Monthly archive for July 2012. Show all posts
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The Global Land Rush: Catalyst for Resource-Driven Conflict?
›Michael Kugelman, Sustainable Security
By ECSP Staff // Tuesday, July 31, 2012The original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on SustainableSecurity.org.
On May 11, the UN approved new international rules to govern how land is acquired abroad. These Voluntary Guidelines (VGs), the outcome of several years of protracted negotiations, are a response to growing global concern that nations and private investors are seizing large swaths of overseas agricultural land owned or used by small farmers and local communities for food, medicinal, or livelihood purposes. FAO head Jose Graziano da Silva describes the VGs as “a starting point that will help improve the often dire situation of the hungry and poor.”MORE
It’s hard to quibble with the intent of the guidelines. They call for, among other things, protecting the land rights of local communities; promoting gender equality in land title acquisition; and offering legal assistance during land disputes.
Unfortunately, however, any utility deriving from the VGs will be strictly normative. As their name states explicitly, they are purely optional. A toothless set of non-obligatory rules will prove no match for a strategy that is striking both for its scale and for the tremendous power of its executioners.
Oxfam estimates that nearly 230 million hectares of land (an area equivalent to the size of Western Europe) have been sold or leased since 2001 (with most of these transactions occurring since 2008). According to GRAIN, a global land rights NGO, more than two million hectares were subjected to transactions during the first four months of 2012 alone. One of the largest proposed deals – an attempt by South Korea’s Daewoo corporation to acquire 1.3 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar – failed back in 2009. Still, even larger investments are being planned today, including a Brazilian effort to acquire a whopping six million hectares of land in Mozambique to produce corn and soy (Mozambique offered a concession last year).
Continue reading on SustainableSecurity.org.
Sources: BBC, Food and Agriculture Organization, GRAIN, MercoPress, Oxfam, Reuters.
Photo Credit: “Garde armé,” courtesy of flickr user Planète à vendre. -
On the Beat:
PBS ‘NewsHour’ Reports on Reasons for Optimism Amid Niger’s Cyclical Food Crises
›By Kate Diamond // Monday, July 30, 2012
Set in the middle of the arid region between the Sahara desert and the equatorial savannas of Africa known as the Sahel, Niger is no stranger to drought. In recent years, however, droughts have hit more often, started earlier in the season, and lasted longer, creating a cycle of food insecurity that is becoming more difficult to break.MORE
Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, recently spoke to PBS NewsHour about his country’s aggressive re-forestation strategy, designed to improve food security by capturing more natural moisture and raising soil nutrient levels. “We are convinced that drought does not need to mean famine,” Issoufou, told special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro. But while Issoufou’s campaign to strengthen food security offers reason for optimism, significant challenges remain if Niger is to break the cycle of drought and famine, including a population growth rate of 3.5 percent a year – one of the fastest in the world.
Desertification and Deforestation Created “A Virtual Desert”
For decades, a combination of environmental and man-made factors has slowly exacerbated Niger’s vulnerability to drought and food insecurity. While the Sahara’s gradual southern expansion has driven Niger’s desertification, an old colonial law (since overturned) making trees state property contributed to runaway deforestation. For the state, trees were an important resource as timber; for farmers, trees were a nuisance that stood in the way of planting new crops. With little incentive to preserve the already-sparse natural tree coverage, by the 1970s, the country’s landscape looked like “a virtual desert,” de Sam Lazaro says. Deforestation only accelerated desertification and the two trends were all the more impactful since they hit hardest in Niger’s semi-arid south, where the bulk of the country’s food is grown and harvested.
“A Structural Response”
By the mid-1980s, after major droughts had struck the country on and off for the past decade, a low-scale, individualized effort began among farmers to maintain the trees on their property. That effort was finally formalized under the current president, who entered office last year “declar[ing] food security a top priority,” according to de Sam Lazaro.
In office, Issoufou launched “Nigeriens Helping Nigeriens” or 3N – a program he bills as “a structural response to the food crises that are consistently linked with our recurrent droughts.”The program builds on farmers’ earlier work through a greening initiative that provides both near- and long-term relief to Nigeriens struggling against food insecurity. 3N employs Nigeriens during the “hunger season” – a stretch of time before the harvest starts – but rather than planting new trees, workers instead dig holes that capture rainwater and seeds that are already there – either in manure left behind by livestock, or blown in by the wind. Over time, de Sam Lazaro reported, those holes provide long-term relief for farmers as trees regrow, returning much-needed nutrients to the soil and, through their foliage, providing shade and retaining rainwater for surrounding crops.
That work is supplemented by an outreach campaign that educates farmers about the end of the colonial-era tree law and the benefits that well-maintained trees can bring to farmers, their households, and their crops.
“Trees that are pruned grow sturdier trunks, yielding abundant firewood, the main cooking fuel,” de Sam Lazaro reports. “The leaves form livestock fodder and trap moisture in the soil. Improved soil fertility can mean better harvests.” And, importantly, those benefits can start accruing immediately. “Even in the first year, you already have some benefits by leaves and some twigs the women can use as firewood in the kitchen,” said Chris Reij, a Dutch scientists who has studied agroforestry in the Sahel since the 1970s.
Cause for Cautious Optimism
In villages that have prioritized re-greening, resilience is already growing. In Dan Saga, a village near Niger’s southern border with Nigeria, even though “drought took a severe toll on the harvest last year,” according to de Sam Lazaro, past surpluses stored in a grain bank mean that hasn’t translated to famine.
Individual and state-led re-greening efforts have turned Niger into “the only country in Africa to have actually added forest to its land” over the past two decades, de Sam Lazaro reported. During that time, 200 million new trees grew in Niger, and that, according to Reij, has bolstered agriculture by an additional 500,000 tons of food per year – enough to feed 2.5 million Nigeriens, or 15 percent of the population.
From 5 to 55 Million People?
The next challenge will be scaling up those results to reach the entire country. U.S. Ambassador to Niger Bisa Williams said that expansion would be a long, but necessary, process. “This is not something that has a quick fix to it,” she said to NewsHour. “Development by its nature is a long-term process.”
“There is no magic bullet” to resolving food insecurity, Williams said. Doing so will mean tackling a number of the country’s development challenges, de Sam Lazaro said, including its high fertility rate which, at 7.4 children per woman, “will triple the number of mouths to feed by 2050.”
Indeed, population growth – both historical and projected – is a key part of Niger’s food security story and deserves more attention. Past population growth helped fuel the country’s rapid deforestation in the 1970s and 1980s, and since the early 1990s, Niger has reliably been among the world’s fastest growing countries. Between 1975, when the country was a “virtual desert,” and today, more than 10 million Nigeriens have been born. In the face of such growth, the country’s capacity for food production has not kept pace; while population growth is 3.5 percent a year, food production increases by only 2.5 percent, indicating a persistent and growing gap between the two. And, because of the multiplicative effects of high birth rates, the UN estimates that by 2050, Niger’s population will be an astounding 55.4 million people (and that’s the medium variant projection).
Though they don’t tackle these population numbers in great detail, the PBS NewsHour piece shows that Niger is moving forward in a promising way. “Everyone knows that this can’t be resolved by the internationals,” Williams said. Solutions, if they are to be effective and long-lasting, “are going to have to be embraced and be local. And I think that is what we are seeing in Niger.”
De Sam Lazaro’s report is part of joint project called “Food for 9 Billion,” with Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting, American Public Media, and PBS. Previous reports examined food security in East Africa, Egypt, and the Philippines.
Sources: The New York Times, United Nations Population Divison.
Video Credit: PBS NewsHour; chart: Famine Early Warning Systems Network. -
Reading Radar:
Chaotic Climate Change and Adaptation in Fragile States
›By Carolyn Lamere // Friday, July 27, 2012In “Chaotic Climate Change and Security,” published in the June issue of International Political Sociology, Maximilian Mayer traces the transformation of climate change from a long-term problem to something that has taken on a new urgency in recent years. Understanding the non-linear nature of climate change – the “abrupt changes” that can come as environmental thresholds are crossed – has led to the securitization of the environment, writes Mayer. Unfortunately, the “doomsday rhetoric of scientists and campaigners about ‘tipping points’ has apparently failed to spur governments toward negotiating a meaningful agreement.” Climate change skepticism still exists, he points out, and even those who are convinced of the potential negative impacts of environmental change on state security have failed to reverse detrimental actions, choosing instead to focus on ameliorating the effects of change on their individual states. As a replacement for these failed frameworks, Mayer suggests that actor-network theory should be used as it better accounts for the interconnected nature of climate change.
