New Security Beat

From the Wilson Center: Call for Papers: Reducing Urban Poverty

2012-01-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Project, USAID, the International Housing Coalition, the World Bank, and Cities Alliance are teaming up a third time to co-sponsor an academic paper competition for graduate and PhD level students focused on challenges facing urban centers in the developing world.

The themes of this year’s competition are land markets, global climate change, and youth.

Land Markets: The absence of efficient land and housing markets and lack of secure tenure for both renters and owners are impediments to urban and economic development in developing cities. Papers on this topic should explore strategies and approaches that would enable property markets to function better and would provide increased security of tenure and strengthened property ownership rights.

Global Climate Change: Papers should examine how urban populations, especially the poor, are coping with the impacts of climate change, and provide strategic policy analysis to better understand how cities can become more resilient to climate change impacts.

Youth: Most of the youth of the developing world are now or will soon be living in urban areas. Unfortunately, they are often growing up in the poorest urban areas – informal settlements and slum communities where their opportunities for advancement are limited by a variety of negative factors. Papers focused on youth should explore ways to build capacity so that you can develop knowledge and skills, find gainful employment, and participate more fully in society to advance economic growth and social development.

Winning papers from each category will be published and the authors invited to Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2012 for a policy workshop with subject matter experts. Additionally, one grand prize winner will be asked to present his or her work at the World Urban Forum (WUF). WUF was established by the United Nations to examine rapid urbanization and its impact on communities, cities, economies, climate change, and policies. The sixth WUF will be held from September 1-7, 2012 in Naples, Italy and will be focused on “The Urban Future.” In addition to the Washington conference and publication of his or her paper, the grand-prize winner will be invited to present his or her winning paper on a panel at the World Urban Youth Assembly at WUF on September 1st and 2nd.

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is February 20, 2012.

For detailed competition guidelines and requirements, and further information on the sub-topics, please see the full call for papers.

Image Credit: “Split by yelowcap,” courtesy of flickr user yelowcap (Vladimir Kaštier).

New Security Beat Is Five Years Old

2012-01-26T17:02:00.011-05:00

Five years ago, in January 2007, we launched New Security Beat. Since then we’ve established a strong editorial focus on a key but neglected niche: where population, environment, and security meet.

Too little attention is given to this complex nexus. To fill that gap, we’ve worked to create a safe space for discussing the connections between these diverse topics. New Security Beat brings members of different disciplines – health, natural sciences, and international relations – together to find common ground at the intersection of their issues.

ECSP’s Sean Peoples, Meaghan Parker, and Schuyler Null accepted the Population Institute’s Global Media Award for Best Online Commentary at a January 12 ceremony in New York City.

How gender and reproductive health are connected to the environment and development;
How the environment and natural resources are linked to conflict and cooperation; and
How population and demography impact war and peace.

To that end, in the last few years we’ve ramped up our efforts on two formats: guest contributions and multimedia.

Dozens of experts present their research and expertise at Wilson Center events each month. But capturing their insights and sharing them with those of you outside the room is difficult. Our series of short, embeddable video interviews, posted on YouTube and the blog, brings these experts’ work to a wider audience and serves as an online archive for researchers, students, and teachers. Some recent examples include:

Through our guest contributors, we’ve also been lucky to publish some of the top thinkers on emerging issues like the demographic roots of the Arab Spring; the value of integrating population, health, and environment development programs; and the links between conflict and natural resources.

If you’re working on new research, policies, or projects on population, environment, and security, we invite you to join us and contribute your thoughts on these important and often overlooked connections. Email a brief pitch to our web editor, and help us make the next five years as informative as the first.

Photo Credit: Population Institute.

Move Beyond “Water Wars” to Fulfill Water’s Peacebuilding Potential, Says NCSE Panel

2012-01-26T09:00:00.006-05:00

One of the best talks of last week’s NCSE Environment and Security Conference was the water security plenary on Friday. Moderator Aaron Salzberg, who is special coordinator for water resources at the Department of State, led with a provocative question: how many in attendance think there will be war over water in the future?

Most of the audience raised their hands. The panelists – as one might expect with a set-up like that – proceeded to explain why they were mistaken.

What Makes a Water War

Carl Bruch, who co-directs international programs at the Environmental Law Institute, started by saying history shows that inter-state “water wars” are “highly unlikely.” He pointed to Aaron Wolf’s and Peter Gleick’s work cataloguing the role of water in conflict throughout human history that shows it is difficult to find even a single conflict that was fought solely over the fundamental resource.

For example, climate change may bring changes in rainfall, and some studies have found a correlation between lack of rainfall and conflict, but there is no causation, said Bruch. “It’s a question of governance,” he said. If lack of rainfall caused conflict, there would have been war across the Sahel in 2003; instead, it only happened in Darfur, which lacked a government able to deal with the challenge (similar observations have been made about the relationship between drought and famine in the Horn of Africa).

Kent Butts, professor and director of the National Security Issues Group at the U.S. Army War College, said that some things have changed that might make conflict over water more likely in the near future. In light of water’s relatively fixed supply, he cited growing human population – the UN median projection is now more than nine billion people by 2050 – and consumption as a key challenge, as well as the uncertain condition of key treaties. The Nile Basin Initiative is on rocky ground – with Ethiopia agitating for a greater share of flow and both Egypt and South Sudan dealing with new governments – and the Himalayan watershed is under stress as demand increases across the region. Butts also pointed to the tremendous number of new dams – many of which no longer need to abide by World Bank conditions as they can get Chinese loans and other bilateral funding – as an emerging challenge that may upend the positive historical trend.

Climate change, too, will likely bring water to the forefront in many areas of the world. “The changing climate changes the dynamics of security in a country,” Butts said. How able a country is to adapt to those changes will quickly expose weak, fragile, or corrupt regimes, threatening stability in some places.

Butts also warned that, though vehemence over water sharing has mainly been confined to rhetoric between countries up until now, that’s no reason to give it short shrift – it’s possible some countries may become trapped by their own public posturing, narrowing their responses to more bellicose options.

Jaehyang So, manager of the Water and Sanitation Program at the World Bank, pointed out the sheer number of people affected by water issues – nearly one-third of all people on Earth lack access to safe drinking water, she said – as evidence that water should be given more credence as a security issue, if perhaps as human or community security, rather than national or international security.

Similarly, Sandra Ruckstuhl, senior specialist for sustainable development at Group W Inc., said that though it’s true that international conflict over water has been rare, “conflict over water at the local level is something that’s been going on for a long time and has been a real divisive force.”

Coordination Can Create Pathways to Peace

If water can be a contributing factor to conflict in some places, it’s also a pathway to peace, the panelists agreed.

“This is a great opportunity,” said Bruch. “We see water as incredibly cross-cutting in the peacebuilding process.” He pointed to water programs’ effects on health, food, energy, gender issues, and economic development as reasons to make them a priority in post-conflict settings.

“The peacebuilding value of water is tremendous,” agreed Butts. “Water quality, as opposed to quantity, can be a major peacebuilding issue,” he said, as it’s a shared benefit.

More than material aid, Salzberg said that people in post-conflict settings most frequently ask the State Department for expertise. Because water issues cut across so many sectors, that’s difficult to provide, said Bruch, but the environment and security community needs to find ways to better coordinate. “In post-conflict countries, one of the highest priorities, if not the highest priority, is access to clean water,” he said.

Paul Faeth, senior fellow at CNA, pointed to the start of funding for the Senator Paul Simon Water for Poor Act, which provides at least $125 million in aid to sub-Saharan Africa alone, as a good policy step towards acknowledging water’s role in human security.

Another barrier to sustainable water management, said Jaehyang So, are subsidies: “There is no water system in the world that doesn’t have some subsidy attached to it,” she said. This creates incentives for misuse, which – though the human right to water should always be preserved – appropriate pricing schemes for industrial and agricultural use might go a long way towards curbing. (Of course, resolving that tension is easier said than done.) An infamous example is groundwater pumping in Yemen – primarily for the non-food crop, qat – which has gone on unsustainably for years, agitating internal divisions and prompting experts to predict that the country will become the first in the modern world to literally run out of water.

In concluding remarks, Butts called for moving beyond simple labels for conflict to better understand the complexity of water systems, create prosperity and stability, and better advance U.S. interests around the world.

The excerpts above are only a small slice of the conference; see the full agenda for panelists and topics covered, and follow the conversation on Twitter (#NCSEconf). We also posted thoughts on some of the previous panels and a gallery of pictures from around the conference to flickr.

Photo Credit: Jaehyang So and Carl Bruch, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.

Eye On: UNEP Maps Conflict, Migration, Environmental Vulnerability in the Sahel

2012-01-25T13:15:00.019-05:00

A new set of maps from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) identifies “climate hotspots” – areas vulnerable to instability exacerbated by climate change – in 17 sub-Saharan countries in and bordering the Sahel region. The maps reflect the fact that, more often than not, the impact of climate change on local populations is compounded by changes in migration, conflict, or both. According to “Livelihood Security: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict in the Sahel,” the UNEP report accompanying the maps, understanding “the exacerbating effect of changes in climate on population dynamics and conflict in the region” will be essential to developing successful adaptation strategies throughout the region.

UNEP’s maps analyze 40 years of data to pinpoint where the region’s most at-risk populations are located based on environmental, population, and conflict trends dating back to 1970. In a single map pinpointing the Sahel’s 19 hotspots, UNEP synthesizes subnational data from four environmental indicators over time – rainfall (from 1970 to 2006), temperature changes (1970 to 2006), drought (1982 to 2009), and flooding (1985 to 2009) – which are then layered on top of population trends (1970 to 2010) and conflict data (1970 to 2005) in order to identify the region’s most insecure areas.

Composite Vulnerability

At first glance, the map can appear hard to decipher; it is flooded with different colors and symbols, each indicating something different about the extent of climate change, migration, and conflict in the region. A Google Earth version of the map (available for download here) makes all this information easier to process by allowing users to select which indicators they want to see mapped out, cutting back on the number of lines, dots, colors, and pie charts the user has to decode.

Given the vast amount of the information being condensed into these maps, the report is a helpful and worthwhile read. For instance, eight hotspots are in places with growing populations and another seven are located in places that have experienced conflict; altogether, 4 of the 19 hotspots have both past conflict and growing populations. The report digs deeper into the confluence of climate, conflict, and migration by discussing case studies that highlight how the three intersect in local communities (at the same time, the report is careful to avoid suggesting that there is a causal relationship between the three issues.). In Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, for example, tensions have been mounting between northern pastoralists and southern farmers as each group has moved further and further afield in search of water and arable land to sustain their livelihoods.

Holes In the Data

While the hotspot maps include a wealth of information, the report makes clear that it is by no means exhaustive. Rising sea levels are, for instance, a major impending threat to coastal populations in the Sahel, but only the downloadable Google Earth map – not the hotspot map in the report or the Google Earth map as presented online – incorporates this factor. Compounded with a skyrocketing population in the coastal areas – the coast between Accra and the Niger delta is expected to be “an urban megalopolis of 50 million people” by 2020, according to the report – an increase in sea levels could have a huge impact on the region’s stability.

The report also readily admits that the datasets for population trends and conflict have shortcomings. Population data is largely based on censuses, which both the report and its data sources (UNEP’s African Population Database and the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) acknowledge can be inconsistent in their accuracy. Additionally, after 2000, population data is based on projections rather than estimates, which, as last year’s update from the UN Population Division showed, have often proven inaccurate, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Regarding conflict, the UNEP report is straightforward in admitting its limits. The report lacks data on small-scale conflict (fewer than 25 battle deaths, following the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s threshold that separates conflicts from lower-level violence), even as it acknowledges that such conflict is “often the first to occur” when climate change threatens communities’ access to resources and livelihoods.

Ultimately, however, these maps give valuable data on specific locations that are uniquely vulnerable to trends in population, climate, migration, and conflict. They add focus to the conventional wisdom that climate change will impact the region’s stability, and, taken together, the maps and the report provide a valuable resource for scholars and policymakers attempting to craft adaptation policies that take into consideration these complex links.

Sources: Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University's Earth Institute, UNEP, Uppsala Conflict Data Program.

Image Credit: UNEP.

Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission Ethan Goffman, SSPP Blog

2012-01-25T09:18:00.002-05:00

The original version of this article, by Ethan Goffman, appeared on the Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy blog.

In a time of polarized politics in the United States, over the environment and just about everything else, an overlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national security apparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environment and Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. With the early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in an increase in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic, those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage in speculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t really occurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action against potential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.

The concern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept of security from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands as food and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the military has already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energy security, economic security, environmental security, and national security are all inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,” explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.

One obvious linkage is the connection of our oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict in politically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in the Middle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is a matter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. The Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries, underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan, the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependent on large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algal jet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for more icebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resource exploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.

Continue reading on the SSPP blog.

Photo Credit: Sherri Goodman and Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.

You Are Invited, January, 25 2011: Sustainable Solutions for the Planet’s Energy Challenge

2012-01-24T17:28:00.001-05:00

Brazil Institute, Environmental Change and Security Program
Wednesday, January 25, 2011, 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Greg Kats, President, Capital E, and author of Greening Our Built World
Daniel Kammen, Professor of Public Policy, Energy and Resources Group, University of California Berkeley; and Former Chief Technical Specialist, Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, The World Bank

The environmental challenges of climate change, energy demands, and natural resource loss continue to mount. World population hit 7 billion on Halloween last year and is projected to go to 10 billion if not more. The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest in 130 years of recorded global temperatures and 2010 was the warmest year yet recorded. Extinction rates are 1,000 times base rates. The Amazon had the greatest drought in recorded history in 2010. Droughts, floods, wildfires, and intense tropical storms are becoming more frequent. These challenges call for action at a planetary scale.

The “Managing Our Planet” seminar series – developed jointly by George Mason University and the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Brazil Institute – addresses planetary scale problems and solutions.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

You Are Invited, January, 25 2011: Is a Food Crisis Brewing in the Sahel?

2012-01-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

Africa Program, Environmental Change and Security Program
Wednesday, January 25, 2011, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
6th Floor Auditorium
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Dramane Coulibaly, Team Leader, European Union Technical Assistance, Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS)
Greg Gottlieb, Bureau for Food Security, USAID
Jacques Higgins, Deputy Director, U.S. Relations Office, World Food Program
Steve McDonald, Director, Africa Program, Wilson Center
Michele McNabb, President, Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
Eric Munoz, Senior Policy Advisor, Oxfam
Ben Safari, Regional Technical Advisor, Commodities and Supply Chain Management, Catholic Relief Services
John Scicchitano, Program Manager, FEWSNET
John Sewell, Senior Scholar, Wilson Center
Meera Shekar, Lead Health Specialist, Africa Region Technical Health Unit, World Bank
Emmy Simmons, Board Member, Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
John Staatz, Michigan State University

While African nations and the donor community struggle to mitigate famine in the Horn of Africa, concern is growing that drought in the Sahel will trigger a food crisis of comparable proportion in West Africa by the spring of 2012. However, experts caution against misdiagnosing food insecurity in the Sahel, for fear that excessive band-aid treatments of emergency food assistance will squander energy and scarce resources that would be better utilized in treating pockets of severe food shortages and building resiliency in the region. With input from American and African experts on the Sahel, this event will explore the true nature of the emerging crisis in the Sahel and seek to identify effective responses, including regional trade and resilience-building through agricultural development.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 6th floor auditorium. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Dot-Mom / From the Wilson Center: Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health

2012-01-24T09:14:00.002-05:00

“Throughout the 2009-2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health lecture series, we always heard the same good news: we know how to save the lives of women and girls. But more political will is needed,” said Calyn Ostrowksi, program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative on December 15 for the launch of the series’ culminating report, Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health.

Joining Ostrowski were co-author Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks; Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the UN Population Fund; Tim Thomas, interim director for the Maternal Health Task Force; and Chaacha Mwita, director of communications at the African Population and Health Research Center.

One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the United States and abroad. The series consisted of 21 separate events, with hundreds of experts sharing their experiences and thousands of participants and stakeholders providing their expertise. The final report captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.

Promoting Social Change

Unlike other health issues, said Green during her presentation on the findings of Delivering Solutions, the field of maternal health requires a holistic and multi-faceted approach; that is, an approach that looks not only at health systems, but also at underlying social factors. The report divides maternal health into three broad categories: social, economic, and cultural factors; health systems factors; and research/data demands.

Looking first at the social, cultural, and economic issues, Greene highlighted the need to improve nutrition and educational opportunities for young women in developing countries. Policymakers must be convinced that investing in women is not just good for women but good for families and children, she said. The participation of male partners and other male family members is also needed to increase access to maternal health services, such as family planning, and promote gender equality. The report pointed to a number of recommendations to promote male engagement:

Target interventions that educate men about danger signs and pregnancy complications.
Address pressures that many young married men feel to prove their fertility.
Inform men about sexual rights and how they relate to the health and wellbeing of their partners.

Technology Solutions and Priority Areas

Health systems and medical resources play an equally pivotal role in reducing maternal mortality as social factors. The report highlights several key areas for strengthening the health system including the expansion of healthcare workers, health finance schemes, technology, and commodity distribution.

One key recommendation is to integrate reproductive health and maternal health supply chains. Four key medicines, oxytocin misoprostol, magnesium sulfate, and manual vacuum aspirators, target the three leading causes of maternal mortality (post-partum hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion). Efforts to improve the distribution of these commodities should be more widely dispersed in developing countries and supported by community-based interventions. Women in urban slums, for example, face unique challenges that are not being adequately addressed.

