 16, 2009, soon after the disputed Iranian presidential election. Courtesy Flickr user JSisson.

Second Photo: A young female protester flashes the iconic "V," a sign of solidarity for supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Courtesy Flickr user .faramarz.

The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.

A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.

In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.

DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security

A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.

Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.

Raising a REDD Flag

A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.

For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.

REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.

The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.

Jim Jarvie is director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps. In a recent video interview, he spoke to ECSP about how humanitarian groups are responding to new climate challenges.

Photo: Stoves that are more fuel-efficient not only help curb rapid deforestation, but help women spend less time gathering wood in dangerous areas. Courtesy Dee Goluba/Mercy Corps.

The NYT’s Andrew Revkin muses about whether “whether family planning programs should be able to get into the carbon business,” citing a study released by Oregon State University that says that the number of children an American resident has could have the greatest environmental impacts of any decision taken by that individual. Reporting on the study, The Oregonian observes that “having fewer children is best way to reduce your carbon footprint.” An interactive graphic from Breathing Earth maps the relationship between population and carbon emissions.

Colorado State University’s Nicole Detraz and Michelle M. Betsill examine whether the April 2007 United Nations Security Council debate, “which emphasized the threat of climate-related conflict, reflects a discursive shift” in an International Studies Perspectives article, “Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts.”

A study in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” warns that overfishing has decimated global marine resources. However, it also reports that careful, collaborative restoration efforts at the international level could yield significant improvements.

In Der Speigel (republished on Salon.com), Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt report that investors, corporations, and governments are angling to profit from future food shortages (the result of a burgeoning global population and inhospitable climate changes) by buying arable land in less developed countries—particularly in weak states—with little concern for the food security of the host nation.

Now available online, a special issue of the International Social Science Journal from 2005 examines the resource curse. Eleven articles explore “how to translate revenues derived from natural resource exploitation into real benefits for citizens of resource-rich countries.”

In what CNN has dubbed her "biggest trip yet," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has commenced an 11-day, seven-nation tour of Africa that will take her to many of the continent’s most volatile states, including Kenya, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Liberia, and Cape Verde.

Global hunger and food security are her top agenda items, as Clinton and African leaders discuss how the United States can help improve the continent’s agricultural sector. Also on the table will be the "Second Scramble for Africa"— the recent spate of developed nations buying up African agricultural land (map) to assure their access to adequate food supplies, which was the subject of a recent Wilson Center conference (video).

More Mouths to Feed

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), one billion people are undernourished. If current population projections are correct, that figure is likely to grow. "In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent," note Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Der Speigel.

Climate change will compound the already-daunting challenge of increasing food production by further "reducing harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis," Joel K. Bourne, Jr. explains in National Geographic’s special report, "The End of Plenty."

Africa: Ground Zero

Sub-Saharan Africa—with birthrates averaging 5.4 children per woman and a farming sector dominated by small producers whose average yield per hectare has remained constant over the last 40 years—is particularly vulnerable to such a crisis. Both Secretary Clinton and President Obama have pushed for increased investment in the continent’s agricultural sector.

"There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food," said Obama at the conclusion of this month’s G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy. "It has sufficient arable land. What’s lacking is the right seeds, the right irrigation, but also the kinds of institutional mechanisms that ensure that a farmer is going to be able to grow crops, get them to market, get a fair price."

Launching his book on African food security, Enough! Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, coauthor Roger Thurow told a Wilson Center audience, "We hope to provide both an instructional and inspirational tale to show that hunger today is largely man-made, that so much is also caused by policies and decisions that span the political spectrum, and to inspire by showing hunger is truly achievable to conquer."

Pledges of Aid, but Land Grab Continues

Largely thanks to Obama’s prodding, G8 countries agreed to invest $20 billion for farm aid in developing countries over the next three years. However, the leaders were unable to agree on a set of shared principles regarding foreign acquisition of arable land.

A number of relatively wealthy but land- and water-strapped nations, including Saudi Arabia, China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as many corporations and other investors, have purchased millions of hectares of land in other developing countries. Asia and South America have been targeted by some, but the inexpensive, fertile land of impoverished Africa appears to be the primary prize.

While some might praise the transfer of land to those with the capital and technology to make it productive, questions abound when one considers the dual pressures of population growth and a changing climate. "[W]hat happens with famine strikes these countries? Will the wealthy foreigners install electric fences around their fields, and will armed guards escort crop shipments out of the country?" ask Knaup and von Mittelstaedt.

The Ethics of Land-Grabbing

In completing such transactions, governments often ignore customary land tenure, selling tracts that are already inhabited and cultivated by small-scale subsistence farmers whose families have lived on the land for generations, but who have no formal deed of ownership.

To prevent such exploitation, experts have suggested the adoption of international rules to govern foreign acquisition of agricultural land in the developing world. A report from the International Food Policy Research Institute recommends a broad swath of measures to ensure transparency, respect for existing land rights, benefit-sharing, environmental sustainability, and adherence to national trade policies.

The Devil Is in the Details

Adding to the strong statements by the G-8 and Secretary Clinton, the FAO plans to convene an international food security summit in Rome this November, which will call for the eradication of hunger by 2025. While these are welcome developments, the details remain unclear.