MOREKatherine Houghton discusses the relationship between climate change and resilience in her article “Climate Change in Fragile States: Adaptation as Reinforcement of the Fabric of the State,” published in a collection of articles written by members of the United Nations University Summer Academy. Houghton writes that in fragile states, environmental issues can be “compounded by armed conflict and institutional failure,” which further destabilizes the country. She mentions cases in which the state lacks the authority to properly assist its citizens following natural disasters, like the flooding of the Indus Valley in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In these cases, failure of the government to meet citizens’ needs “fuels instability and fragility rather than fosters resilience.” Any action to reduce the effects of climate change on residents of vulnerable areas must thus begin with the state, she writes. “Without effective action to strengthen the state and thereby enable adaptation, climate-induced adverse effects and extreme events may lead to the further destabilization of already fragile states.”
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Eye On:
New USGS Report and Maps Highlight Afghanistan’s Mineral Potential, But Obstacles Remain
›By Keenan Dillard // Friday, July 27, 2012
Two maps released to the public for the first time this month illustrate the vast wealth of mineral deposits in the war-torn nation of Afghanistan. The maps, created through a joint effort from the U.S. Geological Survey and Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, are the first of their kind to provide large-scale coverage of a country using a technology called hyperspectral imaging, which measures the reflectance of material on the Earth’s surface simultaneously across a continuous band of wavelengths broken up into 10 to 20 nanometer intervals. More than 800 million individual pixels of data were collected during a period of 43 days in 2007 by a NASA aircraft. Each data point was then “compared to reference spectrum entries in a spectral library of minerals, vegetation, water, ice, and snow in order to characterize surface materials across the Afghan landscape.”MORE
Two maps released to the public for the first time this month illustrate the vast wealth of mineral deposits in the war-torn nation of Afghanistan. The maps, created through a joint effort from the U.S. Geological Survey and Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, are the first of their kind to provide large-scale coverage of a country using a technology called hyperspectral imaging, which measures the reflectance of material on the Earth’s surface simultaneously across a continuous band of wavelengths broken up into 10 to 20 nanometer intervals. More than 800 million individual pixels of data were collected during a period of 43 days in 2007 by a NASA aircraft. Each data point was then “compared to reference spectrum entries in a spectral library of minerals, vegetation, water, ice, and snow in order to characterize surface materials across the Afghan landscape.”
Accompanying the release of the maps is a USGS study, completed in September of 2011, that largely confirms earlier reports from the DOD and USGS on the size of Afghanistan’s untapped mineral resources. The first reports received widespread media coverage last year, and updated estimates indicate that upwards of $900 billion worth of mineral reserves are present in a number of different forms including copper, iron, gold, and, most notably, more than one million metric tons of rare earth elements.
Scientists involved with the project believe that there may be even more reserves awaiting discovery. “I fully expect that our estimates are conservative,” said Robert Tucker from the USGS in an interview with Scientific American. “With more time, and with more people doing proper exploration, it could become a major, major discovery.”
Over the course of the study, scientists from the USGS and Afghan Geological Survey combined the newly-created spectral data with existing maps to identify 24 areas of interest (AOIs) that warranted hands-on investigation.
The two hyperspectral maps illustrate different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Shortwave infrared wavelengths reveal carbonates, phyllosilicates, and sulfates, while visible and near-infrared wavelengths show iron-bearing minerals, which yield products ranging from copper to rare earth elements and uranium. Each map classifies 31 different types of materials by color.
Although the hyperspectral maps only show mineral deposits on the surface, geologists were able to estimate what lies beneath by combining new data with samples previously taken from trenches, drill holes, or underground workings at the AOIs by Soviet and Afghan scientists. According to the USGS, “A number of the AOIs were field checked by USGS and DOD geologists between 2009 and 2011, and the previous geologic interpretations and concepts were confirmed.”
Actual Extraction: Not Easy
Afghanistan has been “scouring the globe for investors to develop its mines in an attempt to lift one of the world’s poorest nations out of misery through investment,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Contracts have already been awarded to China and India to develop copper and iron mines, respectively, and another round of bidding is currently in progress for four unexploited sites that are being closely eyed by countries such as the United States, Australia, and Turkey.
But significant hurdles remain in the quest to turn Afghanistan’s buried minerals into a steady source of income for the government and the Afghan people. Security is still a major concern and United States will pull out a vast majority of its combat troops by 2014. The government has established a Mines Protection Unit to guard sites where ground has already been broken, and plans to increase the size of the unit as necessary to provide security for all mining projects nationwide. For now the Afghan Ministry of Mines is only taking bids for projects in the more secure northern part of the country, where deposits of copper and gold are located. As the nation develops and stabilizes, massive resources of rare earth elements located in the notoriously volatile Helmand Province will open for bids.
Security isn’t the only factor affecting the country’s mining prospects. “If you want to do mineral resource development, there are two things you need to pay attention to: water and energy resources. Where is the power going to come from? You can’t develop these large mineral deposits without energy,” said director of the USGS program in Afghanistan, Jack Medlin, in an interview with EARTH magazine.
There are also the traditional pitfalls of developing extractive industries, especially in poor and conflict-prone countries, including corruption, inequity, land disputes, and environmental degradation. And the fact that Afghanistan is landlocked, making supply lines in an out of the country difficult (as the United States has discovered).
Despite the many hurdles, there is plenty of optimism for an Afghan future brightened by mineral wealth. The new data shows that previous reports of substantial resources were not far off, and the Afghan economy, which for years has relied on opium as its biggest export, could certainly use the help. “The prognosis is extremely encouraging and could play a significant role in recovery from decades of war,” USAID advisor Wayne Pennington told EARTH.
For the full resolution versions of the hyperspectral imaging maps (~90MB each) see here and here.
Keenan Dillard is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Sources: Afghan Geological Survey, Afghan Ministry of Mines, Christian Science Monitor, U.S. Department of Defense, EARTH, The New York Times, Scientific American, U.S. Geological Survey, The Wall Street Journal, World Bank.
Image Credit: USGS. -
Guest Contributor:
Urbanization and the Global Climate Dilemma
›By Will Rogers // Thursday, July 26, 2012The original version of this article by Will Rogers appeared on the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 Blog.
Urbanization and climate change may be the two most important trends to shape global development in the decades ahead. On the one hand, urban cities have the potential to serve as engines of change, driving economic growth in some of the world’s least developed countries and pulling more people out of poverty than at any other time in history. On the other hand, climate change could undercut all of this by exacerbating resource scarcity and putting vulnerable communities at risk from sea level rise and more frequent and intense storms.MORE
Economic Hubs
Today, roughly 80 percent of economic growth occurs in urban centers. Much of this comes from what experts refer to as the “urban advantage:” cities typically concentrate the full spectrum of economic opportunities that are not readily available in rural areas. This includes everything from social services such as education and healthcare, more reliable access to water, sanitation services, and electricity, to industries and transportation hubs that are lynchpins for commercial development.
Simply put, countries have more opportunities for economic growth as they urbanize. According to a 2010 study from the United Nations Human Settlements Program, “The prosperity of nations is intimately linked to the prosperity of their cities. No country has ever achieved sustained economic growth or rapid social development without urbanizing (countries with the highest per capita income tend to be more urbanized, while low-income countries are the least urbanized).”
Of course, how much a country benefits from urbanization depends on policies developed at the local level. Indeed, urban politics can make or break the benefits of urbanization if local policymakers fail to adopt policies that break down socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, and religious barriers.
Nevertheless, urbanization affords tremendous economic opportunities, and most of the future benefits will accrue to the world’s developing and least developed countries. As Drew Erdmann wrote earlier this week on the Global Trends 2030 blog, “For the first time in over 200 years, the majority of the world’s economic growth during this decade will occur in emerging markets, not the developed economies of the ‘West.’” This may help foster a modicum of stability in some of the world’s most unstable states, countries like Haiti, whose urban population is projected to expand from 52 percent in 2010 to 70 percent by 2030, according to United Nations statistics.
Scarcity and Infrastructure Challenges
Yet climate change may ultimately undermine the economic benefits of urbanization in some parts of the world. Urban centers place substantially more pressure on natural resources than rural communities, given their population density and the attendant demands on water, agricultural, energy, and other resources. And although urban planners can apply innovative solutions to help manage these resource constraints – such as waste water recycling systems – climate change could exacerbate resource trends in ways that may hamper the effectiveness of these creative technologies, slowing or stalling economic growth in some of these emerging economic centers.
But the real climate challenge may stem from development in fragile areas along the world’s coastlines. Indeed, many of the global megacities (those with populations over 10 million) are located on the coast: Tokyo, Jakarta, Shanghai, New York City, Mumbai, Bangkok, and Lagos, to name a few. Their locations are borne out of necessity: according to the San Francisco Chronicle, 90 percent of global commerce is done by sea. So while urbanizing along the coastline allows countries to more easily tap into global trade, coastal cities may be vulnerable to sea level rise and more frequent and intense typhoons, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events that could result from climate change.