Additionally, new technologies should be more creatively and effectively used, in particular the use of mobile phones in rural communities.

Many of the policy recommendations offered by the report, as Greene pointed out, are low-cost and highly effective. Yet three significant challenges remain for the field in general:

Six countries – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – account for over half of the maternal deaths worldwide. The unique problems of each of these countries must be addressed and solved.
Integration of maternal health with existing health services along with an over-reliance on community health workers can overburden weak infrastructure.
Unnecessary cesarean births are on the rise as more women deliver in private sector facilities. These births cost 2 to 18 times as much as vaginal births and create unnecessary risks for mothers.

Lessons From The Ground

Chaacha Mwita of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), located in Nairobi has seen firsthand the result of an overburdened and inadequate maternal health system in both his personal and professional life. Mwita endorsed the findings of the series report, emphasizing in particular the focus on transportation systems, male involvement, stakeholder dialogue, and education.

Mwita said that collaboration at all levels is the key to improving maternal health. Policymakers must communicate with researchers, who, in turn, must communicate with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators in the field. The collaborative in-country dialogue series between the Wilson Center and APHRC, he believes, was a highly useful and easily replicable way of encouraging dialogue among relevant stakeholders in the field.

The Big Picture

”Our hope is that we’ve been able to seed discussions,” said Tim Thomas of the Maternal Health Task Force, one of the co-sponsors of the maternal health series. “We hope those seeds will take root and flourish.” Luc de Bernis, senior maternal health advisor of UNFPA, echoed Thomas’ sentiments, emphasizing the need for continued dialogue.

While maternal health has drawn increased international attention, creating political agreement among policymakers is a complex and often difficult process. There has been marked, though uneven, progress in improving maternal health across the globe, but more must be done. The Delivering Solutions report provides a state of the field assessment as well recommendations for existing, easy-to-implement solutions.

Event Resources:

From the Wilson Center: New Research on Climate and Conflict Links Shows Challenges for the Field

2012-01-23T11:12:00.002-05:00

“We know that there will be more conflicts in the future as a result of climate change than there would have been in a hypothetic world without climate change,” said Marc Levy, deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, although existing data and methodologies cannot predict how many additional conflicts there will be, or which causal factors will matter most.

Levy spoke at a December 19 panel at the Wilson Center on new research on the linkages between climate change and conflict. He was joined by Joseph Hewitt, technical team leader for USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation; Joshua Busby, assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin; and Solomon Hsiang, postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Linking El Niño to Civil Conflict

Princeton University’s Solomon Hsiang recently co-authored a study published in Nature that used statistical analysis to link observable changes in the global climate to conflict outcomes on the ground. The researchers looked at countries strongly impacted by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and compared the onset of civil conflict in those countries during El Niño, relative to the La Niña state.

“[El Niño] is the single dominant pattern of the entire planet’s climate on annual timescales,” said Hsiang. “So what is convenient here from a statistical standpoint is that the climate is going back and forth very rapidly…so there haven’t been major socio-political changes over that time horizon.”

The study found that conflict risk for a given region doubled during the hotter and drier El Niño state, from an average of around three percent to six percent. “You can make a variety of different assumptions about what kind of statistical model you are using and you generally always get the same estimate,” said Hsiang. “The correlation between the global climate and conflict seems to be very, very robust to a variety of choices…It’s one of the most robust results I have seen in any of the statistical literature.”

Nevertheless, “our study doesn’t say anything about why El Niño might be linked to conflict,” Hsiang clarified. “We are just showing an association. Climate is not the only thing driving conflict in these countries…it exacerbates an existing problem.”

Identifying Chronic Vulnerability in Africa

Working at the University of Texas at Austin, Josh Busby presented the Climate Change and African Political Stability program, a composite index mapping climate security vulnerability in a region with rising strategic significance and low adaptive capacity. The index incorporates not only physical exposure but also demographic, socio-economic, and political indicators.

“We focus on situations where large numbers of people could be exposed to mass death from climate-related hazards,” said Busby. He identified southern Somalia, South Sudan, and much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo as among the most vulnerable regions, relative to the rest of Africa.

These areas might not necessarily appear as the most vulnerable from a strictly climatic point of view, Busby said, but the composite analysis brings them into focus. For instance, many factors, including governance and a strong La Niña year, contributed to the famine Somalia experienced this year. Although the precise role of climate change is unclear, from a chronic vulnerability perspective, southern Somalia remains an area of concern, he said.

Understanding Pre-Existing Conditions in Vulnerable States

The Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID has commissioned research looking at the relationship between countries that are conflict affected, countries that are fragile, and countries that are highly vulnerable to climate threats, said Hewitt: “We wanted to better understand which countries are likely not to have the capacity, or likely not to have the ability, to manage the stresses and strains of climate threat.”

“[Fragile states] are already characterized by many, many different challenges that contribute to causes of conflict, just aside from climate change itself,” Hewitt pointed out. “Any understanding of the relationship between climate change and conflict needs to understand how climate change is in some sense filtered through all of these existing characteristics.”

On the other hand, many countries identified as highly vulnerable to climate change are not necessarily considered fragile. Despite the predicted changes in climate for these places, they have sources of conflict mitigation and resilience that will likely be able to handle the strains posed by climate change, Hewitt said. “We really want to try and understand what is happening in these countries. How are those countries positioned to confront those stresses, identify coping strategies, and adapt?”

“Any programming that is done to address the consequences of climate threats needs to be attentive to the connections between the program and any pre-existing characteristics that either mitigate conflict or in some sense make the society more vulnerable to conflict” said Hewitt.

Projecting Into the Future

Columbia University’s Marc Levy noted that a strong case for linking climate stress to increased risk of conflict can be made by better explaining the causal chain that leads from environmental change to societal stress. According to the 4th IPCC Assessment, climate change will increase stress on a number of biophysical processes and systems relevant to human societies, such as agriculture, water, ecosystems, and disease. A body of research shows that these natural stresses make societies more vulnerable, consequently increasing their risk of conflict.

Nevertheless, these conclusions are limited by data, according to Levy. Referencing Hsiang et al.’s study, he noted that “there are very few other things that you could measure in a large-end statistical global time series test than inter-annual variability and civil war.” And, importantly, climate change will alter the conditions that the study focused on. “By focusing on variability we know what happens to societies when you get variations around a mean, but we have almost no basis for figuring out what happens when the mean changes,” he said.

“I think we need to firm up our knowledge base by looking more explicitly at how these things operate in high-risk countries. And perhaps start thinking about some customized approaches that might be relevant in high conflict risk countries that wouldn’t necessarily be on the radar outside of those countries,” Levy concluded.

Event Resources:
Joshua Busby presentation
Joseph Hewitt presentation
Solomon Hsiang presentation
Marc Levy presentation
Photo gallery
Video
Image Credit: Joshua Busby/Climate Change and African Political Stability Program.

Integration, Communication Across Sectors a Must, Say Speakers at 2012 NCSE Environment and Security Conference

2012-01-19T18:18:00.001-05:00

The 12th National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, which is focusing on environmental security, is going on now next door at the Ronald Reagan Building, and ECSP staff are among the more than 1,000 attendees discussing nontraditional security issues. The excerpts below are only a small slice of the conference; see the full agenda and follow the conversation on Twitter (#NCSEconf). We’ll be posting pictures to flickr throughout and some video interviews with speakers in the days to come.

Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health

At the conference’s lead-off plenary, Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), Rosamond Naylor (Director, Stanford’s Center on Food Security and Environment), and our own Geoff Dabelko highlighted the challenges and opportunities of addressing the diverse yet interconnected issues of climate, energy, food, water, and health.

“We need to embrace diversity regardless of the complexity,” said Dabelko, and “abandon our stereotypes and get out of our stovepipes.” Government agencies, academics, and NGOs must be open to using different tools and work together to capture synergies. “If we know everyone in the room, we are not getting out enough,” he said.

“We have to be concerned with every level – national, state, tribal, regional, down to the individual,” said Gerstein. DHS recognizes that climate change affects all of its efforts, and has established three main areas of focus: Arctic impacts; severe weather; and critical infrastructure and key resources.

For Coca-Cola, “managing the complex relationship among [food, water, and energy] is going to be the challenge of the 21st century, said Seabright, who noted that the business community is “seeing a steady increase in the internalization of these issues into business,” including as part of companies’ competitive advantages and strategies.

Similarly, we must offer opportunities and not just threats, said Dabelko, such as exploring climate adaptation’s potential as a tool for peacebuilding rather than simply focusing on climate’s links to conflict. We need to “find ways to define and measure success that embrace the connections among climate, water, and energy, and does not try to pretend they aren't connected in the real world,” he said.

Communicating Across Sectors: Difficult But Necessary

Next, Sherri Goodman (Executive Director, CNA Military Advisory Board), Nancy Sutley (Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality), Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (Climate and Energy Security Envoy, UK Ministry of Defence), and Susan Avery (Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) called on governments, militaries, and institutions to move away from traditional, vertically segmented responsibilities to address today’s environmental and security challenges.

“We live in an interdependent, connected world,” Morisetti said, but communicating that is a challenge. Militaries are likely to have new, broader missions, including conflict prevention, he said, which makes communications all the more important.

Science is moving from reductive to integrated outlooks to better address larger, systems-wide challenges, said Avery, but communicating results of this research to the public, and across and between disciplines, is difficult.

Confronting these communication and education challenges, particularly the difficulties of conveying the probability of various risks, is a key focus of the Council on Environmental Quality, said Sutley. “We confront the challenge of risk communication every day and it’s not limited to climate change,” she said.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Climate and Conflict

The common argument is that climate change will lead to scarcity – less arable land, water, rain, etc. – and scarcity will lead to conflict, said Kate Marvel (Lawrence Livermore National Lab). But the link between scarcity and conflict is not that clear. It’s “very important to treat models as tools, not as magic balls,” she said. Developing better diagnostics to test models will help researchers and observers sort out which ones are best.

Kaitlin Shilling (Stanford University) called on the environmental security community to move beyond simple causal pathways towards finding solutions. After all, rolling back climate change is not an option at this point, she said; to find solutions, therefore, we need more detailed analysis of the pathways to violence.

The most common types of climate-conflict correlations are not likely to directly involve the state, said Cullen Hendrix (College of William and Mary). Traditional inter-state wars (think “water wars”) or even civil wars are much less likely than threats to human security (e.g., post-elections violence in Kenya) and community security (e.g., tribal raiding in South Sudan). For this reason, the biggest breakthroughs in understanding climate and conflict links will likely come from better interactions between social and physical scientists, he said.

Because the many unique factors leading to conflict vary from place to place, a better way to assess climate-conflict risk might be mapping human vulnerability to climate change rather than predicting conflict risk in a given place, said Justin Mankin (Stanford University). While human reactions are very difficult to predict, vulnerability is easier to quantify.

Yu Hongyuan (Shanghai Institute for International Studies) compared the concerns of U.S. and Chinese officials on climate change. Polling results, he said, show Chinese officials are most concerned with maintaining access to resources, while American policymakers focus on climate change’s effects on global governance and how it will impact responses to natural disasters, new conflicts, and humanitarian crises. Given the centrality of these two countries to international climate negotiations, Yu said he hoped the “same issues, different values” gulf might be bridged by better understanding each side’s priorities.

Schuyler Null, Lauren Herzer, and Meaghan Parker contributed to this article.

Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center.

A Call for Young People to “Get Angry” About Global Warming John Donnelly, Global Post

2012-01-18T10:30:00.001-05:00

The original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on Global Post.

The elder called on the younger generation to speak up.

At a session on climate change and family planning Thursday, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said that she keeps hoping that more young people will demand action on global warming.

“Maybe there’s a need to link the more thoughtful aspects of the Occupy movement with this, to get some of that more radical thinking,” she said. “As younger people increasingly understand the issues, I would say, ‘get angry’ so that we feel the need to do something more urgent. Let us know this is your future and for goodness sake it is absolutely urgent.”

She spoke at a session called “The Road to Rio: Climate Change, Population and Sustainability,” part of the Aspen Institute’s “7 Billion: Conversations that Matter” roundtable series (watch above). The discussion, organized by Aspen Global Health and Development, focused on strategies leading up to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Summit in June – as well as what should be happening beyond Rio.

Continue reading on Global Post.

Video Credit: The Aspen Institute.

You Are Invited: ECSP at the 12th Annual NCSE Environment and Security Conference

2012-01-17T16:07:00.000-05:00

The National Council for Science and the Environment’s 12th annual Environment and Security Conference starts tomorrow at the Ronald Reagan Building with a high profile line-up of speakers and participants, including Rajiv Shah, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Lisa Jackson, Marcia McNutt, Amanda Dory, Sherri Goodman, and more.

If you are attending, be sure to see ECSP’s own Geoff Dabelko on the opening plenary, “Integrating Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health,” at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow and the “Water and Conflict” symposium at 2:00 p.m.. We will also have a booth on the floor which we’d encourage you to swing by for more information on our work at the Wilson Center and upcoming events.

There are a host of panels on essentially every environment-security topic you can think of at the conference, so be sure to check out the full agenda for details. Follow our Twitter feed for updates and watch here for any news or interviews in the coming days too.

Eye On: Jon Barnett: Should Climate Change Be Addressed by the UN Security Council?

2012-01-12T09:00:00.005-05:00

For a small island state like Tuvalu, climate change is an enormous security issue and they have told the UN Security Council as much, said Jon Barnett, professor of resource management and geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. But, despite debate in 2007 and 2011, the Council has been unable to reach agreement on whether climate change is an international security issue or not.

“Eighty centimeters of sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and the warming of oceans is certainly a considerable threat to [Tuvalu’s] territorial integrity and would, within 50 or 60 years, significantly undermine…their ability to sustain the population of that country,” Barnett said.

But other countries are less willing to see climate change framed as a security issue because they believe there are higher order security issues to be worried about, he said. In addition, “they don’t necessarily believe that mobilizing the institutions of the Security Council is going to get an appropriate response to climate change.”

“There’s a lot of truth in the different arguments of different countries,” said Barnett. But “I think it is symbolically very important that the UN Security Council does recognize climate change as a security issue because it is for many countries in the UN system.”

“The question then becomes what are the practical applications of the Security Council recognizing climate change as a security issue?” Barnett said. “You have to ask if an additional workload into the Security Council is going to come at cost to the existing workload – weapons of mass destruction, keeping a watching eye on civil conflicts and issues of genocide…it would be a pity if adding climate change into the work of the Security Council would undermine its effectiveness on those other very important issues.”

One solution, said Barnett, would be to create an institution that is appended to the Security Council or General Assembly that has responsibility for strategic thinking about climate change and security issues around the world and informs the General Assembly and the Security Council about ongoing trends and thinking. This proposal would provide support for those member states that are facing climate-related security issues while freeing the Security Council to focus on other things for the time being.

Building Commitment to Family Planning: Iran A Seemingly Unlikely Setting for the World’s Fastest Demographic Transition Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Wilson Center

2012-01-11T09:33:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning. Read the first post, on Rwanda’s recent rapid demographic changes, here.

To date, only 11 countries outside of the developed world, China, and a handful of small island states have reached the end of the demographic transition, with fertility rates declining from more than four children per woman to replacement level or lower.* Of these, only two countries have completed the transition in 15 years or less – and both might surprise you. One is Cuba, whose government dispensed family planning services to its relatively small population in the 1970s through accessible primary health care facilities and legalized safe abortion eight years before the United States did. The other: Iran.

Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s new theocracy adopted a socially conservative, pro-natalist outlook. Half of the population lived in rural areas, which typically constrains access to health services. In addition, abortion was illegal in most circumstances. According to the UN, Iranian women had an average of 6.5 children each in the early 1980s and the population was growing nearly four percent annually, a rate high enough for it to double in 19 years.

But, by the early 2000s, Iran’s fertility rate had dropped below two children per woman. The swift changes can be attributed to the efforts of government officials concerned about meeting the employment needs of a growing population, supported by public health experts who wanted to rebuild the eroded family planning program.

A Dramatic Policy Shift

The turning point came after the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in 1988. With military demands high – several hundred thousand people were killed during the war – population growth was viewed positively. But as the war ended, policy directives did an about-face.

Although public health officials had framed the need for reinvigorated family planning programs in health-related terms for years, the motivation for government officials to change policy appears to have been economic. The national budget agency informed the prime minister that after nearly a decade of conflict, the country lacked adequate funding to both rebuild and to meet the needs of its people. The prime minister responded quickly, directing that demographic factors be integrated into the new development plan and stating that “Iranians’ standard of living was being eroded by the growth of the country’s population.”

“Pragmatism Has Prevailed Over Pure Ideology”

After convincing their superiors, Iranian government officials who supported family planning faced the added challenge of garnering the backing of the influential religious establishment. Shortly after the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini officially sanctioned the use of contraception, though his perspective was not universal among clerics. Once the prime minister decided to introduce a national family planning program, officials sought support from additional religious authorities. Opposition was minimal after two key institutions offered endorsements. The High Judicial Council determined that there was “no Islamic barrier to family planning” in late 1988, and the Expediency Council approved the government’s plans soon after.

By late 1989, a new family planning program had been officially introduced. The program’s aims were to lengthen spacing between births; limit pregnancies in the early and late reproductive years; and lower fertility by educating the population and ensuring access to free and diverse contraceptive methods. By the mid-1990s, the government had fully integrated family planning into the existing primary health system.