--Will a repeat of the "Green Revolution" save African farmers?
--Is it responsible to engender dependence on petroleum-based fertilizers, if it increases production in the short-term?
--What are the implications of selling arable land to foreign investors?
--How will large-scale commercialization and mechanization of farming transform developing societies?
--What about genetically-modified seeds?
--Can we eradicate hunger in the next 15 years?

The New Security Beat welcomes your comments on these important questions.

Photo: Men gather corn at a farm in Kenya. Courtesy Curt Carnemark and Flickr user World Bank (pool).

Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.)

On Monday he wrote about India and China's agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from seasonal snow and glacier melt is finally seeping into the consciousness of policymakers outside the climate world, including the diplomatic and security communities. Lamont frames the step as a rare instance of cooperation in a strategically sensitive area at the center of a 1962 territorial war between the countries.

While it would be easy to make too much of such an agreement, it is a tangible recognition of the importance of the ecological unit rather than the national one. It highlights how environmental interdependence across national boundaries can force cooperation in the face of politically difficult relations.

On Wednesday Lamont used cheetah diplomacy between India and Iran as an entry point for his story on international attempts to address Iran’s nuclear proliferation threat. India is asking Iran to help reintroduce cheetahs on the subcontinent, where they are now extinct. In what Lamont said would be an "unusual" example of "high-profile cooperation" for the two countries, diplomats are arranging for talks ahead of a regional wildlife conference. This baby step in relations could be even more significant since the United States publicly acknowledged that India may be able to play an interlocutor role with Iran on the hot button nuclear program question.

While both of these developments are relatively small in the scheme of the larger strategic relationships, they are fundamentally aimed at (re)building relationships between countries by establishing patterns of cooperation where interdependence is obvious and necessary. Such efforts are just one tool in the often-neglected toolbox of environmental peacebuilding.

Photo: Yawning cheetah cub courtesy Flickr user Tambako.

On Monday, California became the first U.S. state to issue a report outlining strategies for adapting to climate change. Among other recommendations, it suggests that Californians should consider moving.

The report encourages California’s government agencies to consider “incentive programs to encourage property owners in high-risk areas to relocate,” and “avoid significant new development in areas prone to flooding, sea-level rise, temperature changes, and precipitation changes.” It points out that more than half ($2.5 trillion) of the total value of Californian real estate assets is at risk.

While California has been at the forefront of state governments in mitigation, the report notes that “adaptation is a relatively new concept in California climate policy.”

Other parts of the American West may also need to consider such adaptation strategies. Research recently released by scientists at the University of Colorado predicts that all of the reservoirs along the Colorado River could by dry by 2057 due to overuse and global warming. David Little, director of planning for Denver Water, told The Salt Lake Tribune that while he did not think that Denver’s water supplies would be affected, Denver could see an influx of people from California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, who “are going to tend to migrate to places where they have water.”

Searching for Shelter in the Megacities of Africa, Asia

The consequences of climate change for the homes of people in the developing world are already much more dire than for Americans. A recent CARE International report, “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement” has brought attention to the 200 to 700 million people expected to be forced from their homes by 2050 due to climatic changes.

Urbanization has already led to the growth of “megacities” in the developing world with populations in the millions. If climate change forces millions of people to leave homes threatened by rising sea levels and desertification, “most migrants will move within their own country or region and, following an already well-trod pattern of rural-to-urban migration, many of them will head to cities,” writes the Climate Matters blog.

According to a study cited by the report, in West Africa between 1960 and 2000 “rainfall decreases, land degradation, and violence in the arid and semi-arid areas of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger resulted in a rapid intra-country migration southward and a swelling of big cities like Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou, Niamey and Kano.”

A Financial Times story about the town of Nandom, Ghana, illustrates some of these trends. A 2004 survey of the city’s residents revealed that all of the family members who left Nandom moved to the more prosperous southern region of Ghana and its cities, including the capital city of Accra In Africa in general, the UN City Initiatives estimates that “about one in three slum dwellers can be considered as an environmental refugee, driven off the land by advancing desert frontiers and failing farming systems.”

While some will be fleeing the countryside for cities, others will be fleeing one city for another. According to data from CIESIN, more than 125 million people live within areas of India and Bangladesh that are vulnerable to a 10 meter rise in sea level. Sudhir Chella Rajan of the Indian Institute of Technology believes that residents of major Indian coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkota, and Chennai will be forced to move to large interior cities. “This would mean that already burdened cities such as Delhi, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Hyderabad, which will have serious resource constraints of their own by the middle of the century, will have to be prepared to accommodate enormous numbers of migrants from the coasts,” Rajan says in "Blue Alert: Climate Migrants in South Asia."

If such predictions are true, and millions of people will be moving to and from cities ill-equipped to handle the disruption, more cities and states need to develop adaptation plans like California’s. They certainly wouldn’t want to emulate the bad example set during the Great Depression, when an LAPD “bum blockade” turned away farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl. (Instructively, geographer Robert McLeman tells Slate that the most mobile “climate migrants” during this era were members of the working middle class, not the rich or the poor).

While mitigating climate change is and should continue to be a critical part of all plans to address the issue, cities in particular must begin to plan how they are going to absorb the influx of new residents as climate change hastens urbanization.

By Comparative Urban Studies Project intern Elizabeth Hipple and edited by Meaghan Parker