Sea level rise could be particularly damaging to urban economic development. Surging seas can crumble coastal infrastructure, such as electricity systems and road ways, and infiltrate ground water aquifers that supply city water and support local agriculture. Moreover, sea level rise may drive up insurance rates, forcing people into bankruptcy while also creating socioeconomic gaps in some cities. These challenges are not abstract or distant either: one need only look to the south of Washington, to Norfolk, Virginia, where sea level rise has already dislocated some communities, while forcing city officials to invest millions of dollars to hold back the sea near the naval station, according to The Washington Post.Alex Evans on global natural resource scarcity
Typhoons, hurricanes, nor’easters, and other extreme weather events may become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change, and pose dangers to urban centers. The density of some coastal cities portends extreme challenges for first responders and others charged with responding to weather-related natural disasters. Indeed, the scale of these disasters could be quite staggering, and may even overstretch the capacity of emergency personnel if they are not adequately prepared to respond. Although one cannot definitively point to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina as an example of climate change, the effects of the storm provide a vivid illustration of the magnitude that such a disaster could have in a densely crowded urban community. As a result of this reality, some large cities have started examining how climate change may affect them in the coming decades. In 2010, for example, New York City published its own study from the New York City Panel on Climate Change that looked explicitly at these challenges.
Even absent climate change, it is difficult to disregard the inherent vulnerabilities associated with densely crowded urban cities, particularly those along the coast. In his book, Monsoon, Robert D. Kaplan writes that, “[N]ever before have the planet’s most environmentally frail areas been so crowded,” particularly in countries like Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere, where hundreds of millions of people are packed together at or just above sea level. “This means that over the coming decades more people than ever before, in any comparable space of time save for a few periods like the fourteenth century during the Black Death, are likely to be killed or made homeless by Mother Nature,” Kaplan observes.
Looking for Opportunities
There are some opportunities that U.S. policymakers and others can pursue to help dampen the impact of potential climate disruptions on urban cities.- Enhancing Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Training: The United States should develop more robust relationships with countries around humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, to help more vulnerable countries and their cities develop the institutions, tools, and procedures for responding to natural disasters. This does not have to be just traditional military-to-military cooperation either. Fire departments and other first responder organizations from U.S. cities can exchange expertise with other officials in cities around the world. And some of this is ongoing already, whether it’s around flood or wildfire response, and may just need to be scaled up.
- Improving Climate Change Science at the Local Level: Many countries do not have the tools or techniques to assess how climate change may affect their cities. As a result, there is a significant opportunity for the United States to bolster its science and technology cooperation with countries, to enhance their understanding of local-level climate impacts. The United States could leverage its National Labs and others in academia to help support and develop sound climate science that will provide better fidelity about how climate change is projected to manifest itself in urban centers. Better projections will enable cities to become more resilient, which may also help dampen political and social disruptions.
Will Rogers is the Bacevich Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan national security and defense policy think tank in Washington. The views expressed herein represent his personal views and do not necessarily reflect the perspectives of any organization with which he is affiliated.
The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends reports are unclassified looks at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events. The Global Trends 2030 Blog provides a forum where guest bloggers can discuss selected topics to be raised in the upcoming publication later this year.
Sources: National Intelligence Council, New York City Panel on Climate Change, San Francisco Chronicle, UN Habitat, UN Population Division, Washington Post.
Photo Credit: “River of Development,” courtesy of flickr user pmorgan (Peter Morgan). -
Linking Water, Sanitation, and Biodiversity Conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa
›By Kate Diamond // Wednesday, July 25, 2012Water, poverty, and the environment are “intrinsically connected,” and the development programs targeting them should be as well, writes David Bonnardeaux in Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene: Experiences From sub-Saharan Africa, a new Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group briefing. In a review of 43 programs across sub-Saharan Africa, including four in-depth case studies, Bonnardeaux finds that natural synergies between water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming and conservation work provide opportunities for greater effectiveness in addressing both.
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Integrating WASH and Conservation: A Natural Match
“WASH interventions are generally reliant on natural resources and processes, whether indirectly or directly,” he writes, and “WASH services produce outputs that are potentially detrimental to the environment if not managed properly.” At the same time, poor ecosystem management can “threaten biodiversity and jeopardize the vital services that these ecosystems in turn provide to humanity, in the form of regulation of stream flow, erosion prevention, water filtration, aquifer recharge, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, and flood abatement.”
Given the connections between the two, WASH and conservation efforts would benefit from programmatic integration, according to Bonnardeaux. To bring the two closer together, he recommends three tools for policymakers and development programmers: integrated river basin management and basin planning; payments for watershed services (also known as payments for environmental services); and population, health, and environment (PHE) programming.
A Whole-of-Basin Perspective
“The causal link between WASH and ecosystem health and integrity is most accentuated when
dealing with freshwater ecosystems,” writes Bonnardeaux.
In Tanzania’s Pangani River Basin, one of his in-depth case studies, a growing reliance on hydropower, urbanization, and increased agricultural demand is altering a valuable ecosystem marked by endemism and iconic landscapes, including Mount Kilimanjaro.
In response, the government and international organizations are partnering through the Pangani River Basin Management Project to developing a greater understanding of the basin’s hydrology and ecosystem, how local populations interact with that ecosystem, and how potential development scenarios could impact the basin in the future. That knowledge, paired with an intensive training program for local water officials, is enabling stronger integrated resource management, which in turn could lay the groundwork for integrating WASH and conservation interventions, writes Bonnardeaux.
Economic incentives – in this case, payments for watershed services – offer another valuable tool for building support for conservation efforts, especially when upstream communities bear a disproportionate burden of safeguarding watersheds.
In South Africa, another case study country, “increased economic development and urbanization have taken its toll on” the country’s wetlands, while unemployment and poverty have remained a persistent problem in slum areas, writes Bonnardeaux. Through the government-run Working for Wetlands program, both the environmental and socioeconomic problems of development are being targeted for improvement. The program hires “the most marginalized from society” to clear wetlands of invasive plants in order to improve its natural filtration capabilities and, in turn, improves the quality of water feeding the burgeoning urban areas.
Although Working for Wetlands, now 17 years old, has been “hugely successful,” Bonnardeaux warns that such economic incentive programs are, more often than not, extremely difficult to carry out effectively. “While there is great potential for this incentive-based conservation approach,” Bonnardeaux notes, “the reality is there are many barriers to its effective implementation.”
Building Long-Term Support for Conservation With Near-Term PHE Successes
Building support for conservation can be a difficult task. The impacts of conservation programming are “often undervalued,” Bonnardeaux writes, in part because results tend to become apparent only over the longer term. By pairing conservation efforts with nearer-term programming, like PHE efforts targeting immediate health needs, development workers can foster the kind of local support that is essential for pursuing long term goals.
The Jane Goodall Institute’s Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education Project (TACARE), in northwest Tanzania, offers a case in point. Established in 1994, TACARE began as a conservation program meant to protect the areas around Gombe National Park, where Goodall first began her chimpanzee research in the 1960s. Local communities, however, were more interested in better health, “with an emphasis on clear water and reduction in water-borne diseases like cholera,” writes Bonnardeaux.
By adopting local health and poverty priorities, he writes, TACARE was able to establish trust and goodwill with the communities it served, which in turn enabled it to pursue longer-term conservation goals aimed at protecting the region’s natural biodiversity.
Bonnardeaux’s work shows that regardless of how policymakers choose to combine WASH and conservation goals, well-implemented integration can yield immense benefits for practitioners, funders, and local communities.
“Linking various sectors such as WASH, forestry, agriculture, population, and community development,” he writes, “can result in cost and effort sharing which in turn can increase the effectiveness of the project including improved conservation and improved livelihoods and health.”
Sources: Bonnardeaux 2012.
Photo Credit: “Intaka Island towards Table Mountain,” courtesy of flickr user Ian Junor. -
Eye On:
Tobias Feakin on the Debate in Europe About Climate Change and the Military
›By Keenan Dillard // Tuesday, July 24, 2012“We established [the Climate Change Security Program] as a methodology of exposing the defense community in the U.K. and Europe to some of the more nuanced security debates that are going on around climate change, environmental change, and resource shortages,” said Tobias Feakin, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) in an interview with ECSP.MORE
What they found when they first approached the U.K. defense establishment in 2006, was surprising. “They opened [that] door wide open and said, ‘actually, you know what, we’ve been looking at this, we’ve been concerned about this for a long time, and we’ve already started including it in our long-term planning and strategic thinking.’”