Iran thus followed the example of other majority-Muslim countries where religion was not an impediment to family planning, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Oman. Just as in countries where highly Catholic populations have low fertility rates (Italy, Poland, Spain, and many others), religious guidance has been interpreted in varying ways in different settings and is not necessarily a central factor in individual fertility decisions. As Akbar Aghajanian and Amir H. Merhyar write in a summary of Iran’s family planning program, “Pragmatism has prevailed over pure ideology when necessary.”

The Contributions of Women’s Education and a Strong Health System

A new policy orientation was the critical first step, but successful implementation was necessary for Iran’s demographic trajectory to change in response. Fortunately, the government had some advantages in rolling out its new program, namely a strong existing health system, a history of past efforts to promote family planning, and an educated female population among whom demand for contraception was high.

Rural development became a priority of the government after the revolution and resulted in improved access to an array of services. In rural areas, community health workers receive two years of training to provide family planning services along with other preventative care and treatment. Services are also available at rural health “houses,” urban clinics, and higher-level centers around the country.

The status of women has also played a major role. A research exercise conducted by IIASA estimated that improvements in educational attainment among women were responsible for about one-third of Iran’s fertility decline between 1980 and 2005. Women’s literacy was already rising during the period of the revolution and reached 74 percent by 1996, while attitudes toward female employment became more supportive. By the late 1990s, new classes of university students included more women than men. The response to the 1989 program indicated that women clearly had an unmet demand for family planning. Use of modern contraception jumped from 31 percent in 1989 to 51 percent just five years later, then rose more slowly over the subsequent decade.

A Dividend Squandered?

The rapid changes in Iran’s age structure, thanks to declining fertility, have opened a window of opportunity for the country to boost economic growth through lower dependency ratios – a phenomenon called the demographic dividend. However, the dividend is not an automatic bonus, and Iran’s capacity to capitalize on its demographic change is questionable.

The unemployment rate among young people today is over 20 percent, indicating that the economy is not generating sufficient jobs, which is a prerequisite to improving productivity. This inopportune climate may even contribute to a further decline in the fertility rate: Some observers have suggested that the country’s economic troubles and rising costs of living have motivated young people to delay marriage and have smaller families. “Unemployment and high costs of living, coupled with social and political restrictions, have made [life] increasingly difficult for young Iranians,” Farzaneh Roudi of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) explained in a blog post last year.

Given Iran’s challenges in producing adequate jobs and other economic benefits for its population, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent unusual pronouncements on population issues are especially puzzling. Last year, Ahmadinejad introduced a pro-natalist policy offering direct payments to each child born, continuing until they reach adulthood, and later suggested that girls should marry at age 16 or 17.

But despite a high level of international media attention, most observers expect the policy to have little impact. Widespread adoption of family planning has become entrenched in society: 60 percent of Iranian women now use a modern contraceptive method. As PRB’s Roudi wrote in response to Ahmadinejad’s proposal, “Iranian women and men have gotten used to exercising their reproductive rights and would expect to be able to continue to do so.”

*The 11 countries that have achieved replacement fertility or lower outside of developed regions, China, and small island states are Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Myanmar, Thailand, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.

Look for related analysis on the political implications of Iran’s changing age structure by Richard Cincotta on New Security Beat soon.

Sources: Abbasi-Shavazi, Lutz, Hosseini-Chavoshi and Samir (2008), Abbasi-Shavazi (2002), Aghajanian and Merhyar (1999), Christian Science Monitor, GlobalSecurity.org, The New York Times, Noble and Potts (1996), Population Reference Bureau, Roudi-Fahimi (2002), UN Population Division, World Bank.

Image Credit: “بیست و پنجم خرداد ۸,” courtesy of flickr user Recovering Sick Soul (Nima Fatemi); charts arranged by Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy Madsen.

You Are Invited, January, 11 2011: Putting Adolescent Mothers on the Development Agenda

2012-01-11T09:26:00.000-05:00

Environmental Change and Security Program, Global Health Initiative
Wednesday, January 11, 2011, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Leila Hessini, Senior Policy Advisor, IPAS
Sadia Afroze Chowdhury, Lead Specialist, Reproductive Health, The World Bank
Jennifer Redner, Consultant, International Women’s Health Coalition

Each year, 350,000 women die of pregnancy-related causes and 25 percent of these women are between the ages of 15 and 19. Most of these young girls live in less developed countries, and, although significant strides have been made by donors and governments to address overall maternal health, adolescent girls are often left off the development agenda. This discussion will highlight the need for repositioning reproductive and maternal health services and identify strategies to protect youth.

Leila Hessini, director of community mobilization and engagement at IPAS, will present the maternal mortality rates of youth in developing countries and address the impact of unsafe abortions. Sadia Chowdhury, reproductive and child health coordinator at the Health, Nutrition, and Population Unit of the World bank, will discuss how to improve the reproductive health status of adolescent girls through a multi-sectoral approach. Jennifer Redner, consultant, International Women’s Health Coalition, will share experiences shaping policy and building support for young women’s access to youth friendly comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

You Are Invited, January, 10 2011: Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics (Book Launch)

2012-01-10T09:32:00.003-05:00

Environmental Change and Security Program
Tuesday, January 10, 2011, 12:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Senior Technical Advisor, Futures Group International
Jack A. Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor, George Mason University
Mark Haas, Associate Professor, Political Science Department, Duquesne University

Ten years ago, demography was hardly on the radar screen of policymakers. Today, it dominates almost any discussion of America’s long-term fiscal, economic, or foreign-policy direction. With the world’s population hitting 7 billion this year and headed for 10 billion in the next century, it is crucial to assess the impact of global population trends on international security and national politics.

Population change is, however, more complex than simply the rise in the total number of people. The distribution of people – where the growth will occur, what age groups will dominate, how various ethnic and religious groups are likely to increase in numbers – is even more crucial. Shifts in aging, ethnic, and religious profiles will shape national elections, risks of insurgencies, and problems of economic policy in the rich and developing world alike.

Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics examines all of these issues, ranging from threats to global security posed by a surging youth bulge in developing nations to the challenges of aging in the developed world, as well as the issues raised by shifting ethnic and religious populations in divided societies in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge Marc Sommers, Woodrow Wilson Center

2012-01-09T11:30:00.000-05:00

The original version of “Governance, Security, and Culture: Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge,” by Marc Sommers, first appeared in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Vol. 5 (2), 2011.

Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the “youth bulge and instability thesis” leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations.

Learning from Liberia

If ever there was a youth-dominated conflict in modern times, it was Liberia’s long and grueling civil war (1989-1996 and again in 2000-2003). Ignited by Charles Taylor’s Christmas Eve incursion from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire late in 1989, together with perhaps one hundred other men, the conflict soon took the form of youth-led chaos. “What initially was seen as a revolution…fought with sticks and cutlasses,” Mats Utas writes, “was eventually transformed into a war of terror where young people started fighting each other” (2005: 55). In fact, some youth continued to view the war as their revolution, for as long as they were able to take advantage of the opportunity that armed conflict afforded. The civil war provided them with “a chance to become someone in a national system that had marginalized them, but also a chance to get rid of the load of work and expectations that the parental generation had laid on them” (65). Some of the more successful young soldiers, sometimes goaded by their girlfriends, “felt so affluent that they could wash their cars in beer – a beverage most could not even afford to drink prior to the war – and that they could drive a car until it ran out of gasoline and then just dump it for another one” (66). The result was a war that wreaked colossal destruction. By 1997, civil war had already left a nation of perhaps two and a half million with up to 200,000 dead, 700,000 refugees, and much of the remaining population internally displaced (Utas 2008: 113).

The region of sub-Saharan Africa has the most youthful population in the world. Of the 46 countries and territories where at least 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30, only seven are not in sub-Saharan Africa. With this in mind, one of the most striking aspects of contemporary Africa is how male African youth have so frequently been viewed as threats to their own societies. However, the view from below differs dramatically from the largely quantitative analyses from above and from outside the continent. Again, the Liberian example is illuminating. A nation long renowned for grasping leaders and withered government institutions has more recently provided truly upbeat signs of forward movement. That said, most youth continue to be left far, far behind. Fieldwork in rural Liberia uncovered a widespread fear of “rebel behavior youth” – youth who had assumed the attitudes of wartime combatants and became socially sidelined. Liberia’s post-war youth unemployment has been estimated at the astonishing rate of 88 percent. Taking all of this into account – a widespread sense of estrangement and social distance felt by many youth and an economic recovery that is passing most of them by – one could certainly argue that Liberian youth are among the world’s most peaceful populations.

Continue reading in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence.

Marc Sommers is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.

Sources: Government of Liberia, Population Action International, Sommers (2007), Utas (2005 and 2008).

Photo Credit: “RPF rally in Gicumbi, Rwanda,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday).

Eye On: Jon Barnett: Climate Adaptation Not Just Building Infrastructure, But Expanding Options

2012-01-06T11:56:00.003-05:00

“I think it’s appropriate to think about [climate change] adaptation or investments in adaptation as investments to open up the range of choices available to people to deal with an uncertain future,” said Jon Barnett, associate professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. “In some circumstances it might be appropriate to build 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.”

For example, providing education, especially for girls, would allow individuals to better negotiate the world and labor markets; installing renewable energy systems in areas lacking electricity would greatly expand the choices for remote households; and altering immigration laws would allow more fluid movements of people.

“Communities and families where people are able to move have higher levels of consumption through remittances that people send back, they have greater connections through the world through the information that migrants send back, [and] they have very reliable forms of income,” he pointed out.

Barnett cited small-island states as positive examples of mobility as adaptation. On Tuvalu, remittances from young male seafarers on crewing missions for international shipping companies from North America and Europe account for three-quarters of the consumption of households, he said. They send home some $4 million a year in remittances or around 10 to 14 percent of Tuvalu’s entire Gross Domestic Product.

Kiribati has an innovative nursing program which provides a way towards “migration with dignity,” said Barnett. Australia’s foreign aid organization, AusAID, sponsors a special scholarship called the Kiribati Australia Nursing Initiative (KANI) which helps provide i-Kiribati people with marketable job skills and, unlike other job training programs, does not require the trained nurses to go back home – they are welcome to stay in Australia.

“Matching skills training with providing that to vulnerable populations in ways that matches gaps in labor markets is a smart strategy of improving capacity to adapt to climate change,” said Barnett. “And it’s a lot cheaper and likely to be much more effective than trying to pick winners in investing in significant infrastructure developments.”

Sources: Islands Business International.

Guest Contributor Marc F. Bellemare: Do High Food Prices Cause Social Unrest?

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

In March 2011, a senior Brookings Institution official wrote that “the crux of the food price challenge is about price volatility, rather than high prices per se” and that “[i]t is the rapid and unpredictable changes in food prices that wreak havoc on markets, politics, and social stability.”

In a recent research paper, however, I use monthly data on food prices and news reports of social unrest worldwide to tease out the causal relationship between food prices and social unrest. The results indicate that it is rising food prices that cause social unrest and that increases in food price volatility are actually associated with decreases in the number of food riots. It thus would be a critical mistake to work toward price stabilization instead of curbing rising food prices.

Consumers, Producers, and Social Unrest

If you have taken a principles of economics class, you know that everything else equal, an increase in the price of a good means that you can afford less of that good. So if you value a given good, the consequence of an increase in the price of that good is that you are worse off.

If you live in the United States, your household dedicates about 13 percent of its budget to food. But if instead you lived in a developing country, that figure would be well over 50 percent.

It should thus come as no surprise that increases in the price of food are especially bad for the poor in developing countries.
This is true for urban households, who are almost all net consumers of food, but also for many rural households who, for a variety of reasons – ranging from failures of the credit, input, or land markets to adverse meteorological conditions – fail to produce enough to feed themselves and are also net consumers of food.

There are many more net consumers than there are net producers of food worldwide. For those net consumers of food, rising food prices can have disastrous consequences. Worse, the greater the share of its budget a household dedicates to food, the more disastrous the consequence of a rise in food prices for that household (Deaton, 1989).

Last March, Annia Ciezadlo, a writer whose memoir Day of Honey explores the social importance of food in the Middle East, wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs:

Change is sweeping through the Middle East today, but one thing remains the same: the region once known as the Fertile Crescent is now the world’s most dependent on imported grain. Of the top 20 wheat importers for 2010, almost half are Middle Eastern countries. The list reads like a playbook of toppled and teetering regimes: Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia.

For decades, many of these regimes relied on food subsidies to ensure stability (…). But over the past several years, grain prices reached record levels, and these appeasement policies lost their luster. In Tunisia, pro-democracy demonstrations began in late December 2010 with protesters brandishing baguettes. In just a few months, a wave of uprisings rippled across the region, toppling Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's longtime ruler, Hosni Mubarak.

Indeed, after attaining a peak during the summer of 2008, food prices started rising rapidly again in the second half of 2010 to hit an all-time high in March of 2011.

Likewise, as illustrated in figure 1 above, the 2008 and 2011 spikes in food prices (denoted by the red line) coincided with spikes in the number of food riots reported in the news (denoted by the blue line).

Voice of America News on the role of high food prices in the Arab Spring.

Correlation Is Not Causation

But as I constantly remind the students in my development seminar, correlation is not causation, and a key component of critical thinking is the ability to question correlations presented as causal claims. In other words, social unrest may lead to high food prices just as much as the opposite is true.

In my paper, using a statistical technique called instrumental variables estimation, I attempt to identify one side of this relationship by first conditioning food prices on the number of natural disasters worldwide (i.e., droughts, episodes of extreme temperature, floods, insect infestations, storms, volcanic eruptions, and wildfires). Not only do natural disasters constitute shocks to the supply of and demand for food, they presumably affect social unrest only through food prices. In principle, this statistical apparatus allows teasing out the potential causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest from the correlation between the two.

Intuitively, this is possible because conditioning food prices on natural disasters (which are themselves uncorrelated with social unrest) allows eliminating the variation in food prices that is purely due to variations in social unrest.

The results are fairly robust: to be sure, rising food prices result in more instances of social unrest, and this remains true whether:

The price of food is considered broadly or the scope is narrowed to only the price of cereals, which constitute the bulk of an average developing-country diet;
The food crises of 2008 and 2010-2011 are controlled for; or
Alternative definitions of what constitutes a natural disaster are considered.

Surprisingly, however, food price volatility – unexpected departures from the food price level, holding the food price level constant, which includes both rises and falls in the price of food – is actually associated with fewer instances of social unrest.

This is likely because unlike food producers, food consumers tend to slightly benefit from food price volatility.

Food producers make production decisions on the basis of expected prices, long before uncertainty over food prices is resolved (Sandmo, 1971); volatility therefore is something producers would like to avoid, and so they typically favor price stabilization policies.

Food consumers, however, make consumption decisions knowing exactly what food prices are at that moment, and so an increase in the uncertainty surrounding food prices means they might get to enjoy relative price discounts between food commodities (Turnovsky et al., 1980). This underappreciated theoretical point has recently found empirical support.

Note, however, how I avoid causal language in the case of food price volatility. That’s because my data do not allow establishing whether there is a causal relationship between food price volatility and social unrest, and the most that can be said is that the two are correlated.

Policy Implications

What does this mean for policy? First, for domestic policy makers who want to prevent social unrest, it is crucial to ensure that food is affordable.

In many cases, this means not doing away with food subsidies for urban consumers (Bates, 1981). This is especially true in places where people already have other reasons to be upset, such as countries with high rates of unemployment. Here, both Tunisia and Egypt at the end of 2010 come to mind.

Second, if international policy makers want to prevent social unrest, it is better to work toward preventing sharp increases in food prices rather than preventing increases in food price volatility, as Chris Barrett and I argued in Foreign Affairs last summer.

Download “Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Political Unrest.”

Marc F. Bellemare is an assistant professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Sources: Bates (1981), Bellemare et al. (2011), Deaton (1989), Food and Agriculture Organization, Foreign Affairs, Hoisington Management, Poor Economics, Sandmo (1971), The Brookings Institution, Turnovsky et al. (1980).

Chart Credit: Marc F. Bellemare; video credit: Voice of America News.

Reading Radar: Migration and Environmental Change, Minority Land Rights and Livelihoods

2012-01-04T13:00:00.003-05:00

Migration and Global Environmental Change: Future Challenges and Opportunities, from the UK Government Office for Science’s Foresight Programme, looks at how environmental change, including climate change, land degradation, and the degradation of coastal and marine ecosystems, over the next 50 years will affect migration trends. The report emphasizes that migration is a complex and multi-causal phenomenon, which makes it difficult to differentiate environmental migrants as a distinct group. Nevertheless, research suggests that global environmental changes will affect the drivers of migration, particularly economic forces, such as rural wages and agricultural productivity.

Though Foresight finds that many will use migration as an adaptation strategy that improves resilience to environmental change, they also point out that some affected individuals may become “trapped” in vulnerable situations, lacking the financial capacity to respond to environmental changes, while others may be able to move but will inadvertently enter more exposed areas, particularly, at risk urban centers. For recommendations, they stress the importance of strategic, long-term urban planning, and recognition within adaptation and development policies that migration can be part of the solution.