“One of the reasons that the defense community has been looking at this issue is that they have a longer-term vision, if you like, than other departments,” Feakin said. “They have to think about procurement decisions which are going to be stretching out…up to 30 years into the future, so there are bigger demands on them to be thinking about these kinds of strategic issues.”
Feakin co-authored International Dimensions of Climate Change, a 2011 report for the British government which highlights the security threats and challenges, both internal and external, that the U.K. will face as result of climate change.
While the defense community acknowledged the need to include climate change in their planning processes, members of the policymaking community expressed concern that they did not, “have enough detailed understanding of what this [climate change] is going to mean in a security paradigm,” said Feakin. To meet that need, RUSI has been conducting regional and country-based studies in order to determine how things might play out.
Dialogue on the issue has transcended Great Britain and is now taking place among member states of the European Union, although Feakin notes that, “there’s perhaps more hesitancy in terms of framing the debate in the security paradigm and perhaps a slight perception that it might be leading us down the wrong path when mitigation efforts should be at the top of the order of play.”
Despite these ongoing debates, Feakin believes that the security aspect of climate change helps to “make a comprehensive case that we have a situation that does have to be dealt with and there are going to be multiple players in that.” Efforts to address climate change will be civilian-led, but the defense community will play an important supporting role in the future, he said.
“It’s something we have to plan for and we will be part of the response.” -
From the Wilson Center:
Open Data Initiatives at USAID Reflect Move Towards Collaboration, Enabling Efforts
›By Graham Norwood // Tuesday, July 24, 2012Over the past year and a half, USAID has been busy reinventing itself. The announcement of its USAID FORWARD initiative and the release (jointly, with the State Department) of the first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review in late 2010 signaled significant changes for the organization, including several reforms designed to modernize operations and improve transparency. Part of that effort is making data collection and dissemination more open.
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Thus far, the results have been encouraging.
September of last year saw the launch of an awareness campaign focused on the Horn of Africa, co-sponsored by the Ad Council and called, somewhat confusingly, USAID FWD (famine, war, drought). As part of the program, USAID published a collection of regional maps, aggregating the organization’s substantial data pool and showing everything from food and water security to the movement of refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons).
Using data from its own FEWS.NET site, USAID created the maps with open-source tools, allowing other organizations and concerned individuals to leverage the data for additional aid and outreach activities. Many, including the ONE Campaign and InterAction, were quick to incorporate the maps and underlying data into their own activities.
In order to promote greater data access and transparency, USAID also collaborated with the Department of State to create the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a website that provides sortable aid budget allocation data to the general public. Launched in late 2010 with frequent updates since, the site allows users to see easily how aid is apportioned by region, sector, initiative, or other categories.
For instance, visitors can see that USAID more than quadrupled its humanitarian assistance to Pakistan in 2010 as a result of that country’s devastating flooding. Aid then fell back to near 2009 levels the following year.
Recently, USAID has also taken its open data efforts to the Web. Faced with 117,000 records of development loans provided by its own Development Credit Authority and lacking proper geographic coding, the organization undertook a pioneering experiment in crowdsourcing this June. Civilian volunteers from the online technical communities GISCorps and the Standby Task Force pitched in to help code the data, as did unaffiliated citizens attracted by social media campaigns.
The end results were outstanding: the volunteers finished the job in just 16 hours, although USAID had initially expected the operation to take 60.
Representatives from USAID recently published an illuminating case study about the crowdsourcing experiment and launched it at the Wilson Center. “By leveraging partnerships, volunteers, other federal agencies, and the private sector, the entire project was completed at no cost,” the report noted, adding that USAID hoped to have “blaze[d] a trail to help make crowdsourcing a more accessible approach for others.” One of the case study authors, Shadrock Roberts, noted that “we need to be working as hard to release relevant data we already have as we are to create it.”
USAID’s recent experiments with transparency and greater civilian participation appear to be part of a larger organizational shift toward greater openness and collaboration. Administrator Rajiv Shah seemed to confirm this in a March interview with Foreign Policy, when he spoke at length about the benefits of partnering with the private sector as well as other NGOs.
The recently reported demise, or at least great diminishing, of President Obama’s Global Health Initiative (GHI), which closed its doors amid a heated turf battle between USAID, the State Department, and PEPFAR, lends credence to this theory as well. The official GHI blog stated last week that it would “shift focus from leadership within the U.S. Government to global leadership by the U.S. Government.” This appears to indicate greater future emphasis on collaboration, with an eye toward enabling non-USAID actors to play a greater role in the development process.
It remains to be seen how USAID’s role and strategy will change over the next few years. However, results from the organization’s initial attempts at open data and open government policies have been positive in many respects, and there is reason to hope they will continue to push the boundaries in these areas.
Sources: Center for Global Development, Foreign Assistance Dashboard, Foreign Policy, Global Health Initiative, USAID.
Image Credit: Foreign Assistance Dashboard. -
In Mongolia, Climate Change and Mining Boom Threaten National Identity
›By Kate Diamond // Monday, July 23, 2012Mongolia, a vast, sparsely populated country almost as large as Western Europe, is at once strikingly poor and strikingly rich. Its GDP per capita falls just below that of war-torn Iraq, and Ulan Bator has some of the worst air pollution ever recorded in a capital city. At the same time, Mongolia sits atop some of the world’s largest mineral reserves, worth trillions of dollars, and its economy, already one of the world’s fastest growing, could expand by a factor of six by the end of the decade as those reserves are developed.
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As the government undertakes the long process of opening up the country’s mineral wealth, Mongolia is nearing a familiar turning point for resource-rich but developmentally poor countries. However, a unique and dynamic set of environmental and cultural factors set it apart from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Bolivia, and Afghanistan, as it works to avoid the pitfalls of the “resource curse.”
Nearly 40 percent of Mongolians are herders whose livelihoods are irrevocably intertwined with their environment. Herding has been an economic and cultural mainstay of rural life since the days of Genghis Khan. Children as young as five race horses for miles across open grassland in the Naadam, Mongolia’s annual national festival. The winning jockeys are celebrated and the winning horses idolized. Mongolia’s reverence for its nomadic roots extends all the way to its 20-year-old constitution, which enshrines livestock as “national wealth” to be protected by the state.
But today, the livelihoods of families reliant on grazing livestock are under threat from a climate that is becoming increasingly harsh and unpredictable. Mongolia is feeling the effects of climate change “perhaps more rapidly than any other place in the world,” proclaimed the vice chairman of parliament this year. Desertification is driving the Gobi Desert to expand by 10,000 square kilometers every year – enough to fit the state of Delaware two times over.
Compounded by increasingly harsh winter storms, the changing climate is driving herders to relocate to Ulan Bator and other cities in search of better opportunities. That migration is adding to sprawling slums, cook stove-driven air pollution, and a public health crisis that the president himself has called a “disaster.” These changes are set to have a uniquely powerful impact on a national identity that is interwoven with the herding tradition.
Navigating the country’s mineral wealth is not, therefore, just a matter of avoiding the standard pitfalls – corruption, inequity, and environmental destruction – of the resource curse; lawmakers will also have to contend with preserving a way of life that has defined Mongolia for centuries.
Every Mongolian a Millionaire?
Estimates for Mongolia’s mineral wealth range from $1.3 trillion to $2.75 trillion in the 10 biggest mines – and those amounts reflect just the 27 percent of the country that geologists have mapped so far. While mining has long been a part of the country’s economy, the past few years have seen the industry explode as massive gold, copper, and coal deposits in the country’s south have been opened to foreign investment.
Oyu Tolgoi, a copper and gold mine, was opened up to Canada-based Ivanhoe Mines (and its majority shareholder, global mining giant Rio Tinto) in 2009 following six years of negotiations with the government, which owns a third of the mine. OT, as it is called, is scheduled to open next year and has already drawn more than $4 billion in foreign investment in construction – just shy of Mongolia’s entire 2009 GDP.
Tavan Tolgoi, the world’s second largest coal deposit, is slowly being opened up to investment as the government negotiates with Chinese, Russian, American, South Korean, and Japanese firms for rights to the deposit’s western block. Meanwhile, state-owned Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi is slated for an IPO next year in advance of expanding its mining operations in the deposit’s eastern block. Populist fears of foreign companies – especially those from China and Russia – gaining too much control over the country’s resources have complicated negotiations; the government has said that if an agreement is not reached by mid-2012, it will begin developing the western block on its own.
Tavan Tolgoi and OT have led Mongolia to “the brink of an investment bonanza that could see its economy double in size every three or four years,” according to the Financial Times. The country’s GDP growth leapt from 6.4 percent in 2010 to 17.3 percent in 2011 in large part because of construction at OT, and on a per capita basis, its mineral wealth is enough to make all 2.75 million Mongolians a millionaire.
In spite of that resource wealth, Mongolia is still very poor. As a satellite country during the Soviet era, Mongolia received as much as a third of its GDP from Moscow; with the USSR’s fall, education, health, and economic policies and programming went largely underfunded, resulting in a striking paradox that mires development today.
Education and employment offer a case in point. Even though more than 90 percent of Mongolians have attended school through the secondary level, there is a mismatch between the skills they learn and the skills the changing labor market demands, resulting in a well-educated but unemployed population where 1 in 10 are out of work. More than a third of the country lives in extreme poverty with a daily income of less than $0.40, and overall poverty rates have remained stagnant for decades.
Winters of White Death
Although pastoralism has been a mainstay of life in Mongolia for centuries, the past 20 years have seen an explosion both in the number of herders and in the size of individual herds. As former Soviet limits on herd sizes were lifted, Soviet factories shut down, and access to cheap Soviet goods like meat and dairy dried up, Mongolians turned to the countryside in record numbers.
Herders took on more animals as a way to hedge against uncertainty, including harsher, longer, and more volatile winter storms, or dzuds (literally meaning “white death”). From 1990 to 2010, the country’s livestock population jumped from 10 million to 40 million, ultimately outnumbering Mongolians by a factor of more than 14.
These larger herd sizes are exacerbating environmental changes already underway. Mongolia’s average annual temperature has risen three times faster than the global average, and almost the entire country – 90 percent – is vulnerable to desertification. Taken together, climate change and overgrazing have degraded more than two-thirds of pastureland.
The 2009-2010 winter is proof of the combined toll that climate change, growing herd sizes, and dzuds can have on rural Mongolians. A dry spring and summer left little surface water or grass for livestock to eat or drink by winter, so they were more vulnerable to storms, which were the worst in living memory. According to the UN, the winter impacted nearly one-third of Mongolians and contributed to higher rates of malnutrition, a 35 to 40 percent increase in infant mortality rates, and double the usual maternal mortality rates. By the end of the season, 17 percent of livestock had died off and more than 20,000 herders had given up on rural life and moved to urban areas instead, according to UN estimates.
The lure of mining jobs and basic services like schools and hospitals (few and far between in the countryside) add to the pull that Mongolia’s few cities exert over herders. Once in the cities, though, herders often end up living in slums made of gers, traditional felt yurts. In Ulan Bator, 60 percent of residents live in ger districts that are almost completely disconnected from the city’s infrastructure and lack even the most basic sanitation services. Slum conditions are so bad that Dave Lawrence, a career development worker writing for the World Bank’s East Asia and Pacific blog, wrote that “nowhere else in the world do so many people live as if they were refugees from war or a natural disaster.”
According to a 2009 World Bank report, the slums – where families keep warm during sub-zero winters with little more than coal-fired cook stoves – are a driving force behind pollution levels that surpass even those of China’s notoriously polluted skies. In 2010 the World Health Organization announced that Ulan Bator had “the world’s worst air pollution” – an unexpected distinction for the capital of one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries (second only to Greenland).
Pollution levels across the city reach their highest in the overcrowded, impoverished, and coal-heated slums during winter months. Mortality rates are an estimated 24 to 45 percent higher than what they would be if pollution levels were in line with international air quality standards, according to World Bank projections. Pollution levels peak during cooking times, suggesting that those responsible for cooking and other household chores – often women and girls – bear the brunt of indoor exposure.
A Struggle to Balance Mining and the Environment
The mining boom adds another layer to the country’s delicate environmental balance. Mongolia is naturally susceptible to food insecurity (the proportion of undernourished has hovered around one-quarter of the population for the past two decades), and water access in particular plays a large role.
One-third of Mongolia’s provinces fall “well below the international norm that defines absolute water scarcity,” according to the UN Development Program, and more than half of the population lives without access to clean water. Mining is exacerbating both problems as unlicensed operations pollute scarce above-ground supplies (which are frozen half the year), while large-scale works divert the primary underground sources.
“My greatest fear is we won’t have water,” Mijiddorj Ayur, a 76-year-old herder in the Gobi, told NPR in May. “I don’t care about the gold or the copper, I’m just afraid there won’t be water.”
Even in the northern part of the country, which has yet to see a mining boom on the same scale as the south, water remains contentious. In September 2010, a group of four activists armed with hunting rifles shot at foreign-owned mining equipment stationed along the country’s longest river, which feeds into Lake Baikal. Based on an environmental protection law banning mining operations near headwaters, the riverside mine was illegal; however, weak enforcement meant the law was easy to ignore.
The incident is emblematic of a problem that even the country’s mining regulators acknowledge. “The principle of the [headwater] law is right,” Tamir Tegshsaikhan, an official at the country’s mining regulator, told EurasiaNet after the 2010 incident. “The government adopted the law with a view to protect the environment, but the implementation side has many issues.”
The Only Path Out of Poverty?
Corruption, which runs rampant throughout the government, makes implementation all the more difficult. A 2005 USAID report showed that Mongolians saw corruption as one of the top three challenges facing the country, following poverty and unemployment. That same report found that “by far the most problematic characteristic of Mongolia’s corruption is that it takes place at an elite level and involves a conflict of interests between the state and private sectors.”
With that warning, the prospects for equitably and safely developing the mining industry appear bleak, especially given the extreme reliance on the industry as Mongolia’s best chance at prosperity. The country’s standing in Transparency International’s annual corruption perception index offers further cause for concern – since Mongolia first entered the index in 2004, its ranking has dropped from the 85th least corrupt country in the world to 120th in 2011, placing it alongside the likes of Iran and Kazakhstan (worth noting is the fact that during those years, 37 countries were added to the index).
Corruption is front and center in domestic politics this year after the former president, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, was arrested following allegations that he misused public funds while in office. While observers agree that Enkhbayar, like most public officials, likely enriched himself while in power, the case against him is seen as so politicized and poorly handled that it has become a lightning rod for criticism of the current government.
Because of the corruption case, Enkhbayar was barred from running in the country’s recent parliamentary elections, which took place on June 28. The elections were billed as the answer to two key questions surrounding the mining industry: first, how should the government redistribute revenues given the country’s widespread socioeconomic troubles? And second, to what degree should lawmakers welcome foreign investment? The Democratic Party, which won the most votes but fell short of a majority, announced last week that it would form a coalition government with Enkhbayar’s Justice Coalition, which struck a strong nationalist tone during the elections; concerns about resource nationalism in the new government are reportedly already growing among mining companies.
“Exploiting Everything Is Not Development”
Perhaps unexpectedly, the country’s lawmakers acknowledge the precariousness of its current situation. Mongolia “is in a critical stage of our development,” said Prime Minister Sukhbaatryn Batbold last October at an Asia Society Forum. Reinforcing his concern, another senior government official said in 2010 that “it’s a question of whether we become Nigeria or Chile.” Lawmakers take study trips to places like Chile, Canada, and Norway, which have managed to balance resource wealth with socioeconomic advancement. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Batbold said.
To that end, lawmakers have taken noteworthy strides towards ensuring the resource boom leads to healthy development. Parliament passed anti-corruption legislation barring lawmakers from making campaign promises about jobs or money, and the major parties agreed to a ban on cash handouts in advance of the recent elections. The government established two funds with mining revenues, one to make payments to the country’s poorest residents and the other to subsidize prices for basic goods when markets are volatile. And there is an active civil society: When lawmakers failed to make payments from the Human Development Fund, for instance, massive protests spurred them back into action.
While these measures offer hope for Mongolia’s future, whether they can be successfully and effectively implemented remains to be seen. In advance of last month’s elections, lawmakers found ways to skirt the cash handout ban through a buy-back program where the government paid Mongolians $760 each in exchange for their shares in the state-owned mining company. This pattern will have to change if Mongolia is to develop over the long term while avoiding the dangers of the resource curse and protecting a fragile but nation-defining landscape.
Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, one of the four herders involved in the 2010 shooting protest and the 2007 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, warned that in a place like Mongolia, where so many depend on the land for their living, protecting the environment will be an essential part of ensuring that the mining industry is able to contribute to a brighter future for his country.
“Exploiting everything,” he said, “is not development.”
Photo credit: “Mongolian Boys Herd Goats,” courtesy of United Nations Photo; “UNDP-MNG-Dzud4,” courtesy of the United Nations Development Programme; “Open coal pit at the UHG mine,” courtesy of flickr user CEE Bankwatch Network.