A study, released on December 5 by Minority Rights Group International, finds that minority communities in Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan face significant challenges around access to and control of critical natural resources. The report, Land, Livelihoods, and Identities: Inter-Community Conflicts in East Africa, shows how rapid population growth, climate change, and globalization are increasing competition for land, water, and forest and mineral resources in territories traditionally occupied by minority groups. These pressures can undermine livelihoods and trigger multiple and overlapping conflicts, especially where ownership has not been formalized in law. The study also notes that women are doubly vulnerable as their access to land and resources is frequently mediated through customary law, which depends on their communities retaining control over traditional territory. Although the report makes national-level legal and policy recommendations, the authors note that some of the most effective resource management and conflict resolution strategies adapt traditional cultural practices to the current circumstances of communities.

What You Are Reading: Top 10 Posts for 2011

2012-01-03T15:36:00.004-05:00

2011 was a momentous year for environment-population-security connections. Youth demographics came into the media spotlight with popular uprisings across the Middle East, we reached seven billion people on Earth, and there was new awareness about the importance of natural resource management in a more connected-than-ever world. Here are the most popular stories of 2011 on New Security Beat, measured by unique pageviews:

1. Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us

Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” kicked-off the Arab Spring, but what are the country’s chances at achieving democracy? Demographer Richard Cincotta compares historical data on the relationship between age structure and democratic governments to find out.

2. In Search of a New Security Narrative: The National Conversation Series Launches at the Wilson Center

Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC) argued the United States needs a new national strategic narrative and presented their vision at the Wilson Center, saying that America needs to move away from a model of containment, deterrence, and control towards a “strategy of sustainability.”

3. Quantifying the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment in Development: When the Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

An article in Environmental Conservation broke new ground by presenting rigorous research that shows working across development sectors produces synergies not obtainable by any one of the disciplines alone.

4. How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here?

Demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explained how world population reached seven billion this year, its significance, and where our demographic path might take us from here.

5. In the Rush for Land, Is it All About the Water?

With staple food prices shooting up and food security projected to worsen in the decades ahead, it is little wonder that countries are looking abroad to secure future resources. But the question arises: Are these “land grabs” really about the food – or, more accurately, are they “water grabs”?

6. Jon Foley: How to Feed Nine Billion and Keep the Planet Too

ECSP reports on Jon Foley’s presentation about the challenges to global food security as well as a strategy for overcoming them at South by Southwest’s inaugural eco conference.

7. Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute explains in an interview with ECSP what role population dynamics play in his assessment of “peak water.”

8. Guest Contributor Jim Duncan: Redrawing the Map of the World’s International River Basins

Following on his presentation at the Wilson Center, water expert Jim Duncan outlined updates made to the Transboundary Freshwater Spatial Database, including the addition of 13 new basins covering 501,000 km2 and an estimated 13.8 million inhabitants.

9. Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections

The UN released an update to its biannual estimates for world population, extending projections for the first time to the end of the century. The results show that growth is likely to continue longer and total numbers will be higher than previously thought.

10. PRB’s Population Data Sheet 2011: The Demographic Divide

ECSP examined the Population Reference Bureau’s latest data sheet which shows an unprecedentedly stark divide between demographic trends in rich and poor countries.

Thanks for reading New Security Beat and also for your many constructive comments. We redesigned the blog in 2011 and plan to continue that modernization effort this year, all with the aim of better reaching you, so we’re grateful for your attention, feedback, and contributions.

Image Credit: Adapted from "Viva the Tunisian Revolution," courtesy of flickr user freestylee (Michael Thompson).

Three New Reports Highlight Ongoing Significance of Youth Demographics in Global Trends Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Wilson Center

2012-01-02T09:00:00.015-05:00

Amidst world population reaching seven billion and last year’s Arab Spring, which in some nations is continuing into this winter, it can be easy to miss emerging pieces of research that tell us something relatively objective about youth and instability. Three new studies give practitioners and policymakers a stronger foundation of evidence to highlight the challenges and opportunities facing the world’s largest generation of young people.

Results of a recent UNICEF staff survey indicate that the people responsible for the UN’s efforts targeting children and youth are seriously concerned about demographic and economic dynamics. Asked to review a list of 20 “global trends,” UNICEF staff rated “growing disparities” and “youth bulge and youth unemployment” as the most significant to children. The results, which the agency will soon publish in a paper on “The Next Generation and Global Trends,” also indicate that staff members feel that UNICEF has a strong capacity to influence the future of these trends.

UNICEF’s recent “Child Outlook” report on global trends discusses the issues highlighted in the survey. The report notes that although many countries are moving toward middle-income status, poverty rates remain stubbornly high, indicating that economic development does not benefit all equally. Income and consumption in such countries tend to be concentrated among the wealthiest households. “While many families will prosper, others are being left behind,” the report explains.

“Tensions and discouragement arising from youth unemployment, combined with higher food prices and fiscal contractions, may have contributed to increased civil unrest, protests, and political instability,” UNICEF asserts. In many developing countries, the number of young people entering the labor market far surpasses the number of available jobs. Although some youth are not working because they are enrolled in secondary or tertiary education, low rates of youth participation in the workforce often are not a matter of choice. Young people, especially those with low levels of education and from poorer families, are often unable to find secure, decent jobs. More than one-quarter of all young people with jobs worldwide live below the poverty line of $1.25 per day.

Economic Pressures on Youth in East Africa

Two other research projects – one published, one still underway – provide additional context to the combination of demographic and economic challenges that face the world’s young people. In the first, part of a recent special U.S. Institute of Peace series on South Sudan, Stephanie Schwartz and Wilson Center fellow Marc Sommers probe the expectations of and obstacles faced by youth in the newly created country.

According to the incipient government’s statistics agency, 72 percent of South Sudan’s population is younger than 30, which places it among the 20 youngest age structures in the world. Only 40 percent of youth ages 15 to 24 are literate, and nearly 80 percent of households depend on agriculture for their income. Based on interviews conducted with urban and rural youth in three areas of South Sudan, the authors find that the pressure of paying rising dowry costs is the most salient issue facing young men, while young women are treated as economic assets with no influence in their own future. The authors’ research suggests that “some young men join armed gangs, at least in part, because they believe it will help them pay dowries.”

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explains demographic security in brief

Although many young people in South Sudan aspire to the stability of government work, the limited number of jobs and shortage of relevant skills inhibit their aspirations. With an underdeveloped private sector, few opportunities for training, and nepotistic practices in hiring, there is little work for those living in towns and urban areas beyond manual labor and selling goods. The authors recommend that education and job training be expanded, with a focus on equitable access among young people from varied geographic backgrounds.

Across the border in northern Uganda, Chris Blattman, an associate professor of political science at Yale, has been studying the social effects of the government’s youth employment program started in 2007. The program offered grants to small groups of young people for vocational training or to fund the costs of starting a new business. Although a full paper has not yet been published, preliminary findings indicate strong economic benefits of the program which in turn improve social cohesion and community participation while diminishing aggression and “disputes with authorities” among young men. If they bear out, the results may well confirm the oft-repeated policy recommendation that focusing on youth employment is critical to improving national development as well as reducing the likelihood of instability and conflict.

In the year of seven billion, we heard much about the need to invest in young people and the tremendous potential they embody, for demographic dividends as well as overall development. Yet 2011 was also a year of tremendous upheaval, much of which was driven by young people – and their older counterparts – seeking representative and democratic governance. This should serve as a reminder that youth can be a remarkable force for positive change, but in too many places – South Sudan among them – their opportunities, prospects, and contributions are constrained. As the UNICEF survey results reiterate how important this issue is to development programming, the Uganda research may be another important piece of evidence that direct investment in young people reaps tangible results not only for them, but also for society.

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International.

Sources: Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Chris Blattman, ILO, Sommers and Schwartz (2011), South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics, UNICEF, World Bank.

Photo Credit: “UNAMID Peacekeeper Speaks with Sudanese Youth,” courtesy of UN Photo/Albert Gonzalez Farran.

From the Wilson Center: The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes

2011-12-29T09:00:00.006-05:00

In the far west of the Brazilian Amazon reside some of the last indigenous tribes on Earth untouched by modern society. In 2002, writer and photographer Scott Wallace, on assignment for National Geographic magazine, undertook a three month journey through the Javari Valley Indigenous Land on an expedition to map and protect the territory of the flecheiros, or Arrow People, named for the poison-tipped arrows they use. Wallace turned the chronicles of his adventure into a book while in residence as a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center.

On November 21, Wallace returned to the Center to present his finished book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes.

Over the past 40 years, Brazil’s policies towards indigenous tribes have changed dramatically, said Wallace – from initially wanting to “civilize” tribes through contact, to a modern hands-off approach. He explained that globalization and demand for rubber in the twentieth century meant more contact with indigenous tribes and, ultimately, more upheaval. As a result, many tribes took up hostile attitudes towards outsiders and retreated as far into the wilderness as possible.

Today, the Brazilian Department of Isolated Indians is attempting to map out the extent of uncontacted peoples’ lands in order to better protect them from intrusion. Over the last eight years since the book was written, the official number of uncontacted tribes has increased from 17 to 26. Javari Valley alone hosts eight distinct ethnic groups, making it the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes in the world.

The leader of Wallace’s expedition, Sydney Possuelo, is an explorer who was formerly the head of the Department of Isolated Indians and once one of Brazil’s most famous sertanistas (“agents of contact”). Possuelo is now a champion of the vision that we should no longer contact tribes, said Wallace, but only “identify them and get legal protection for [their] lands and erect control posts to keep intruders out.”

Old Tensions, New Threats

Although Wallace holds up Brazil as one of the countries with the most enlightened policies for native Indians in the Americas, he said there is cause for concern as intrusions continue. As Wallace notes on his blog, isolated Indians are known to travel extensively by foot during the dry season, appearing along the riverbanks as they search for turtle eggs buried in nests along the sandy beaches of the western Amazon. Mounting pressure from logging crews, wildcat gold prospectors, and seismic teams exploring for oil and gas are flushing these isolated indigenes out of the forests.

During their trek to map the flecheiros, Wallace’s group ran into an illegal gold mining operation, and, although they managed to take the dredge to the local authorities, Wallace said he fears corruption may have stymied justice.

Rights-Based Conservation

On the positive side, Wallace pointed out that by protecting indigenous tribes, the government is also protecting tens of thousands of acres of virgin rainforest in what is a mutually beneficial intersection of conservation and human rights. “Indians are the rightful owners of the land and the most efficacious guardians of the rainforest,” he said.

While there are many obstacles threatening the survival of uncontacted tribes, Wallace said that the situation is not hopeless and that conservation through protecting indigenous-rights in Brazil is a good starting point. “When there is a commitment to do something and resources are made available,” he said, “what seems like inevitable development, like the overrunning of forests, can be stopped.”

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Photo Credit: "Brazil Amazon adventure," courtesy of jonrawlinson.

Dot-Mom / From the Wilson Center: Engaging Faith-Based Organizations on Maternal Health

2011-12-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

“Faith-inspired organizations have many different opportunities [than non-faith-based NGOs]. The point that is often reiterated is that religions are sustainable. They will be there before the NGOs get there and will be there long after,” said Katherine Marshall, executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue at the Wilson Center on November 16. Marshall noted in her opening remarks that maternal health should be an easy issue for all groups, regardless of religious tradition, to stand behind. Yet, in reality, maternal health is a topic that “very swiftly takes you into complex issues, like reproductive health, abortion, and family planning,” she said.

As part of the Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health series, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Global Health Initiative collaborated with the World Faiths Development Dialogue and Christian Connections for International Health to convene a small technical meeting on November 15 with 30 maternal health and religious experts to discuss case studies involving faith-based organizations in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. The country case studies served as a springboard for group discussion and offered a number of recommendations for increasing the capacity of faith-based organizations (FBOs) working on maternal health issues.

Engaging Religious Leaders in Pakistan

“When working with religious leaders to improve maternal health there are some do’s and don’ts,” said Nabeela Ali, chief of party with the Pakistan Initiative for Mothers and Newborns (PAIMAN). Ali described a PAIMAN project that worked with 800 ulamas (religious leaders) to increase awareness about pregnancy and promote positive behavior change among men.

One of the “do’s” highlighted by Ali was the need to build arguments for maternal health based on the Quran and to tailor terminology according to the ulamas preferences. The ulamas who worked with PAIMAN did not want to utilize the word “training,” so instead they called their education programming “consultative meetings.” More than 200,000 men and women were reached during the sermons and the strategy was been picked up by the government as one of the best practices written into in the Karachi Declaration, signed by the secretaries of health and population in 2009.

Despite the successes of the program, Ali warned against having unrealistic expectations for religious leaders interfacing with maternal health. She stressed the importance for having a long-term “program” approach to the issue, as opposed to a short-term “project” framework.

Behavior Change in Yemen

“Religion is a main factor in decisions Yemeni people make about most issues in their lives and religious leaders can play a major role in behavior change,” said Jamila AlSharie a community mobilizer for Pathfinder International.

Eighty-two percent of Yemeni women say the husband decides if they should receive family planning and 22 percent say they do not take contraception because they belief it is against their religion and fertility is the will of God, said AlSharie. Therefore, the adoption of healthy behavior change requires the involvement of key opinion leaders and the alignment of messages set in religious values. Trainings with religious leaders included family planning from an Islamic perspective, risks associated with early pregnancy, nutrition, education, and healthcare as a human right.

Male Participation a Key Strategy

“As a faith-based organization we believe it is a God given right to safe health care and delivery so we mobilize communities to support pregnant women to address their needs, educate families about referrals and existing services in the community,” said Elidon Bardhi, country director for the Bangladesh arm of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA).

Through female-run community organizations, ADRA educates men and women about the danger signs of labor and when to seek care. For example, many men in Bangladesh hold the belief that women should eat less during pregnancy to ensure a smaller baby is born, thereby making delivery easier, said Bardhi. ADRA addressed such misconceptions through a human rights-based approach and emphasized male participation as a key strategy, ensuring there were seven male participants for every one female.

A Culturally Nuanced Approach in Nigeria

The Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI) is a public-private partnership that identifies and creates strategies for integrating family planning with maternal health. According to Kabir Abduallahi, team leader of NURHI, “family planning” is not as acceptable a term as “safe birth spacing” in Nigeria, so the project highlighted how family planning can help space births and save lives.

Religion and culture play an important role in the behavior of any community. The introduction of a controversial healthcare intervention (such as family planning) in a religiously conservative community requires careful assessment of the environment and careful planning for its introduction, said Abduallahi. Baseline surveys and formative research data helped NURHI understand the social context and refine intervention strategies.

Ten Ways to Increase the Capacity of FBOs

Faith-based organizations’ close links to communities provide them with an opportunity to promote behavior change and address other cultural factors contributing to maternal mortality rates such as early marriage and family planning.

Working in collaboration with FBOs and other stakeholders is critical to promoting demand for maternal and reproductive health services; however, there is limited knowledge about faith-based maternal healthcare and FBOs are often left off the global health agenda. In conclusion, Marshall noted 10 areas the group identified as areas to focus on:

Move projects to programs: Projects are often donor driven and limited in scope and duration. Donors and policymakers should move from project-oriented activities to local, regional, and national-level advocacy programs to build sustainable change.
Coordinate, coordinate, coordinate: Significant resources are wasted due to a lack of coordination between FBOs and development agencies. A country-level coordinating mechanism should be developed to streamline efforts not only between agencies but also across faiths.
Context, context, context: A thorough understanding of the local culture and social norms is imperative to successful program implementation.
Terminology is important: In Pakistan, religious leaders redefined sensitization meetings around family planning and maternal and child health as “consultative meetings” not “trainings.” In Nigeria, the culture prefers “child birth spacing” over “family planning.” In Yemen, it’s “safe age of marriage” instead of “early childhood marriage.”
Most religious leaders are open and with adequate information can produce behavior and value changes. Utilizing the Quran, Hadith, and Bible can support arguments and emphasize the issue of health and gender equity.
Relationship building: Winning the trust of religious leaders can be difficult and time-consuming but is necessary for opening doors to patriarchal societies.
Rights-based approach: A human rights-based approach can be a very powerful agent of change for addressing negative social structures such as violence against women, but it can also create controversy. In Bangladesh, ADRA utilized the approach to educate men about nutrition, dowry and child marriage, and education of women.
Networks: There is a significant need to create forums that bring together the various FBO and global development communities in order to share knowledge and enhance advocacy messages. Networks are needed to streamline resources and inventory existing research, projects, and faith-based models that work.
Monitoring and evaluation systems: There is a striking lack of data about the impact and outcomes of FBOs. Increasing the monitoring and evaluation skills of FBO workers can improve evaluation systems and meet the demand for new data.
There needs to be greater political will for engaging the faith-inspired community.

A formal report from the private technical meeting will be available on the Global Health Initiative’s website in the near future.

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Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center.

From the Wilson Center: Managing the Planet: The Road to Rio+20

2011-12-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

“We still see people thinking about the environment as if it is something apart. The idea of a synergy, a balance of development still, I think, eludes us both in theoretical, but especially in practical terms. And that is what Rio+20 is about,” said Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, under-secretary for environment, energy, science, and technology at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Rio+20 conference next year, marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. It will be an opportunity to generate new answers to the question of how to collectively develop in a more sustainable and balanced way, said Figueiredo. Jacob Scherr, director of strategy and advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Richenda Van Leeuwen, senior director for energy and climate at the UN Foundation, and Thomas Lovejoy, biodiversity chair at the Heinz Center for Science and professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, joined the ambassador at the Wilson Center on November 16 for a discussion about preparations for the upcoming conference. The event was part of the “Managing The Planet” seminar series, coordinated jointly by George Mason University and the Wilson Center.