Sources: Asia Society, Asian Journal of Political Science, Constitution of Mongolia, EurasiaNet, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Financial Times, National Statistical Office of Mongolia, NPR, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Reuters, Revenue Watch Institute, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, Transparency International, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of State, United Nations Development Program, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), The World Bank. -
Eye On:
Visualizing Complex Vulnerability in Africa: The CCAPS Climate-Conflict Mapping Tool
›By Lauren Herzer // Friday, July 20, 2012“Every crisis is complex, and the Sahel is no exception,” wrote USAID Assistant Administrator Nancy Lindborg in a recent Huffington Post article that called for “smarter programming and a coordivenated response” to chronic crises. “A regional drought has been overlaid with instability stemming from the coup in Mali and conflict in the northern part of that country where armed militant groups have forced the suspension of critical relief operations” and led to refugee movement into neighboring countries simultaneously challenged by drought and crop infestation. Understanding the complexity of this type of crisis, let alone visualizing the multiple factors that come into play, is a growing challenge for policymakers and analysts.
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Enter version 2.0 of a mapping tool created by the Climate Change and African Political Stability Program (CCAPS) housed in the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, based at the University of Texas, Austin.
In collaboration with the College of William and Mary, Trinity College, and the University of North Texas, and with funding by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, CCAPS originally launched the mapping tool in March of this year. The map is powered by mapping and data tools from Esri and allows users to view any combination of datasets on international development projects, national governance indicators, incidences of conflict, and climate vulnerability data.
With an intuitive interface and compelling visuals, the mapping tool is a valuable resource for policy analysts and researchers to assess the complex interactions that take place among these environmental, political, and social factors. Advanced filters allow the user to identify a subset of conflicts and aid projects and there are nine base map styles from which to choose.
The mapping tool is anything but static. The team is constantly working to refine and enhance it through the inclusion of additional indicators and improvement of the interface. The updated version now includes CCAP’s new Social Conflict in Africa Database, which tracks a broad range of social and political unrest, and their partners’ real-time conflict dataset, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED), which tracks real-time conflict data. Impressively, the ACLED data will be updated weekly.
I asked CCAPS program manager Ashley Moran to clarify how the governance indicators work in the model. She explained:The national governance indicators are included in one of four baskets that make up the climate vulnerability model…and represent four potential sources of vulnerability: physical exposure to climate-related hazards, population density, household and community resilience, and governance and political violence. They used the term “basket” since most include several indicators that reflect the full dimensions of that source of vulnerability. The fourth basket includes five national governance indicators and one indicator of political violence.
Moran also shared plans to add more detailed national governance data to the map:We are developing a mapping tool specifically for the climate vulnerability model, which will allow users to see the component parts of the model. It will allow users to re-weight the baskets (e.g. if a user thought governance should have more weight within the model since the government response to climate hazards is key), and it will also allow users to examine an area’s vulnerability to just one or two baskets of the user’s particular interest (instead of all four baskets combined as the tool does now). When we launch this, a user will essentially be able to see the vulnerability model disaggregated into its component parts, so they’ll be able to map just the governance data in the model, if they want.
In the coming months, the CCAPS team will add more detailed historical and projected data on climate vulnerability, data on disaster response capacity, as well as international aid projects coded for climate relevance.
Each of these datasets on their own are a wealth of vital information, but understanding how they intersect and the potential impact of their interactions is crucial to improving our understanding of them individually and collectively and creating responses that are timely and long-lasting.
If you’re in the San Diego area next week, check out Ashley Moran’s presentation of the mapping tool at the Esri International User Conference and the Worldwide Human Geography Data Working Group.
Sources: The Climate Change and African Political Stability Program, The Huffington Post.
Image Credit: CCAPS -
From the Wilson Center:
Urban Resilience: What Is It and How Can We Promote It?
›By Graham Norwood // Friday, July 20, 2012A new study on the intersection of violence and economic development in cities breaks new ground by examining how communities respond to and cope with extant violence, rather than focusing on the root causes of violence in a given area. Authors Diane Davis, Harvard professor of urbanism and development, and John Tirman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, spoke at length about the origins, methodology, and findings of the report, Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Conflict, at the Wilson Center on July 12. The report was supported by USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation.
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“We made the decision that we weren’t going to produce yet another research project or study on the root causes of violence, because there is a lot of incredibly good work on that [already],” said Davis. “We wanted to take a totally different angle…to try to think about taking a more pragmatic approach that builds on how everyday people, who live with violence, respond.”
To do this, Davis and Tirman focused their research on seven cities around the world with histories of chronic violence, creating a case study for each and then comparing results. (An eighth city, Karachi, was jettisoned because it was deemed too unsafe for research.) The comparative process allowed Davis and Tirman to develop a basic theoretical framework for how different factors increase or decrease a community’s resilience to violence.
Defining Resilience
The term “resilience” lies at the heart of the new study. “The idea of ‘bouncing back,’ or returning to normalcy, is [generally] the measurement standard for looking at resilience,” Davis said.
However, she was quick to point out the problems with such a simplistic definition. “[In] cities of the developing world…things are in flux. So it’s really hard to know what a ‘bouncing back’ is if things are constantly changing.”
“Also,” she added, “in many of the environments we were looking at, violence is a consequence of the way things were under normal conditions. So you don’t necessarily want to bounce back to those conditions that were producing the violence in the first place.”
Davis and Tirman sidestepped these problems by letting their research define successful resilience, rather than trying to fit their results to a prefabricated definition of the word. In doing so, they were able to identify several important commonalities in the cities and communities that displayed the most positive resilience to violence.
“Our findings suggest that resilience appears at the interface of civilian and state action,” Davis writes in the report. She underscored the significance of civilians as facilitators in both developing and implementing better security policies: “People who live in violence know more than academics or policymakers about what they can and can’t do to deal with the problem of violence,” she said.
Focus on Community
Davis and Tirman pointed out that the most successfully resilient cities they studied – Mexico City, Managua, and especially Medellín – seemed to have a number of civilian/state relationships defined “from below,” rather than the more problematic “top down” approach. This means that civilians and communities were participating on their own terms, collaborating with city planners and with law enforcement agencies to get their needs met rather than simply being what Davis called “yes men” to higher authorities.
Physical space – what Davis referred to as “the weight of the spatial” – also played a very significant role in Urban Resilience. She and Tirman made the conscious decision to incorporate physical planning and design into their research, eschewing the more typical sectoral approach to violence and security.
This methodological break from the existing literature was particularly useful in demonstrating that violence-plagued communities are often themselves the most important agents of resilience. “Citizens have to be able to make real decisions on their own,” Davis stressed in the Q&A; session that followed her and Tirman’s presentation. “[They] have to feel that ownership, that autonomy of the decisions in their neighborhood, even if they’re bad [decisions], because that’s what ties them to each other.”
“We think the starting point for generating resilience is really supporting and enabling communities to make dense horizontal relationships with others in their neighborhood, across sectors, that allow them to push back against perpetrators of violence.”
In other words, while the state can play a significant role in helping communities to mitigate violence, successful resilience ultimately requires the commitment and participation of the communities in question.
“The state might have a security program, it might have a planning program, but every decision has to be made with an understanding of what’s good for that particular neighborhood,” Davis said.
Places People Want to Protect
Davis was very succinct in offering recommendations based on the study. For policymakers and urban planners, she said resilience is formed by “a combination of good governance, security reform, and…inclusive urban planning.” Citing examples from Mexico City, Medellín, and elsewhere, Davis pointed to planning policies like mixed land use, greater pedestrian accessibility, and more parks and public spaces as ways that authorities could engender the kind of community pride so crucial to the development of positive urban resilience.
“[Focus on] generating vibrant public areas where people feel invested in protecting [them] and making them better,” she advised.
While many scholars have tended to look either at the state or local communities in isolation when considering violence and resilience, Davis argued that reducing violence was “a shared objective.” She thus stressed the importance of “co-production of security,” reiterating the overall notion that state and community actors need to work side-by-side in a form of what Davis and Tirman called “cooperative autonomy.”
In addition to Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, Davis also authored the supplementary Toolkit for Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence. Both documents can be found on the MIT’s website. Davis and Tirman hope to add the seven individual case studies to the site soon.
Event Resources:Photo Credit: “Bogota at night,” courtesy of flickr user WanderingtheWorld (Christopher Schoenbohm); charts courtesy of Davis and Tirman. -
Center for American Progress Takes on Climate Change, Migration, and Why They Matter to U.S. National Security
›By Kayly Ober // Thursday, July 19, 2012In early 2012, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century. Although generally in line with climate-migration pieces before it (“It is difficult to fully understand the detailed causes of migration and economic and political instability, but the growing evidence of links between climate change, migration, and conflict raise plenty of reasons for concern”), the report strays from the usual by focusing on U.S. national security interests and four particular sub-regions of concern.MORE
Northwest Africa
The first region examined – and the one perhaps most on the radar of security analysts at the moment – is Northwest Africa. Here the already-tenuous political stability left in the wake of the Arab Spring will most certainly be exacerbated by climate change, authors Michael Werz and Laura Conley write. “Northwest Africa is crisscrossed with climate, migration, and security challenges…rising coastal sea level, desertification, drought, and the numerous other potential effects of climate change have the potential to increase the numbers of migrants.” All of these factors combine to create what Werz and Conley define as an “arc of tension,” that will strengthen organizations that thrive on chaos, like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which has already taken advantage of the regional power vacuum left by Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster.
CAP investigates this arc of tension more fully in a more focused, separate brief on Northwest Africa, drilling down on Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco. They find that these countries already grapple with a complex set of issues, including population pressures, drought, land degradation, large-scale migration, and natural resource conflicts. Climate change exacerbates all of these. Particularly worrying is the threat it poses to traditional pastoral and agricultural livelihoods, which could translate into “increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth, who security experts believe are more easily recruited to assist [terrorist groups] in return for money and food.”But environmental pressures and related conflict are not new in these areas, so how do we parse out the slow-onset climate change factors from the usual variety? That question is left unanswered and remains an open – and hotly debated – problem for researchers. The multi-faceted nature of migration, in particular, makes it hard to define the exact causes of movement.
On a larger scale, flagging the environment as the principal reason for migration has its problems, especially under the umbrella of “refugee” status. According to respected migration experts, using the term “refugee” in the case of environmental or climate scenarios is incorrect, since the environment is often simply one “push” factor, while economic opportunities make for a heavier “pull.” Furthermore, applying the term refugee in this case, they say, is misleading and undermines true political refugees.
CAP uses the less polarizing term “climate migrants” in their paper, saying “no universally accepted concepts, much less legal categories, exist to describe or define climate migrants. There is agreement, however, that factors such as drought, flooding, severe weather, and environmental degradation can cause human mobility in large numbers that are certain to increase in the near future.”
South Asia
In a case like Bangladesh and India, the second sub-region to be examined, the international community is preoccupied with rising sea levels, which is considered a more concrete example of climate change affecting migration. Ultimately, as CAP notes, it’s also a security issue:In December 2008 the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., ran an exercise that explored the impact of a flood that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring India. The result: the exercise predicted a new wave of migration would touch off religious conflicts, encourage the spread of contagious diseases, and cause vast damage to infrastructure.
While true that India is “not in a position to absorb climate-induced pressures,” as Werz and Conley write, it’s not quite true that “foreign climate migrants” would be necessarily be an immediate problem, as they suggest.
India has a history of taking in Bangladeshi migration, with an estimated 10 to 20 million illegal Bangladeshis currently living in India, according to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, an Indian think tank. Traditionally, Bangladeshis have migrated for a myriad of socioeconomic reasons, but most alluring are land availability and a stronger Indian economy. In any case, Bangladesh-India migration would not be new phenomenon.
The environment has also been a part of the equation, but in the case of large-scale sea level rise, its effect on migration can be a bit more nuanced. As the International Food Policy Research Institute noted in its study “Environmental Migrants: A Myth?,” Bangladeshis often have “risk-sharing and informal lending arrangements” to deal with idiosyncratic shocks, which include flooding. Instead, crop failure actually has the strongest effect on mobility. This suggests that it’s not just sea level rise that observers worried about environmentally-driven migration need to track in Bangladesh, but also drought and rain-induced flooding.
The Andes
The third region, the Andes of South America, also suffers from a slightly myopic security lens. Here, it’s all about melting glaciers and snowcaps. Retreating glaciers would spell disaster for countries which rely heavily on seasonal melt for agriculture and hydroelectric power. Most vulnerable are those with weak governance systems and infrastructure like Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. For reference, hydropower supplies a whopping 80 percent of Peru’s electricity. However, there are more subtle impacts that could portend bigger trouble for the region.
Regional security experts concede that higher temperatures are already affecting crop production in rural Colombia, harming the ability to consolidate the security gains made by Plan Colombia over the last decade, for example. And a recent report from EUROCLIMA, the European Union’s program on climate change in Latin America, paints an even bleaker picture for agricultural production in the face of desertification and drought:Natural ecosystems, agriculture, water resources, and human health in Latin America have been impacted by unusual extreme weather events reported in the past years. For example, droughts related to El Niño impacts on the flows of the Colombia Andean region basins (particularly in the Cauca river basin), are causing a 30 percent reduction in the mean flow, with a maximum of 80 percent loss in some tributaries. Consequently, soil moisture, and vegetation activity are strongly reduced.
Perhaps more worrying is the impact on the biodiversity in the region. Considering that Latin America represents 16 percent of the world’s surface but 40 percent of its biodiversity this could have serious implications for the biomedical field and others. In a recent Nature study, scientists discovered that in situations where glacial coverage is reduced to the point where it only covers 30 to 50 percent of the drainage basin, several species begin to disappear. They calculated that the entire melting of the glaciers in these areas would result in a huge loss of biodiversity, where between 11 and 38 percent of animal and plant species could go extinct, including many of endemic species that can be found only in these areas.
China and the Third Pole
Finally, China is now in its fourth decade of ever-growing internal migration, some of it driven in recent years by environmental change. Today, across its vast territory, China continues to experience the full spectrum of climate change-related consequences that have the potential to drive migration. CAP finds that the consequences of climate change and continued internal migration in China include “water stress; increased droughts, flooding, or other severe events; increased coastal erosion and saltwater inundation; glacial melt in the Himalayas that could affect hundreds of millions; and shifting agricultural zones” – all of which will affect food supplies and the country’s seemingly relentless pace of development. Still, the most unique factor of migration in China is the power of the central government to be the main “push factor,” as in the case of the Three Gorges Dam.
Agreeing to Agree
Though they might sacrifice some nuance in the regional breakdowns, the core of CAP’s argument for why climate migration matters to U.S. national security is solid. The United States has a “vested interest in helping ensure that areas with weak or absent governance structures – where poverty, environmental degradation, and grievances over central governments and energy production coincide – do not become future recruiting grounds for extremists,” write Werz and Conley. “The possible impacts of climate-related migration in such fragile situations could be destabilizing.” Invest in people rather than just military might; invest in poverty reduction, economic development, and alternative livelihoods.Jon Barnett on migration as adaptation
In the context of climate change, this means accepting that migration is a form of adaptation. As Jon Barnett notes in an interview with ECSP:In some circumstances it might be appropriate to [invest in traditional adaptation projects like] infrastructure and hard options where we’re very certain about the nature of the risk…but in other cases, expanding the range of choices and freedoms and opportunities that people have to deal with climate change in the future is perhaps the better strategy.
This requires higher-level thinking by states to concede that migration will happen and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Migration bolsters origin communities through remittances and education and technology sharing. But this thinking has yet to permeate policymaking, with obvious political reasons. Until then, states that are committed to preventing migration are actually cutting off important community responses.
Ultimately, what we consider adaptation and development needs to evolve. By investing in an integrated, multi-sector development approach, we can prevent violent responses to migration at the source rather than relying on reactionary and military solutions. Or, as CAP’s Michael Werz and Laura Conley put it more boldly, “our security can no longer be guaranteed by military strength or economic clout alone, but only by our ability to compel collective action.”
Photo credit: “Villagers going to the local market in Bogoro walk past a Bangladeshi patrol unit of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) as the country prepares for the second round of elections. 12/Oct/2006. UN Photo/Martine Perret,” courtesy of United Nations Photo Flickr.
Sources: Center for American Progress, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Inter-American Development Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute, Nature, The World Bank.
Video Credit: “The Nexus of Climate Change, Migration and Security,” courtesy of the Center for American Progress. Image: “The Arc of Tension,” courtesy of the Center for American Progress. -
Dot-Mom:
‘Motherland Afghanistan’ Shows Maternal Mortality Not Just A Health Issue
›By Calyn Ostrowski // Wednesday, July 18, 2012Afghanistan has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world: 372 out of every 100,000 women who give birth die during childbirth. Despite some recent improvements, political, social, cultural, and economic factors present enormous challenges. Last month, the Center for Population and Development Activities hosted an online viewing and dialogue discussion of the PBS Independent Lens film Motherland Afghanistan, which follows Afghan-American filmmaker Sedika Mojadidi and her father, Dr. Qudrat Mojadid, as they return to their home country and visit the Laura Bush Maternity Ward in Kabul. The conditions they find are devastating and underscore not only the need for greater commitment to reproductive health services, but also the advancement of women’s and girl’s access to education, security, and political participation.MORE
Like most health facilities in Afghanistan, Dr. Mojadid found that the ward lacks sufficient human resources and adequate health supplies. Health care workers were limited, most with out-of-date skills, and no functional training. “Most of these doctors don’t have the basic knowledge to take care of their patients. They’re so thirsty for just one word of wisdom, but there’s nobody to give them that,” he says.