Sustainable Development Goals

Rio+20 should reaffirm the sustainable development vision of the first Earth Summit, said Scherr, “of our ability to deal with all of these issues at once: to move forward on economics, and dealing with poverty, of being equitable, and protecting and preserving the environment for future generations.”

Figueiredo said he sees the concept of a “green economy” as an “instrument to promote sustainable development and eradicate poverty. And in that sense, it seems clear that we will not find one green economy as such, but probably as many green economies as countries in the world, because each country will find its way of using that kind of tool.”

One proposal for the conference, supported by Brazil, is to devise a set of sustainable development goals, which would “embrace the Millennium Development Goals and instill a certain sustainability viewpoint to all of them,” Ambassador Figueiredo said. Furthermore, they would be global in nature, rather than geared towards developing countries, providing a vision for collective development.

“The Millennium Development Goals were good in some ways [but] they were fairly weak on the environmental side,” said Thomas Lovejoy. “This is a chance to actually improve on that, to really bring these elements together.”

Action and Accountability

Through “sustainable development dialogues,” Brazil is working to provide a new mechanism for civil society input at the conference. According to Figueiredo, Brazil hopes to “create a bridge between those who understand the issues, those who have a deep knowledge of the issues, and those who have the power again to do something about it.”

“We have been talking about these issues for 40 years, what we really need is a meeting that, as the Secretary General recently said, is a conference about implementation…to really start moving us down the path towards a sustainable future,” said Scherr.

“You might argue that everything that happened 20 years ago was an absolute failure, but of course it was not, because an awful lot has happened in the interim, it’s just that it hasn’t happened on a big enough scale or fast enough,” Lovejoy said.

“What gives me a lot of reason for hope going into Rio+20 is there are a lot of very practical, very pragmatic efforts involved,” he said.

Richenda Van Leeuwen pointed to the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative as a potential agenda to follow. The initiative has three objectives: ensuring universal access to modern energy services; doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency; and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

“We are using Rio, and the seminal opportunity that it represents, as a mechanism to be able to bring these new commitments together…to show that there is an opportunity for concrete actions,” Van Leeuwen said.

A robust accountability framework is vital to that effort, Van Leeuwen said. “It’s easy to make a pledge at a pledging conference, but really what we are looking at is a whole new way of doing business, a whole new action agenda,” she said. “So we are very optimistic and very excited about the opportunity for Rio, but Rio not as an end really, but as a beginning and as an opportunity to be a springboard to get much further global action.”

Photo credit: "Brazil!," courtesy of Flickr user sparktography.

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On the Beat: IRP Editors Cover Rwanda’s Population, Health, and Environment Challenges

2011-12-26T09:00:00.004-05:00

The original version of this article appeared on the International Reporting Project website.

The International Reporting Project (IRP) and 12 senior editors and producers from across the United States traveled to Rwanda this year to learn about issues affecting Rwanda and other countries in Africa and to help them improve their news organizations’ international coverage. Some of the editors focused on Rwanda’s extensive population, health, and environmental challenges:

Nicholas Aster, founder and publisher of San Francisco’s Triple Pundit, covered sustainable development in Kigali, coffee’s empowerment potential, and eco-tourism sites like Volcanoes National Park. Aster also became interested in Rwanda’s efforts to avert disaster by corralling Lake Kivu’s CO2 reserves into a power supply. At the close of his trip, Aster reflected on Rwanda’s sustainability goals in a photo essay.

Tom Paulson, host and reporter for KPLU’s Humanosphere, discovered the positive side of aid and development in Rwanda, including girls’ education initiatives and coffee farming improvements. Moreoever, Paulson documented the Gatekeepers’ trip to Volcanoes National Park, including a visit from a mountain gorilla who became a little too friendly. Paulson has also posted several questions the Gatekeepers asked President Paul Kagame when they met with him, including his policies on restricting free speech, curbing population growth, and preventing another genocide. At the close of the trip, Paulson composed a photo slideshow that shows a growing, vibrant Rwanda, and he also outlined 10 reasons why the complex and sometimes contradictory country can’t be described in a sound-bite.

Sue Horton, op-ed and Sunday Opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, began chronicling her trip with a survey of Rwanda’s history on genocide, governance, and gorillas. On the road to meet Rwanda’s famed gorillas, Horton noted Rwanda’s strengths and challenges: its ambitious vision for the future encourages a growth in infrastructure and the country has showed impressive gains in healthcare provision and access, but Kigali is relocating residents who don’t fit the image.

The deputy managing editor of Global Post, Andrew Meldrum, also found a note of optimism in witnessing how far Rwanda has come since the genocide, particularly after hearing the testimonies of the genocide’s youngest victims: children born of sexual violence during the genocide. And his Global Post colleague Jon Rosen delves into the country’s population growth and the government’s approach to family planning.

In addition to the Gatekeeper Editor Trips, the IRP offers individual Fellowships to U.S. reporters to travel overseas on five-week reporting trips. In 2009, IRP Fellow Perry Beeman discovered a Rwanda similar to that which the Gatekeepers encountered: a country that has made much progress, but still has many challenges ahead. Beeman, who also was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, created a multimedia series, “Renewal in Rwanda”, for The Des Moines Register; his reporting garnered him an Overseas Press Club citation for Best Reporting in 2010.

Rwandans, Beeman found, are dedicated to conservation. President Kagame is committed to the environment and is driven to develop clean, sustainable power and to convert from subsistence agriculture to a stronger, more diversified economy. But everyone has a hand in this effort, including schoolchildren who report on conservation in song, dance, and dramatic arts. Beeman also examined efforts to preserve the Gishwati Forest, including gorilla and chimpanzee preservation efforts from villagers to businessmen to researchers. Beeman emphasized the importance of immersing oneself in an environment in order to report on it, and he did so by, among other things, tracking wild chimpanzees in the forest.

For more information about IRP's Fellowships and Gatekeeper Editor trips, visit their website at InternationalReportingProject.org.

Photo Credit: “The Broadsheet in Kyovu, Kigali,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday).

Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues on Durban and the Role of Women in Combating Climate Change Ambassador Melanne Verveer, U.S. Department of State

2011-12-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

The original version of this article, by Ambassador Melanne Verveer, appeared on the White House Council on Environmental Quality blog.

Last week I traveled to Durban, South Africa to participate in the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to highlight the critical and largely untapped potential of women to combat climate change. Studies have shown that it is often women who are on the frontlines of, and suffer disproportionately from, the impacts of climate change. This is certainly important. But we must remember that women are also a powerful force for finding solutions to climate change across the board, including in areas such as agriculture, sustainable forest management, and energy access.

Agriculture, which accounts for approximately 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is a sector that can be particularly sensitive to climate variability and change, is one key area where women can play a major role. A recent FAO report shows that women, in many places, are the main producers of the world’s staple crops, particularly in developing countries and regions likely to be adversely affected by climate change impacts. However, globally, only a small minority of women farmers have access to land tenure. This is a problem for many reasons – including that it limits women’s potential to combat climate change. Studies have shown that women with the right to property are significantly more capable of investing in climate-smart agricultural productivity; we have a lot of work to do to unlock women’s potential in this area.

Women also have untapped potential for increasing energy access, which directly relates to climate change. For example, nearly three billion people globally still rely on traditional cookstoves and open fires to prepare food for their families. In most instances, women are responsible for cooking – not to mention also spending many hours per week collecting fuel, which often puts women at risk of gender based violence. The resulting smoke exposure causes an estimated two million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Cookstoves also impact the climate through emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon. Engaging women is critical to tackling this problem. As we work to build a global market for clean cookstoves, integrating women into the cookstoves supply chain will help increase clean cookstove adoption rates while also creating new economic development opportunities. And as Secretary Clinton has noted, women create a multiplier effect in local communities because they disproportionately spend more of their earned income on food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling.

The United States recognizes the power of women’s potential in these areas and many others, and is investing in major initiatives including Feed the Future and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, where women’s role in generating transformative change is front and center.

I went to Durban to highlight the critical role of women in combating climate change. While there, I worked with U.S. negotiators on the Durban texts and participated in public engagement events. Our efforts to build on the gender equality and women’s empowerment language in the Cancun agreements are reflected in several crucial institutional developments, including language on gender balance related to the composition of the board of the new Green Climate Fund, the Standing Committee, and the Adaptation Committee. We also worked to reflect gender considerations in the mission of the Climate Technology Center and Network. USAID Assistant Administrator Eric Postel and I solicited input during a meeting with leading non-governmental organizations working on gender and climate issues, and I hosted a high-level side event at the U.S. Center focused on unlocking women’s potential to combat climate change. The level of enthusiasm among my fellow panelists and the audience at the event was inspirational.

We made progress in Durban, but we can’t stop here. To achieve the future we all seek, we must do more. As the late Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and ground-breaking advocate on women and the environment said, “We must not tire, we must not give up, we must persist.” The future of not only women, but our planet, depends on it.

Ambassador Melanne Verveer is U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.

Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The White House.

Photo Credit: “Melanne S. Verveer,” courtesy of the U.S. Embassy, Kabul.

In Somalia, Beyond the Immediate Crises, Demography Reveals a Long-Term Challenge Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Wilson Center

2011-12-21T09:00:00.007-05:00

In the nearly 20 years since the infamous intervention that resulted in the deaths of dozens of American and UN peacekeeping soldiers on the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia has become the epitome of a “failed state.” Neighboring countries, global bodies, and aid agencies are rushing to respond to the country’s rapidly evolving political, security and humanitarian crises.

Diplomatic attention has focused on decentralized, weak governance that is divided among the Al Shabab insurgency, clan warlords, and a hamstrung and largely ineffective Transitional Federal Government, whose control does not extend beyond the capital. Foreign militaries have had to devote naval resources to curtailing daring and far-reaching acts of piracy against civilian and military vessels from networks based in Somalia. Aid groups have been stymied in their efforts to stem famine as access to populations in the hardest-hit areas has been cut off by Al Shabab and food aid has been stolen. Most recently, Kenyan and, reportedly, Ethiopian forces have crossed the border, extending the reach of the country’s political crisis. Hundreds of thousands of have fled conditions of hunger, illness, and violence into neighboring countries.

Perhaps the deepest woe of a “failed state” is that its problems are deep-seated and cannot be solved during the brief span of a UN meeting or the news cycle following the latest terrorist attack. Amid the extraordinary efforts to battle the country’s crises, one of the most important underlying structural factors is often overlooked: the country’s unusual demographic picture.

A Demographic Outlier

Somalia is a global outlier in demographic terms, with rates of fertility (6.4 children per woman), infant mortality (107 deaths per 1,000 births), and maternal mortality (1,200 deaths per 100,000 live births) all above the already-high averages for sub-Saharan Africa. These demographic indicators are both a reflection of the abysmal state of health care in the country and a warning that its economic and security challenges are unlikely to be easily resolved.

Research shows that where at least 60 percent of the population is younger than 30 years old, countries are more prone to outbreaks of civil conflict, and the risk increases as the proportional size of the “youth bulge” grows. In Somalia, 70 percent of the population is younger than 30, a level comparable to Iraq and the Palestinian Territories. With little to no improvements in health care, Somalia’s age structure has remained unchanged over the past 40 years. Unlike dozens of other countries where fertility has declined significantly in recent decades, Somali women have nearly as many children on average today as they did in the 1970s. The current total fertility rate of 6.4 children per woman is only a 12 percent decline from the 1970 rate.

Despite high infant mortality – more than 10 percent of children die before turning one – this sustained high fertility rate has generated rapid population growth, with each successive generation larger than the next. Somalia’s population has almost tripled since 1970, from 3.6 to 9.3 million, although population density remains low (one-third the world average). If the fertility rate remains constant at the current level – not an unreasonable projection considering how stagnant it has been over past decades – Somalia would be home to 33 million people by 2050. Even if the fertility rate drops to near four children per woman, as projected in the UN’s medium variant, the population would still triple to 28 million by mid-century given the demographic momentum of decades of high fertility.

The fertility decline built into the UN’s medium variant projection – which would still place Somalia among the highest total fertility rates in the world by 2050 – is unlikely without steady and major improvements in the country’s health system, particularly women’s health. But with decades of conflict, weak governance and little investment, the environment for reproductive health services is dire.

A recent World Health Organization assessment described “unacceptable levels of unmet need, extreme inequities in access…slow progress…[and] underinvestment and poorly coordinated actions.” Pregnancy and childbirth are major risks to women’s well-being. Somali women have a one in 14 chance of dying from maternal causes over their lifetimes, the second-highest risk in the world. Funding to improve reproductive and maternal health care remains too low to meet demand. The United Nations Population Fund reports that donors spent about $6 million on population and reproductive health programs in 2008, about one-third as much as was spent in Benin and Burundi, which have smaller populations.

The Future for Youth

Instability and violence have become entrenched in Somalia; according to the Armed Conflict Dataset, civil conflict occurred in 12 of the past 20 years. The direct causes of the conflict are typically recorded as struggles for power and resources among competing clans. But in considering the underlying causes of conflict, demographic security scholars have suggested that very young age structures such as Somalia’s can create both motive and opportunity for recruitment into a violent uprising. As ever-growing numbers of young people face adulthood with few prospects for employment, hopelessness or desperation can make them vulnerable to the promise of well-being and identity offered by a political faction or rebel group.

There are 1.7 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 in Somalia today, with another 2.5 million following in the next ten-year age cohort. With opportunities for education, jobs, and equitable participation in society, these youth would represent a promising future for their country. Unfortunately, such opportunities are not afforded to most of them. A United Nations survey found that the secondary school enrollment rate is just six percent, with poverty and early marriage keeping many young people out of school. World Bank data from 2002 show that two-thirds of urban working-age adults and 41 percent of those in rural areas were unemployed. Nearly half of the population lives on less than $1 per day.

Youth Education, Economic Opportunities Could Increase Stability

While global attention centers on the government’s commitment to a new roadmap for peace and the efforts of the African Union’s peacekeeping forces to drive Al Shabab out of Mogadishu, development agencies have recognized demographic security as an important component of Somalia’s future.

The United Nations Children’s Fund is supporting schools for displaced children in Mogadishu, saying in a press release that “providing them with learning opportunities in a safe environment is critical for the country’s long-term stability and growth.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced plans for a new program called the Somali Youth Leaders Initiative, which aims to improve young people’s access to secondary education and economic opportunities and to increase their civic participation. In designing the program, USAID noted “the recruitment of boys and men by extremist organizations and piracy networks” and “the common perception that an increasing youth population is a potentially destabilizing force.”

As the October 4 bombing at the Education Ministry in Mogadishu showed, young people are often the victims of the country’s instability. Programs such as those of UNICEF and USAID that empower young people to capitalize on their potential should be a greater focus among initiatives to address Somalia’s long-term future as well as its immediate crises.

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and former senior research associate at Population Action International.

Sources: BBC, Population Action International, The New York Times, UCDP/PRIO, UNICEF, UNESCO, UN Population Division, UN Population Fund, Urdal (2006), USAID, World Bank, World Health Organization.

Image Credit: "Somalia Suffers from Worst Drought in Century," courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo/Stuart Price; charts arranged by Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, data from the UN Population Division and World Health Organization.

Climate Diplomacy in Perspective Lukas Rüttinger, adelphi

2011-12-20T15:07:00.001-05:00

Climate policy on the international level often seems to be largely limited to negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, in the shadow of these negotiations, a new approach merging climate and foreign policy is developing. Calling it “climate diplomacy,” proponents of this approach argue that tackling climate change is inherently a political struggle and one in which classic diplomatic instruments should play a role. This is especially true, since the challenges posed by climate change are so huge and the solutions so far reaching that the climate conversation also has to be a diplomatic one. Yet negotiations and treaties are just one instrument of foreign policy and they are only as successful and strong as the political foundation upon which they are built.

The German Federal Foreign Office, supported by adelphi, invited representatives from the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations, as well as over 30 countries for a two-day conference in Berlin this October, “Climate Diplomacy in Perspective – From Early Warning to Early Action,” to discuss what climate diplomacy looks like in practice, what its added value is, and what challenges it is best suited to address.

In working groups on water diplomacy, food security, and coastal stability, common themes and questions quickly emerged. In particular, the value and danger of securitizing the climate change discourse was a prominent issue.

On the one hand, the securitization of issues such as transnational water sharing can raise threat perception to a level that makes it very hard to tackle and may even foster conflict. On the other hand, participants noted that framing climate change as a security challenge might help to finally create the political leverage needed for far-reaching action.

Confronting Complexity

Another common theme was the complexity and linked nature of the climate challenges faced. Although covering different aspects, each working group quickly recognized systems with multiple feedback loops, such as the water-food-energy nexus. The same point was underlined in discussions around complex emergencies and crises, such as the 2010 floods in Pakistan.

However, the discussion did not stop at an analysis of challenges, the working groups also developed many suggestions of what climate diplomacy could and should look like.

One shared recommendation was that the complexity of and links between issues require sectoral policies and institutions to reach beyond their traditional, thematic, and even geographic focus. In regards to cross-border water cooperation, for example, this means that regional political institutions are often better suited than water institutions because of their broader mandate and focus. Where classic diplomacy and regional cooperation do not work, for example because national governments are blocking these efforts, participants proposed that informal diplomacy, track two initiatives, and cooperation on lower administrative levels such as municipalities can provide alternatives.

The complexity of the challenges is daunting but when asked to summarize why diplomats should tackle climate change, John Ashton, the special representative for climate change for the British Commonwealth Foreign Office, summed up his understanding in a simple but to-the-point answer: “Because it is our job.”