According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) only 14 percent of births in Afghanistan are attended by a skilled healthcare worker. Qualified birth attendants ensure a continuum of care through pregnancy and birth, leading to healthier mothers and children. One strategy to address the human resource shortages in places like Afghanistan is to expand and acknowledge the skills and responsibilities of non-physician health workers through task-shifting (redistribution of tasks to persons with a baseline set of skills). Task-shifting can help lighten the load, but trained midwives are essential, as panelist Jeffrey Smith, regional technical director for Asia Jhpiego pointed out during the Wilson Center’s Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health series.
“The most important decision made early in the reconstruction [of] Afghanistan was that midwives would be the backbone of the reproductive health workforce and they would be empowered with the skills to perform the tasks necessary for provision of basic emergency obstetric care,” said Smith.
Due to population growth and existing shortfalls, the UNFPA estimates that Afghanistan needs an additional 4,000 midwives in order to attain a 95 percent skilled birth attendance by 2015. Although it is a long road to progress, the government of Afghanistan has worked with UNPFA and other international donors such as USAID to create the first National Policy and Strategy for Nursing and Midwifery Services, which provides nurses and midwives with a comprehensive education and skillset to address preventable causes of maternal deaths.
While improving the overall health system is imperative to decreasing maternal mortality rates in Afghanistan, I found it impossible to ignore the cultural and political backdrop of Motherland Aghanistan’s setting. Forced marriages, lack of education and political participation, violence, insecurity, and patriarchal cultural norms clearly play a large role.
Women for Afghan Women – a women’s rights organization based in Kabul and New York – joined the video discussion and had a strong message about the prospects for women in ongoing negotiations with insurgents. “Afghan women have been left out of any formal talks,” said Executive Director Manizha Naderi:We are trying to get our voices heard by doing media interviews and speaking anywhere we can. We are against any form of negotiation with the Taliban because they can’t be trusted. Our position against negotiating with the Taliban does not mean we are giving in to a permanent war or that we want war. It means we look for strategies that are not destined to failure before the ink is dry on the settlement pages.
Just this April, Afghan Minister of Health Suraya Dail said at the Wilson Center that “the gains we have made [in reducing maternal mortality rates] are remarkable; however, gains are fragile and donor resources are declining. Substantial investments must be maintained to safeguard these hard-wins.” The film reiterates her point.
The most important point is that the subjugation of women is not a sidebar, something that can be avoided through negotiations, it is the linchpin of Taliban strategy, having nothing to do with religion. The subjugation of half a country is the straightest path to subjugating the whole. Just forbid women from going to work or school or leaving the house without a mahram (male escort), beat them with whips or guns on the street because a square inch of ankle shows below the burkha, drag a few into the Kabul stadium, force them to their knees and shoot them in the head, and a terrorized country will submit.
Although we believe women must be at all negotiations and decision making tables, we also believe these negotiations are doomed to failure. They have not worked in the past, they will not work in the future. Let’s invest our considerable energies and experience in other solutions to the Afghan situation. Security, infrastructure, economic, and civic development are essential for Afghanistan as well as advancement of women’s and girls’ economic, educational, health, civic participation, and political rights. Funding from NATO countries is necessary to secure these goals.
Indeed, exposés like Motherland and the work of photographer Lynsey Addario, who presented at the Wilson Center last year, show the precariousness of women’s rights and development in ways that statistics and politicking sometimes mask.
Sources: MEASURE DHS, PBS, UNFPA, World Health Organization.
Video Credit: Independent Lens Motherland Afghanistan, courtesy of PBS. Feature image: “Side streets of Kabul,” courtesy of flickr user Abdurahman Warsame. -
Re|Source 2012 Conference: Global Fight for Natural Resources “Has Only Just Begun”
›Fiona Harvey, The Guardian
By ECSP Staff // Wednesday, July 18, 2012The original version of this article, by Fiona Harvey, appeared in The Guardian.
The global battle for natural resources – from food and water to energy and precious metals – is only beginning, and will intensify to proportions that could mean enormous upheavals for every country, leading academics and business figures told a conference in Oxford on Thursday.MORE
Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, who convened the two-day Re|Source 2012 conference, told The Guardian: “We are nowhere near realizing the full impact of this yet. We have seen the first indications – rising food prices, pressure on water supplies, a land grab by some countries for mining rights and fertile agricultural land, and rising prices for energy and for key resources [such as] metals. But we need to do far more to deal with these problems before they become even more acute, and we are not doing enough yet.”
Countries that are not prepared for this rapid change will soon – perhaps irrevocably – lose out, with serious damage to their economies and way of life, the conference was told.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, said that the free market would not necessarily provide the best solution to sharing out the world’s resources. Governments would need to step in, he said, to ensure that people had access to the basics of life, and that the interests of businesses and the financial markets did not win out over more fundamental human needs.
Continue reading on The Guardian.
Photo Credit: “Aerial view of the Jonah natural gas field, upper Green River valley, Wyoming, 2001,” courtesy of flickr user SkyTruth and Peter Aengst/The Wilderness Society. -
Guest Contributor:
Nine Strategies to Stop Short of Nine Billion
›By Robert Engelman // Monday, July 16, 2012Although most analysts assume that the world’s population will rise from today’s seven billion to nine billion by 2050, it is quite possible that humanity will never reach this population size.
My chapter in this year’s State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity, “Nine Population Strategies to Stop Short of 9 Billion,” outlines a series of strategies that would prompt significant declines in birth rates. Based purely on the intention of women around the world to have small families or no children at all, these initiatives, policies, and changes in attitude could end population growth before mid-century at fewer than nine billion people.MORE
Examples from around the world demonstrate effective policies that not only reduce birth rates, but also respect the reproductive aspirations of parents and support an educated and economically active society that promotes the health of women and girls. Most of these reproduction policies are relatively inexpensive to implement, yet in many places they are opposed on the basis of cultural resistance and political infeasibility.
In creating this list, I sought to eschew the language and approaches of “population control” or the idea that anyone should pressure women and their partner on reproduction. Instead, I hoped to highlight strategies that could put human population on an environmentally sustainable path:- Provide universal access to safe and effective contraceptive options for both sexes. With two in five pregnancies reported as mistimed or never wanted, lack of access to good family planning services is among the biggest gaps in assuring that each baby will be wanted and welcomed in advance by its parents.
- Guarantee education through secondary school for all, especially girls. In every culture surveyed to date, women who have completed at least some secondary school have fewer children on average, and have children later in life, than do women who have less education.
- Eradicate gender bias from law, economic opportunity, health, and culture. Women who can own, inherit, and manage property; divorce; obtain credit; and participate in civic and political affairs on equal terms with men are more likely to postpone childbearing and to have fewer children compared to women who are deprived of these rights.
- Offer age-appropriate sexuality education for all students. Data from the United States indicates that exposure to comprehensive programs that detail puberty, intercourse, options of abstinence and birth control, and respecting the sexual rights and decisions of individuals can help prevent unwanted pregnancies and hence reduce birth rates.
- End all policies that reward parents financially based on the number of children they have. Governments can preserve and even increase tax and other financial benefits aimed at helping parents by linking these not to the number of children they have, but to parenthood status itself.
- Integrate lessons on population, environment, and development into school curricula at multiple levels. Refraining from advocacy or propaganda, schools should educate students to make well-informed choices about the impacts of their behavior, including childbearing, on the environment.
- Put prices on environmental costs and impacts. In quantifying the cost of an additional family member by calculating taxes and increased food costs, couples may decide that the cost of having an additional child is too high. Such decisions, freely made by women and couples, can decrease birth rates without any involvement by non-parents in reproduction.
- Adjust to an aging population instead of boosting childbearing through government incentives and programs. Population aging must be met with the needed societal adjustments, such as increased labor participation, rather than by offering incentives to women to have more children.
- Convince leaders to commit to stabilizing population through the exercise of human rights and human development. By educating themselves on rights-based population policies, policymakers can ethically and effectively address population-related challenges by empowering women to make their own reproductive choices.
Kathleen Mogelgaard assisted with research for this piece.
Robert Engelman is the president of the Worldwatch Institute and contributing author to State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity.
Sources: Bloom et al. (2011), Guttmacher Institute, Kohler et al. (2008), Population Reference Bureau, UN, UNFPA, The Wall Street Journal, Yadava and Yadava (1999).
Image Credit: Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity.
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