Lukas Rüttinger is a project manager for adelphi, mainly focusing on the fields of conflict analysis and peacebuilding as well as resources and governance.

Photo Credit: German Federal Foreign Office.

From Dakar: Explaining Population Growth and Family Planning to Environmentalists

2011-12-19T17:43:00.001-05:00

“There is a growing recognition that population is a key driver of environmental, development, governance, and security challenges; however, family planning is not a traditional tool, nor is it often considered an ‘appropriate’ one, for responding to food, water, climate, or conflict,” said Roger-Mark De Souza at a November 30 panel discussion at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning in Dakar, Senegal. “This presents a challenge for us: How can we change perceptions of family planning so that it becomes part of the solution to wider problems, including natural resource scarcity, lack of economic development, gender inequity, and instability?”

De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International (PAI), was joined by Sandeep Bathala, program associate with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program; Robert Engelman, president of Worldwatch Institute; and Daisy Magaña, fellow with the GoJoven Program, for a session on Reaching Out at Rio: Explaining Population Growth and Family Planning to Environmentalists.

Population Dynamics Part of Climate Vulnerability

“Advocates…need to communicate that empowering women to make their own reproductive choices will improve both their individual well-being and our collective environment,” said Engelman. According to research conducted on behalf of Americans for UNFPA, messages that focus on women – their health or empowerment – resonate well with American environmentalists, as they do with broader audiences.

PAI’s interactive mapping website shows that high levels of unmet need for family planning and rapid population growth rates are common in countries with low levels of resilience to climate change and high levels of projected decline in agricultural production, said De Souza. “Family planning services can be one element of a multi-pronged strategy to reduce especially women’s vulnerability to these interlocking vulnerabilities,” he said.

“Currently, population growth is viewed as a challenge to addressing climate change-related vulnerabilities, but family planning services are commonly left out of conversations about ways to reduce these vulnerabilities.” This is a lost opportunity, said De Souza: “We can integrate family planning into wider environmental, development, and peace-building efforts.”

At the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, a side event on reproductive health and climate was well-attended. However, as panelist Esther Agbarakwe of the Africa Youth Initiative on Climate Change noted, population was not part of the conference‘s official discussion, due to lack of knowledge and fears of population control. PAI is currently working with UNFPA to produce a series of training modules on population and climate change that will help environmentalists, climate change activists, and researchers better understand and explore these connections.

Tapping the Youth Base

Bathala, formerly the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program director, discussed how the Sierra Club, one of the only major grassroots conservation organizations with a population program, uses youth outreach to raise awareness on the links between the environment, reproductive health, and women’s rights.

Because young people constitute over half of the world’s population, the Sierra Club focuses on empowering youth leaders to make the connection between environmental issues and sexual and reproductive health and rights. The Population and Environment Program reaches youth directly by organizing summits and multi-state campus tours featuring young people from around the world sharing compelling stories with their peers.

“The program provides youth and adult activists with materials, communication strategies, and leadership training,” Bathala said. “With these tools, the activists then educate their community members, campus, and decision-makers about the need for measures that increase access to family planning while addressing poverty, women’s empowerment, and environmental protection.”

In April, fellow panel member and Belize-native Daisy Magaña joined one of the Sierra Club’s U.S. tours to discuss the GoJoven program, which convenes and support youth reproductive health champions throughout Latin America. Through GoJoven, Magaña has worked to expand adolescent reproductive and sexual health choices, services, policies, and programs in Belize.

In a blog post, Magaña discussed how her message was simple: Don’t give up. “If you think being active on environmental and sexual rights issues is hard to do here, imagine doing it in a deeply conservative [Catholic] country like mine,” she told U.S. students.

Sierra Club also leads story tours to functioning population, health, and environment programs in the field, including a 2009 trip to Guatemala and Belize in conjunction with GoJoven. Through visits to 10 project sites, two U.S.-based youth advocates witnessed first-hand the challenges and opportunities associated with community-based sexual and reproductive health programs, significantly enhancing their ability to be pro-active messengers in their own communities. The tour helped the Sierra Club build an international network of young people committed to social and policy change in their countries.

Looking Forward: Finding Ways To Highlight Integration

While recognition of the connections between population growth and environmental impacts is growing, the experience of the panelists shows that it takes innovative methods to reach both the environmental and family planning communities. A similar panel later this winter at the Wilson Center will include representatives of Americans for UNFPA discussing their research on talking to environmentalists about reproductive health and population growth.

With the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) coming in June of next year, highlighting successful strategies is crucial in order to pave the way for better integration in the future.

Event Resources
Sandeep Bathala presentation
Robert Engelman presentation
Roger-Mark De Souza presentation
Image Credit: Roger-Mark De Souza/Population Action International.

You Are Invited, December, 19 2011: New Research on Climate and Conflict Links

2011-12-16T13:24:00.000-05:00

Environmental Change and Security Program
Monday, December 19, 2011, 9:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
6th Floor Auditorium
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Joseph Hewitt, Technical Team Leader, Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, U.S. Agency for International Development
Joshua Busby, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin
Marc Levy, Deputy Director, Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Earth Institute, Columbia University
Solomon Hsiang, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Science Technology & Environmental Policy, Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, Princeton University

Global climate change has the potential to significantly alter the relationship between people and their environments, as it could undermine the resource base upon which people have built their livelihoods and socio-political institutions. There are at least three ways by which climate change could potentially contribute to armed conflict or violent social unrest: by exacerbating existing conflict dynamics and patterns of grievance; by instigating new environmental or resource problems that overwhelm existing systems; or by leading to interventions for climate change adaptation or mitigation which themselves exacerbate or instigate destructive conflict dynamics or trajectories.

Marc Levy will assess research on climate change and conflict links. Joshua Busby will present new work from the Climate Change and African Political Security climate security vulnerability index for Africa. Solomon Hsiang will discuss his recent Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences study that links the global climate cycle to global patterns of civil conflict. Joseph Hewitt will speak to climate and conflict links in the context of wider conflict research.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 6th floor auditorium. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

How Much Did the Climate Talks in Durban Accomplish? Ruth Greenspan Bell and Barry Blechman for Foreign Affairs

2011-12-16T10:27:00.000-05:00

The original version of this article, by Ruth Greenspan Bell and Barry Blechman, appeared on Foreign Affairs.

The outcome of the recent Durban climate conference represents a victory, of sorts, for a particular vision of how the community of nations might eventually gain control over greenhouse gases. But that vision is flawed, perpetuating an approach that, after more than 20 years of negotiations, has not reversed warming trends. Of particular concern is the continued insistence on a comprehensive deal negotiated by all nations through a UN process. The degree to which the meme of a “legally-binding” agreement has dominated thinking is likewise troubling.

Our October article, “Beyond the Durban Climate Talks,” examined an alternative negotiating pathway – one based on the effective model of nuclear arms control. There, specific issues were opportunistically segmented for resolution. And, in some cases, negotiators achieved progress by working in alternative fora that were not wedded to the UN ground rules, especially the ones that give every country, no matter how small, a potential veto on the results. Unfortunately, the Durban result continues the well-trod UN pathway.

The meetings saw protracted debate about how precisely to characterize the “legal” and “binding” nature of a future agreement that might emerge in 2015 from yet another “new” round of negotiations. Indeed, the supposed distinction between “political” or “voluntary” and “legally binding” agreements has dominated United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations for years. Yet such distinctions break down upon closer examination.

Continue reading on Foreign Affairs.

Ruth Greenspan Bell is public policy scholar at the Wilson Center.

Photo Credit: “Oxfam hungry for climate action at Durban Climate Conference,” courtesy of Oxfam International and Ainhoa Goma.

On the Beat: Pulitzer Center Launches Collaborative Reporting Project on Reproductive Health Jake Naughton, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

2011-12-15T14:13:00.002-05:00

The original version of this article, by Jake Naughton, appeared on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting blog.

The Pulitzer Center launched its collaborative reproductive health-reporting project at this year’s International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Dakar, Senegal. The project brings together four journalists from Africa and four from the United States who will collaborate to enhance local and international reporting about reproductive health across the continent.

The African journalists are Mae Azango of Liberia, Estelle Ellis of South Africa, Sam Olukoya of Nigeria, and Ken Opala of Kenya. Their U.S. counterparts are Christian Science Monitor correspondent Jina Moore; New Yorker editorial staffer Alexis Okeowo; and the Pulitzer Center’s managing director Nathalie Applewhite and visual media coordinator Jake Naughton.

More than two thousand reproductive health professionals and hundreds of journalists from all over the world participated in the conference, which sought to shine a spotlight on the unmet need for family planning services worldwide, and to focus on integrating family planning into general health services.

Continue reading on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting blog.

Video Credit: "Meet the Journalists: Dakar," courtesy of the Pulitzer Center.

Beat on the Ground: Watch: Dr. Vik Mohan on Integrating Family Planning and Conservation in Madagascar

2011-12-15T11:07:00.004-05:00

The integration of population, health, and environment programming “enables us to create synergies that mean we are more effective at achieving both health and conservation goals,” said Dr. Vik Mohan, director of sexual and reproductive health programming for Blue Ventures, in an interview with ECSP at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning.

After Blue Ventures established their first clinic in 2007 in the village of Andavadoaka, on Madagascar’s southwest coast, “we felt immense pressure to scale up our intervention,” said Mohan. “We started with one clinic in one village, and now we have a multi-site service covering all 40 villages that we partner with for our community-based conservation work,” he said.

According to data compiled by Blue Ventures, the average total fertility rate in the region is 6.7 children per woman. The London-based eco-tourism-turned health and environment NGO offers a variety of family planning services to meet local demand, including mobile outreach clinics and community-based distribution of contraceptives. They also partner with Marie Stopes International to offer long-acting and permanent methods of contraception for those that want it.

“This Model Can Be Taken to Scale”

By integrating conservation and reproductive health messaging and service delivery, “we are getting greater buy-in from the community because they all see the added value of the breadth of things that we offer them,” Mohan said. “Men who came to hear about fisheries management get to hear about family planning technologies, practically for the first time in their lives.”

The fishermen are able to see the links between food security and population growth through their own experience, he added. “We believe very passionately this model can be taken to scale,” Mohan said. “This is something that could be easily replicated in other regions. Definitely in other coastal regions, but almost certainly in other remote areas – perhaps areas of high biodiversity where there are existing projects, perhaps conservation projects – but where there is an unmet need for healthcare and family planning in particular.”

“My advice to other organizations, whether you are doing healthcare or whether you are doing conservation, is just think holistically,” said Mohan. “If you are a conservation organization that recognizes that there is an unmet healthcare need for the communities that you work with, then…don’t be afraid to ask those questions, and don’t be afraid to build capacity to meet the need, if you find one. Or, don’t be afraid to partner with health NGOs to enable that need to be met.”

For more on Blue Ventures’ integrated efforts, see also ECSP FOCUS Issue 23, “To Live With the Sea: Reproductive Health Care and Marine Conservation in Madagascar,” co-authored by Vik Mohan.

You Are Invited, December, 15 2011: Report Launch: Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health

2011-12-14T16:06:00.000-05:00

Africa Program, Council of Women World Leaders, Environmental Change and Security Program, Global Health Initiative
Thursday, December 15, 2011, 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
6th Floor Auditorium
RSVP Agenda Directions Webcast

Luc de Bernis, United Nations Population Fund
Margaret Greene, Co-author, Delivering Solutions; Greenworks
Chaacha Mwita, Communications Director, African Population and Health Research Center
Calyn M. Ostrowski, Program Associate, Global Health Initiative & Environmental Change and Security Program
Tim Thomas, Interim Director, Maternal Health Task Force

One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s 2009-2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the U.S. and abroad. This year, in Kenya, the Wilson Center and African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) convened two workshops on neglected maternal health issues with field workers and members of the Kenyan parliament.

To meet the challenges in maternal health, the series’ speakers recommended using existing, low-cost solutions that build on our current knowledge base. Today’s event will launch Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health, which captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 6th floor auditorium. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

You Are Invited, December, 15 2011: Climate Finance: Innovative Financing Sources for Sustainable Development?

2011-12-14T15:53:00.000-05:00

Environmental Change and Security Program, Program on America and the Global Economy, Heinrich Böll Stiftung - North America, New Rules for Global Finance
Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
5th Floor Boardroom
RSVP Agenda Directions

Ari Huhtala, Senior Environmental Specialist, Climate Change Team, Environment Department, World Bank
Ian Parry, Technical Assistance Advisor (Climate Change and Environment), Tax Policy, Fiscal Affairs Department, International Monetary Fund
Liane Schalatek, Associate Director, Heinrich Böll Stiftung - North America
John Sewell, Senior Scholar, Environmental Change and Security Program, Wilson Center
David Waskow, Climate Change Program Manager, Oxfam America

The climate summit in Durban, South Africa ended this weekend with a comprehensive yet unfinished climate agreement. Some advances were made in the discourse about providing urgently needed financial resources to deal with climate effects being felt in developing countries; however, with traditional donor countries' budgets severely constrained, alternative financing sources are gaining momentum. This panel will bring together speakers from a variety of backgrounds, including international financial institutions, governments, think tanks, and civil society groups to discuss concrete financing options for sustainable development that go beyond direct public contributions by developed countries. These varied proposals include taxes and levies on air and maritime transport, special drawing rights, and financial transaction taxes.

This event will NOT be webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 5th floor boardroom. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Eye On: Famine and Food Insecurity in the Horn of Africa: A Man-Made Disaster?

2011-12-14T09:00:00.017-05:00

This year’s drought in the Horn of Africa has been the region’s worst in decades and has exploded into a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions. In Somalia, where the drought is layered on top of two decades of conflict and an extremely weak state, the impact of the drought has been most damaging. Somalia is the only country in the region where the UN has declared famine zones. And, even though the UN recently upgraded three of Somalia’s six famine areas to “lesser emergencies,” four million Somalis – more than half the country’s population – remain in urgent need of food and general humanitarian aid.

The drought may have been what sparked the current crisis, but other, longer-term factors, like a sustained lack of agricultural development, extreme rural poverty, and changing weather patterns, not to mention Somalia’s lack of functioning government, set the stage.

A Long-Term Crisis in the Making

“Lack of rainfall over several seasons is the most immediate and most visible cause of the current humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa,” said Jim Hansen of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in a brief video produced this summer by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University (watch above). Much of the Horn’s population “depends on rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism for their livelihoods and sustenance,” said Hansen. Already “quite poor and…locked in poverty for quite a long time,” environmental and resource degradation, paired with rapid population growth, have compounded their vulnerability to extreme events, he said.

Throughout the region, resilience to crises like the current drought has been weakened by decades of poor agricultural planning, “driven more by shifts in ideology than any real evidence among some of the key international development organizations,” said Hansen. That poor planning has made communities more dependent on humanitarian aid when poor weather hits, which in turn forces aid groups to redirect resources away from longer-term development and towards short-term disaster relief instead, Hansen said.

While these problems exist across the Horn of Africa, Hansen points out that the crisis has been most damaging in Somalia, which he attributes to the country’s weak governance and to international aid groups’ limited ability to operate in the country.

“Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Somalia have similar severity of drought, but the humanitarian crisis is much more severe – the loss of livelihood and life is greater in Somalia largely because the government is weaker,” he said.

The Government’s Role

Owen Barder, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, draws a more direct line between governance and famine in the Horn. “In Somalia…there’s a complete breakdown of government, and the consequence is the famine that we’re seeing,” said Barder during a Center for Global Development podcast. The country has been without a functioning government since 1991, when civil war broke out. It has since become “the most food-insecure nation in the world” and, as described by Foreign Policy, “the international community’s longest-running failure.”

Barder raised two points about the government’s role in famine. One, that access to information – in this case an early warning system monitoring drought conditions – can minimize the humanitarian impact of any given natural disaster; and two, that a country’s government must be able to translate that information into action in order for it to actually make a difference.

Barder is not alone in emphasizing the state’s role as a driver of the famine. Edward Carr, a AAAS science fellow with USAID, wrote in July, when the UN first declared famine in Somalia, that attributing the famine solely to drought is “a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.”

Charles Kenny, also a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, went even further on Foreign Policy, arguing that famine, or “mass starvation as an intentional act of governance,” should be categorized as a crime and prosecutable at the International Criminal Court.

Al Shabab and the Months Ahead

As of late November, the United Nations estimated that tens of thousands had died in Somalia alone since drought began this spring. Though USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) reports that famine has now subsided in three of the six southern regions it initially struck, a quarter of a million Somalis remain at risk of “imminent starvation,” according to the UN.

According to FEWSNET, famine should not reappear in the foreseeable future, assuming aid groups can maintain current distribution levels – a key caveat. Ten days after FEWSNET issued its analysis, however, Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked militant organization that controls much of southern Somalia, banned 16 aid groups, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, from operating in the areas under its control. UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told the BBC that the move would put “about 160,000 severely malnourished children…at imminent risk of death.”

Fighting in southern Somalia between Al Shabab and Kenyan and Ethiopian forces is adding another layer to the country’s humanitarian crisis. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reported that, as of late November, the fighting had become the primary driver of internal displacement, replacing drought and famine as the key drivers during the first three quarters of the year. The UNHCR estimated that, between the drought and the conflict, 1.46 million Somalis have been displaced.

Meanwhile, the rainy season is picking up, and although that’s good news for farmers and pastoralists, it also means that Somalis will be vulnerable to diseases like measles, typhoid, and cholera, which can spread quickly through overcrowded, under-supplied IDP camps. Somalis still living under Al Shabab’s control are prohibited from getting vaccinations, amplifying their vulnerability to disease in the coming months.

These latest developments offer strong evidence that policy decisions can exacerbate the human toll of natural disasters. From Barder’s perspective, that is reason for optimism. “We have the information, we have the capacity to prevent it from happening,” he said.

For more on Somalia's underlying demographic issues, see Elizabeth Leahy Madsen’s post “In Somalia, Beyond the Immediate Crises, Demography Reveals a Long-Term Challenge.”

Sources: AlertNet, Associated Press, BBC, Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, The New York Times, UNHCR, UN News Centre, Voice of America.

Video Credit: "Jim Hansen on Food Security in East Africa," courtesy of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society on vimeo; image credit: FEWSNET/USAID.

From Durban: Can “Climate-Smart Agriculture” Help Feed Africa’s Growing Population? Brenda Zulu for the Wilson Center

2011-12-13T12:00:00.004-05:00

Food production needs to increase 70 percent by 2050 to meet the demands of a growing world population, said former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a keynote address on “climate-smart agriculture” at a COP-17 event hosted by the World Bank and African Union. Annan, who is now chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said this was a particular concern in Africa, where four out of five citizens are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods.

One in seven people in the world do not have enough food to eat, Annan said, and climate change is expected to make this challenge more difficult to overcome. Climate-smart agriculture includes a wide variety of techniques that help increase the resilience of communities and protect them from extreme weather events, such as terracing to prevent soil erosion, improving weather forecasting, managing water runoff, and developing irrigation systems.

“Climate change affects us by undermining our resource base through water and soil degradation,” said Prime Minister of Ethiopia Meles Zenawi at the event. “There is need to protect the resources and to rehabilitate green areas of our land.” He said that since 70 percent of Africans are small-scale farmers and that most of the poor in Africa were farmers, there is no better way to fight poverty on the continent than through agriculture.

South African President Jacob Zuma said at the event that given that the UN projects a population of more than nine billion people in the world by 2050, agriculture should be a priority as it is more vulnerable to climate change than any other sector.

“Climate-smart agriculture includes proven practical techniques such as mulching, intercropping, conservation agriculture, integrated crop management and agro forestry, improved grazing, and innovative better weather management,” he said, all of which have the potential to help increase crop yields.

Mary Robinson, chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, said there could be no smart agriculture without integrating women’s issues, because climate change affects women disproportionately. “Women make the connection between climate-smart agriculture, food security, and gender,” she said.

“Our ability to feed the growing population under climate variability and change will require new expertise and harmonized efforts,” said Robinson.

Annan agreed, saying African women should be fully involved in early action that can support technical assistance, such as screening agriculture plans to ensure they are “climate smart” as well as integrating climate resilience and mitigation into ongoing poverty-reduction programs and testing new approaches.

But according to Brylyne Chitsunge, a farmer from Pretoria speaking on the panel, things will need to change considerably from the status quo. “The small-scale farmer remains very much marginalized in institutions,” she said. “They exist on paper but they really don’t exist.”

Brenda Zulu is a member of Women's Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the "From Durban" series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.

Sources: World Bank, World Food Programme.

Photo Credit: “Cultivated hillsides,” courtesy of flickr user coda (Damien du Toit).

From the Wilson Center: Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Conflict in the Niger River Basin

2011-12-13T09:00:00.004-05:00

New research on the Niger River Basin finds that the effects of climate change in the region are pervasive and that “latent conflict” between groups – disagreements and disputes over damage to farmland and restricted access to water, but not physical violence – is common.

“You’ve got vulnerable people, vulnerable households, vulnerable communities living within…fragile systems – governance systems [and] environmental systems,” said Phil Vernon, International Alert’s director of programs for Africa and peacebuilding issues, at “Climate Change, Water, and Conflict in the Niger River Basin,” an event hosted by the Wilson Center on November 17.

Together with his colleague Lulsegged Abebe and Marisa Goulden of the University of Anglia, Vernon examined how communities in Mali, Nigeria, and Niger have been impacted by climate change, how they have adapted to those impacts, and whether these changes spurred conflict.

Competition Over Dwindling Resources

Climate change destabilizes communities by adding uncertainty and stress, Vernon said, and when a community is already vulnerable, the impacts of those uncertainties and stresses are amplified and the potential for conflict is greater. In every community examined in the study, climate-induced vulnerability led to some kind of conflict. More often than not, however, that conflict took the form of disagreements, or “latent conflict,” rather than violent conflict – a reason for optimism in the face of dire predictions that an era of climate wars is upon us.

Throughout the basin, river flows and rainfall have been decreasing since the 1970s, said Goulden, creating tension between two of the major communities living in the basin – farmers and pastoralists. Pastoralists are forced to travel farther to bring their herds to water, while farmers are expanding their cropland to feed growing populations, reducing the pathways available to herders and their livestock.

Unfortunately, poor policy decisions have made tensions worse in some places. In Lokoja, Nigeria, for example, the government began dredging the Niger River in 2009 to improve commercial shipping. Officials said the dredging would reduce flooding, but in 2010, farmers suffered immensely from floods. The government’s false promises increased the farmers’ vulnerability, said Goulden, because, expecting to be protected from flooding, they were not adequately prepared, making the damage worse.

As a result, farmers are now building homes and developing cropland further away from the river, reducing land available to pastoralists and increasing the potential for conflict between the two communities.

Increased Resilience Is a “No-Brainer”

Climate in the Niger River Basin is marked by a high degree of variability – rainfall, river flows, and temperature already fluctuate a great deal and could become even more variable in the future, said Goulden.

That uncertainty has important implications for how people think about responding to climate change, said Abebe. “Development and adaptation policies must be flexible enough to cope with extreme variability both in the wetter and the dry conditions in the Niger River Basin,” he said.

Boosting resilience will be key to ensuring that vulnerable communities have the flexibility they need to respond to future crises, Vernon said.

“If the interaction of stress and vulnerability is the problem…it’s somewhat of a no-brainer that increased resilience is part of the answer,” said Vernon. And decisions on how to increase resilience “should be made at the lowest appropriate level…from high policy down to household and individual decisions.”

Different People, Different Levels of Resilience

Vernon’s emphasis on making decisions at the “lowest appropriate level” reflects the reality that various communities – and individual community members – experience climate change in different ways. Fostering adaptation strategies that take these variations into consideration will be an essential strategy for avoiding climate-driven conflict in the future.

In Mali, the Niger River flooded downstream of the Selingué Dam in 2001 and 2010, and in each case, researchers found divergent responses to the crises.

In the lead-up to the 2001 flood, dam operators had been intentionally keeping reservoir levels high in anticipation of increased demand for hydroelectric power during an upcoming soccer championship match. When heavy rains hit the area, though, the operators were forced to release huge amounts of water over a short period of time, causing massive flooding downstream.

In the flood’s aftermath, downstream farmers were able to successfully sue the power company for their losses, but downstream pastoralists had no comparable option. The pastoralists were therefore more vulnerable to the flood’s long-term impacts.

Responses differed within communities as well, often breaking down along gender lines. In 2010, when floods hit Mali again, men “were trying to help people move away from the flood water, and then afterward with rebuilding of homes,” said Goulden, “whilst women are concerned with finding shelter, cooking, and caring for the sick, elderly, and children.”

No “Massive Risk of Violence” in the Near Future

Policymakers are left with an urgent crisis – climate change – and a solution that is inherently time-intensive: building resilience in vulnerable communities down to the individual level, said Vernon.

“There is a risk of undermining the elements of resilience which exist already in responding too rapidly and too urgently based on the anxieties we have to the problem of climate change and insecurity,” he cautioned.

Fortunately, although the threat of climate change is urgent, Vernon said that the risk of that threat spilling over into violent conflict is still a long way off. “I think policymakers have got to be thinking about where might this lead,” he said, “but at the moment, in terms of this research, there was no evidence that there’s a massive risk of violence happening any time soon.”

Event Resources
Research presentation
Photo gallery
Video
Sources: AlertNet, BBC, International Alert.

Photo Credit: "Cattle manure millet field in Niger," courtesy of flickr user ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute).

Why South Asia Needs a Kabul Water Treaty Michael Kugelman, Ahmad Rafay Alam, and Gitanjali Bakshi for Foreign Policy

2011-12-12T12:55:00.000-05:00

The original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, Ahmad Rafay Alam, and Gitanjali Bakshi, appeared on Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel.

Pakistan is once again accusing India of water hegemony. This time, however, the accusation refers not to Indian damming of the Western Rivers in the disputed regions of Jammu and Kashmir, but to Indian support for Afghan development projects along the Kabul River. This accusation indulges in conspiratorial thinking, and distracts from a factual understanding of the water issues between the two countries.

According to Pakistani media reports, Afghanistan (with assistance from India and the World Bank) has plans to build 12 dams on the Kabul River (a tributary of the Indus which runs through Afghanistan and Pakistan), with a combined storage capacity of 4.7 million acre feet (MAF). Pakistan is concerned that these dams will stop crucial water supply from flowing to the Indus River. It is also concerned that Indian support for these dams will increase India's sphere of influence over water issues in the region.

India has not confirmed its support to build all 12 Afghan dams on the Kabul River, though it is currently one of Afghanistan's largest assistance donors; Afghan media report that India has $1.3 billion invested in infrastructure projects. Water infrastructure, including dam building, is an integral part of Afghanistan's 2008 Development Agenda.

Continue reading on Foreign Policy.

Sources: The Daily Outlook Afghanistan, The News International, Pakistan Defence.

Photo Credit: "Ferry Across the River," courtesy of flickr user peretzp (Peretz Partensky).

From the Wilson Center: The Legacy of Little America: Aid and Reconstruction in Afghanistan Michael Kugelman, Wilson Center

2011-12-12T09:00:00.002-05:00

In 2007, the United States built a $305 million diesel power plant in Afghanistan – the world’s most expensive power plant of its kind. Yet the facility is rarely used, because the impoverished country cannot afford to operate it.

This ill-fated power plant does not represent the only time America has lavished tremendous amounts of money on development projects in Afghanistan that have failed to meet objectives. At a December 7 presentation organized by the Wilson Center’s Asia Program and co-sponsored with the Middle East Program and International Security Studies, Rajiv Chandrasekaran discussed Washington’s expensive attempts to modernize southern Afghanistan’s Helmand River Valley from the 1940s to 1970s – and the troubling implications for U.S. development projects in that country today.

From Morrison Knudsen to USAID

According to Chandrasekaran, a Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and Washington Post journalist, the story begins after World War II, when Afghanistan’s development-minded king, Zahir Shah, vowed to modernize his country. He hired Morrison Knudsen – an American firm that had built the Hoover Dam and the San Francisco Bay Bridge – to construct irrigation canals and a large dam on the Helmand River. Shah’s view was that by making use of the Hindu Kush’s great waters, prosperity would emerge and turn a dry valley into fertile ground.

Unfortunately, problems arose from the start. The region’s soil was not only shallow, but also situated on a thick layer of subsoil that prevented sufficient drainage. When the soil was irrigated, water pooled at the surface and salt accumulated heavily. Yet despite these challenges, King Shah was determined to continue the massive enterprise. And so, increasingly, was the U.S. government – particularly when Washington began to fear that if it did not support this project, the Soviets would.

In 1949, the United States provided the first installment of what would amount to more than $80 million over a 15-year period. With this aid in hand, Morrison Knudsen not only completed the canals and dam but also constructed a new modern community. Americans called the town Lashkar Gah, but Afghans christened it “Little America.” It boasted a movie theater, a co-ed swimming pool, and a tennis court. Children listened to Elvis Presley records, drank lemonade, and learned English at Afghanistan’s only co-ed school.

However, problems continued to proliferate. Afghans in Lashkar Gah – many of whom had been lured away from their ancestral homelands on the promises of better harvests – did not experience greater farm yields. In the 1960s, the Afghans severed their contract with Morrison Knudsen, and began working directly with U.S. government agencies, including the new U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The result was some fairly productive farms, but, due in great part to waterlogging and soil salinity, the objective of transforming the region into Afghanistan’s breadbasket was not attained. U.S. funding slowed in the 1970s, and the grand experiment officially ended in 1978, when all Americans pulled out of Lashkar Gah following a coup staged by Afghanistan’s Communist Party.

“We Need To Find a Middle Ground”

What implications does all this have for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan today? Chandrasekaran offered several lessons for American policymakers. One is “beware the suit-wearing modern Afghan” who claims to speak for his less-development-inclined countrymen. Another is to be aware that “there is only so much money that the land can absorb.” Finally, it is unrealistic to expect patterns of behavior to change quickly; he noted how Afghans in Lashkar Gah continued to flood their fields even when advised not to do so.

These lessons are not being heeded today, according to Chandrasekaran. He cited a USAID agricultural project, launched in late 2009, that allocated a whopping $300 million to just two provinces annually, with $30 million spent over only a few months. He said that while this effort may have generated some employment, the immense amounts of money at play fueled tensions among Afghans. Furthermore, contended Chandrasekaran, the program “focused too much on instant gratification and not on building an agricultural economy.”

In conclusion, Chandrasekaran insisted that foreign aid is essential in Afghanistan (and at the recently concluded Bonn Conference, Afghan President Hamid Karzai agreed, calling for financial assistance to continue until 2030). He described past aid efforts as either “starving the patient” or “pumping food into him.” We need to find a middle ground, he argued, and said that working on more modest projects with small Afghan nongovernment organizations is one possibility. The problem, he acknowledged, is that Washington is under pressure to spend ample quantities of money, and therefore depends on large implementing partners – no matter the unsatisfactory results.

Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Wilson Center.

From Durban: Youth Need More Information on Climate, Population Links Brenda Zulu for the Wilson Center

2011-12-09T14:34:00.000-05:00

Youth need more information about climate change, but also on its links to reproductive health and gender, said Esther Agbarakwe, technical advisor for the Africa Youth Initiative on Climate Change. Speaking at the joint Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and Wilson Center side event, “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet,” at the COP-17 climate conference, Agbarakwe pointed out that “there are critical issues, like demography, the number of young people, and young women in this population, that should be discussed.” But, she said, they would likely not be brought up in any official manner at the conference because of fears about “population control.”

In Nigeria, young people, and particularly young girls, are frequently excluded from formal discussions about climate change and sustainable development. Growing up, Agbarakwe said she was aware of environmental change due to pollution in the Niger Delta, but her parents did not talk to her about reproductive health. In her community, many young girls had unplanned pregnancies and boys dropped out of school. It was only through a child rights activists’ club that she learned about how she could protect herself.

“That is why there is need to have young women in this discussion,” she said.

Giving a Voice to the Most Affected

Wendy Mnyandu, a student from Durban’s Zwelibanzi High School attending the side event, noted in an interview that climate changes have affected mothers more because they are dependent on the forest for energy.

“It is important for villagers to adapt to new technologies [such as] cook stoves, where they can use less fuelwood that will not take away the forest,” she said.

At the Wilson Center earlier this year, Agbarakwe explained how insufficient rain has led to longer trips to collect water, increasing women’s vulnerability. A friend of hers was raped while walking to the next village to fetch water after her own community’s well dried up – an ordeal that was not only emotionally and physically traumatizing, but also isolated her from her community and jeopardized her future plans and dreams.

“It is important for more men to talk about this topic,” said Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president of research at Population Action international, who also spoke at the side event. “I am talking on behalf of my mother, my daughters, my wife, and my granddaughters, for their voices are not often heard. I am a father of two young teenage boys and they know how to talk about this. By talking about it, we can see how family planning is very effective,” he said.

Talking About Population to Climate Experts, and Vice Versa

“Just last week I was in Dakar, Senegal, at the International Conference on Family Planning,” said De Souza. “I was talking to specialists and I was getting them interested in climate change.” Similarly, “more and more we find that climate change activists and specialists are appreciating that climate change is important to women and their wellbeing,” he said.

Population Action International (PAI) has mapped agricultural production, water stress, and increased vulnerability to climate change. “We see that there are 26 global hotspots where these issues are critical. What we have also done is look at these hotspots to determine where there is a very high unmet need for family planning,” said De Souza. PAI is using these maps to show the climate change community that a cost-effective investment in family planning could increase resilience in these areas.

De Souza said that in order to build support for programs that address these issues, it is important to look at national adaptation programs of action and their funding needs. “Funding is critical, and these types of interventions produce results – we need to understand where those missed opportunities are and tell that story to our policymakers and our delegations that are here in Durban and to keep with that message when we go back home,” he said.

Empowering Young African Women

Agbarakwe became interested in these issues after meeting former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, who also spoke at the side event. “I had met a Nigerian young man who challenged me that it was difficult for a woman to realize her career dreams because one day she will have to be married and bear children,” said Agbarakwe:

When I saw my passion, I was confused and asked questions of Robinson on what she would do if she found herself at the crossroads like me. She told me as a young woman, I will find myself at a crossroad. That is why I am very determined about this issue, and that is what is needed, because when young women are empowered they actually can make decisions.

Robinson, the chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, said in an interview that she was heartened to see the number of youth at the side event. In Durban, she spoke with a group of young women who were part of Oxfam’s Project Empower:

We met young women and several of them had come from the Eastern Cape [of South Africa]. They had come to Durban to look for work. Instead they found themselves in rural poverty. They had dreams of a better life for themselves, but their daily reality they talked to us about was nobody’s dream. They talked to us about negative impacts of their communities – the violence against women that is very prevalent, the unplanned pregnancies, and the reality of women who even have to use their bodies to gain money.

The good thing was that they were ready to talk about the problems and did not consider themselves to be victims. They were strong women. They had learned to say ‘no’ and to say ‘respect me.’ They talked about going into some of the clinics and facing encounters with the police and that the police did not respect them. ‘We do not accept that anymore. We know now that we are members of the community who wish to be respected,’ they explained.

African women are looking for contraceptives, such as the female condom, where they can be in control, said Robinson; there are about 215 million women in the world who do not want to get pregnant but are not using modern contraception. “If we were to solve that problem, women [would not only] be better mothers, but also be better leaders in their communities,” she said.

Brenda Zulu is a member of Women's Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the "From Durban" series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.

Sources: Population Action International, World Health Organization.

Photo Credit: "Viet Nam and Primary Education," courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo; video courtesy of Population Action International.

Reading Radar: Sanitation and Water MDGs in the Middle East and North Africa: Missing the Target?

2011-12-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Goal 7, Target 10 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.” The Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), established by the UN to monitor progress towards this goal, has twice concluded (in 2008 and 2010) that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are in good shape to meet this target. However, a new article in Development and Change, “The Politics of Assessment: Water and Sanitation MDGs in the Middle East,” by Neda Zawahri, Jeannie Sowers, and Erika Weinthal, argues that the JMP’s “reliance on classifying ‘improved’ and ‘unimproved’ water and sanitation infrastructure, through infrequent household surveys, has produced misleading assessments that fail to capture the extensive water quality and sanitation problems plaguing the MENA.”

The authors compared the findings of the JMP with a variety of data sources – participatory assessments, reports from other UN agencies, donor projects, domestic ministries and agencies, and academic research – and found major contradictions between the progress reported by the JMP and the situation on the ground. In one example, the authors write that “while the JMP considers piped household water as an improvement in water coverage, it fails to differentiate between ‘full’ coverage and ‘partial’ coverage, that is, household water supplies available only a few hours a week.” And the authors point out that according to UN-Habitat, “the availability of piped water does not necessarily translate into safe drinking water, as water may become contaminated before it reaches the tap.”

As a result of the weakness of the indicators used by the JMP, household surveys conducted by the JMP in the MENA region “[do] not adequately capture the quality of drinking water,” the authors write, and efforts to address this inadequacy through more comprehensive testing of municipal water samples were deemed “too complex to be routinely employed through the world” and “prohibitively expensive.”

“International organizations and national leaderships in the MENA lack substantial incentives to adopt more accurate assessments for safe water and sanitation,” Zawahri et al. conclude. The need to generate comparable data across time and space has trumped the importance of “gauging access, quality, and affordability of water and sanitation.”

PHE Champions Bring Their Experiences From the Field to the International Family Planning Conference in Senegal Jason Bremner, Behind the Numbers

2011-12-08T13:59:00.002-05:00

The original version of this article, by Jason Bremner, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

This past week at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning, four practitioners from the field traveled from remote parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Tanzania to Dakar, Senegal, to share their successes and challenges in reaching remote communities with an integrated package of health, livelihood, and environment services. Together they made up the panel, “Reaching the Hardly Reached: Delivering Family Planning Through Population, Health, and Environment Integration.”

The panelists came from four environmental organizations whose starting point for working in these remote places was the protection of the biodiversity and natural resources upon which all life depends. Dr. Vik Mohan, physician and medical director for Blue Ventures, talked about how he and his organization transitioned from focusing initially on the conservation of coastal marine reserves and coral reefs to now working to improve health care, including access to family planning.

Blue Ventures, in response to community and women’s needs, opened a family planning clinic, and on the opening day, 20 percent of the women of reproductive age in the community came out to request contraceptives. Today they offer a whole spectrum of short- and long-acting contraceptive methods through partnerships with Marie Stopes International, Population Services International, and various funders. Blue Ventures reported that contraceptive prevalence had risen from 8 percent when they began in 2007 to 35 percent today.

Continue reading on Behind the Numbers.

Photo used with permission courtesy of PRB. Left to right: Didier Mazongo, WWF; Vik Mohan, Blue Ventures; Baraka Kalangahe, Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership; and Jason Bremner, PRB.

From Durban: New UNEP Climate Report Says Women Face “Disproportionately High Risks” Brenda Zulu for the Wilson Center

2011-12-08T09:00:00.001-05:00

A new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Women at the Frontline of Climate Change: Gender Risks and Hopes, released at COP-17, says that women, particularly those living in mountainous regions in developing countries, “face disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from climate change, as well as associated risks such as human trafficking.”

Droughts, floods, and mudslides are affecting a growing number of people worldwide, in part because of climate change, but also because population growth is highest in some of the most vulnerable areas of the world. For example, in the 10 years from 1998-2008, floods affected one billion people in Asia, but only four million people in Europe.

According to UNEP, women often bear the brunt of such disasters: “In parts of Asia and Africa, where the majority of the agricultural workforce are female, the impacts of such disasters have a major impact on women’s income, food security, and health,” as they are responsible for about 65 percent of household food production in Asia and 75 percent in Africa. In addition, they are often more likely than men to lose their lives during natural disasters.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a press release that “women often play a stronger role than men in the management of ecosystem services and food security. Hence, sustainable adaptation must focus on gender and the role of women if it is to become successful.”

“Women’s voices, responsibilities, and knowledge on the environment and the challenges they face will need to be made a central part of governments’ adaptive responses to a rapidly changing climate,” he added.

Investing in low-carbon, resource-efficient green technologies, water harvesting, and alternatives to firewood could strengthen climate change adaptation and improve women’s livelihoods, says UNEP.

“If Insufficient, Family Planning Funds Should Be Scaled Up”

UNEP spokesperson Nick Nuttall said in an interview that there are wide differences between how people consume natural resources, with North Americans and Europeans consuming far more than someone in a developing country. We should move toward more efficient use of natural resources, make the transition to a low-carbon economy, and scale up renewable energies, which can reduce demand for fossil fuels to meet economic growth and population increases, he said.

Asked whether climate change funds should therefore support family planning, Nuttall said the UN supports the right of couples and women to choose the size of their families and that many UN agencies and NGOs provide that support already.

But, he said, “there are funds available for family planning and, if insufficient, they should be scaled up to meet the demands and requests of developing countries. Given that this is an issue far wider than climate change, these existing funding streams should be where the financial support comes, rather than from a climate fund.”

Brenda Zulu is a member of Women's Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the "From Durban" series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.

Sources: UNEP.

Image Credit: "Climate change vulnerability," courtesy of Riccardo Pravettoni, UNEP/GRID-Arendal.

On the Beat: Watch Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard on Covering the Evolving Environment and Reproductive Rights Beat

2011-12-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

“My author bio says I cover energy, environment, and reproductive rights,” said Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones in an interview with ECSP. “One of the biggest challenges in covering that beat is even just articulating what that means.”

Fundamentally, Sheppard said she is interested in covering how policy decisions shape the future, which involves examining the intersections between these key issues. She spoke at a November 1 Wilson Center event on the challenges of reporting on population and environment, especially this year, when a great deal of media covered the world population reaching seven billion.

Sheppard is currently reporting on adaptation to climate change, looking at how human societies are responding to the changes that they are already experiencing, whether it be changes in migration patterns, resource availability, or food security. “I’m seeing this as a really ripe area where these things intersect, when we are talking about just how many people we are going to have in the future, and where they are going to be, and whether we can meet their needs in a society that is constantly changing,” she said.

Energy is another important area of intersection, said Sheppard. Access to energy is critical to ensuring a better future for the world’s inhabitants, but policy decisions must also take into account the fact that our fossil fuel resources are finite, she said. “We need to start thinking about ways we are going to do this sustainably for the world population in the future.”

From Durban: African Women, Most Vulnerable to Climate Change, Are Agents of Change Brenda Zulu for the Wilson Center

2011-12-06T14:10:00.001-05:00

From Population Action International's Weathering Change – Fatima's Story.

It is the poorest people whose lives are most undermined by changes in the weather, said Chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health Mary Robinson at a side event on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet” during COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. “When farmers don’t know how to predict the seasons, when there is more flooding than there was, when there are longer periods of drought and then flash flooding,” she said, people need more resilience. “They have to be even stronger in being able to cope with the drought and flooding.”

“In the past, February and March were planting months, while June and July were harvest months in the first season,” explained Constance Okollet, chairperson of the Osukura United Women Network in eastern Uganda, in an interview. “The second season started in August and September as planting months, but now we don’t have any seasons anymore.”

Okollet said that since 2007, there have been floods in her area that have destroyed homes and fields and forced some to leave their homes. “I actually had to leave when the floods destroyed my house and when I went back there was nothing; and immediately after that there was a drought after planting,” she said.

“These days we gamble with agriculture, as we are not sure when to plant. What we see now is, if it is not torrential rains, then it is a storm. During the rainy season, you find a lot of winds. We never used to see them and now we have mudslides, which are occurring every year. With heavy rains it has been difficult for people to dry cassava and groundnuts. Last month, I lost two fields of groundnuts because the rain has been very heavy,” Okollet said. “In the community, we used to harvest heavily, but it is not the same anymore.”

African women are often particularly vulnerable to such environmental disruptions. Okollet pointed out that women walk long distances to look for water and feed children before they go to school. “Women always eat little and leave the rest for their children,” she said. “Children are sick and there is a lot of death in the village because of hunger and lack of food security.”

Water-borne diseases, such as cholera, erupt after floods contaminate the water, and getting health care can be difficult for women because the health center is very far away.

Okollet said that when all this was happening, she and her fellow network members thought that maybe God was punishing them. “We only knew what was happening when Oxfam talked to us about climate change,” she said.

The Osukura United Women Network has asked the Ugandan government for help supplying early-maturing crops that will adapt to the seasonal change. The group is working to sensitize their community to the importance of hygiene and sanitation as well as working with men in the community to build wells and latrines.

“We need women to be agents of change in their local communities,” said Robinson.

Brenda Zulu is a member of Women's Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the "From Durban" series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.

Video Credit: "Fatima's Story - Weathering Change Extra," courtesy of vimeo user Population Action International.

From Durban: Gender, Family Planning Should Be Part of Climate Discussions, Says Mary Robinson Brenda Zulu for the Wilson Center

2011-12-06T11:42:00.008-05:00

Speaking at a side event on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet” in Durban, South Africa, Mary Robinson, chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health, said they were seeing more female leadership at this year’s UN climate change conference (COP-17).

But Robinson, who is also chair of the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice, said there needs to be more explicit gender language in the COP-17 text to ensure that green climate funds support gender equity and money gets to women on the ground for adaptation.

“Our foundation has been helping to bring out women’s leadership at the top level in this conference to match women’s leadership at the community level,” explained Robinson, pointing out that the heads of the last three COPs are women.

Though the role of gender in climate adaptation and mitigation will likely not be prominently discussed on the floor at COP-17, Robinson said she looked forward to side conversations about a stronger focus on these issues.

Family planning, she argued, should also play a larger role. “There have been so many attempts to deflect from commitments and get into other kinds of issues that bring about some kind of stigma in this area,” said Robinson. But “those of us on the Global Leaders Council on Reproductive Health fundamentally believe in the central role played by reproductive health, access to knowledge about how to space children, and having choices about number of children.”

There are about 215 million women in the world who do not want to get pregnant but are not using modern contraception. Family planning and reproductive health services help build up a woman’s resilience to climate changes, Robinson explained.

These services are vital to improving women’s health and enable women to seek educational and work opportunities, unleashing their potential to help solve problems associated with climate change.

Brenda Zulu is a member of Women's Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the "From Durban" series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.

Sources: World Health Organization.

Image Credit: "Mary Robinson and Constance Okollet" at COP-17, used with permission courtesy of the Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice (MRFCJ).

Compromise Is Hard: The Problems and Promise of REDD+ Susanna Murley for The Huffington Post

2011-12-06T09:55:00.001-05:00

The original version of this article, by Susanna Murley, appeared on The Huffington Post.

In Durban this week delegates from around the world are examining the options to mitigate carbon emissions. What looks like the best chance for progress? REDD+ (for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, plus co-benefits – like conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks). REDD+ has been seen as a potentially powerful solution to solve both poverty and deforestation – in one fell swoop.

How does it work? Essentially, these programs would be funded by developed nations to help pay for community forestry projects in developing countries, if the communities can demonstrate – with verifiable data – that their efforts are saving forests that would have been destroyed or if they are planting trees that would permanently sequester carbon.

Will this work? Many other systems have tried and failed to reduce deforestation. In Indonesia, where an area of forest about the size of Nevada has been destroyed since 1990, activists have participated in demonstrations, legal actions, blockades and destruction of property to protest timber production. Many international NGOs have joined them in their campaigns against the forestry practices in Indonesia, releasing report after report on the "State of the Forest." The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have attempted to regulate forestry as conditions of their loans. None of it worked, and Indonesia continues to see massive amounts of illegal logging and deforestation.

Continue reading on The Huffington Post.

Sources: Center for International Forestry Research, Gellert (2010), MongaBay.com

Photo Credit: "Oil palm plantation," courtesy of flickr user CIFOR (Ryan Woo).

From the Wilson Center: Addressing Gender-Based Violence Across Humanitarian Development in Haiti

2011-12-05T09:28:00.001-05:00

Women and girls living in displacement camps in post-earthquake Haiti are “the most vulnerable of a very vulnerable population,” according to Amanda Klasing, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. Klasing was joined by Leora Ward, technical advisor for women's protection and empowerment at International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Emily Jacobi, executive director of Digital Democracy, for a November 15 panel discussion at the Wilson Center on gender-based violence in Haiti. “Unless we address the violence – the actual experience of violence that women and girls continue to experience at very high rates in Haiti – we [aren’t] going to be able to create a general environment for women and girls to participate in the rebuilding of their country,” Ward said.

Women More Vulnerable After Natural Disasters

“There is a history and a context for sexual violence in Haiti,” Klasing said. “The earthquake didn’t happen in a bubble.” A study published in The Lancet found that approximately 35,000 women in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area were victims of sexual assault in the 22 months following the 2004 departure of President Aristide. According to Klasing, sexual violence was historically widely used as a tool for political repression in Haiti, including by security forces during the 1991-94 military regime and under dictator “Baby Doc” Jean-Claude Duvalier.

During and in the aftermath of natural disasters, IRC has found that women are more likely to die than men; are at increased risk of violence; are more vulnerable to lapses in access to health care; and will experience ongoing economic vulnerability, said Ward. “Disasters break down social networks and systems that help protect women and girls,” she said.

While the data on the rate of gender-based violence after Haiti’s earthquake is lacking, “individual vulnerability for gender-based violence has increased, and so the concern, and the response, should reflect that,” Klasing said.

Unfortunately, humanitarian workers rarely undertake measures to respond to sexual violence at the beginning, according to Ward. “Crucial protection systems and response services are typically implemented long after the initial days of the crisis,” she said. “The humanitarian community typically prioritizes food aid, healthcare, water and sanitation services, and shelter from the onset of a response to a natural disaster, often preferring to wait until later to address the issue of sexual violence in an emergency.”

Using Technology To Amplify Women’s Voices

Digital Democracy was formed in 2008 to use technology to enhance civic participation and democratic engagement. The staff already in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck became very involved in the technology community’s immediate response, said Jacobi. “Our focus…led us to start working with women specifically, because we felt like they were being just further marginalized and made vulnerable by the disaster relief process,” she said.

Sixty-seven percent of the women in the displacement camps have mobile phones, said Jacobi. Even without access to electricity and other basic needs, women were finding ways to charge their phones and to use those tools to communicate after the disaster, she said.

Digital Democracy helped Haitian NGO KOFAVIV (the Commission of Women Victims for Victims) to incorporate technology into their efforts to provide services and support to victims of sexual violence. They used free, open-source software, such as Frontline SMS and Ushahidi, to facilitate communication and track incidents of gender-based violence. In August, they launched a call center where women can report rapes, access information, and find services.

“The idea of a helpline isn’t very innovative,” Jacobi said, but in Haiti, services like 911 or crisis helplines did not exist. “It is innovative for this group of women to choose to put their resources, and their time, and their energy to trying to reach beyond their current network…to try and reach actually a much wider network in a way technology can do better, than simply sending out women to every single camp.”

Long-Term Funding, Focus on Women Needed

However, despite renewed attention to Haiti, the sustained success of these programs is in question. “Long-term funding for prevention and service provision is a problem--a huge problem--and we are talking about an issue that cannot be resolved in one year, in two years,” said Ward. “Again, [sexual violence] existed before the earthquake, and it has even gotten worse. And funding, I think, cannot be ignored as a critical piece.”

“The perspective of women has not necessarily been taken into account in post-earthquake Haiti, either in the recovery, or in the reconstruction,” added Klasing. “I think that is a challenge for the international community – how are we going to get these women and girls into the process?”

Nevertheless, although the rate of gender-based violence isn’t necessarily decreasing yet, “we are seeing a real building up of resistance networks, and networks of men and women working to combat these challenges,” said Jacobi.

Event Resources
Emily Jacobi presentation
Amanda Klasing presentation
Leora Ward presentation
Photo gallery
Video
Image credit: Survivors Connect.

Beat on the Ground: New Population, Health, and Environment Program for Lake Victoria

2011-12-02T16:03:00.002-05:00

With some of Africa’s highest population densities, ethnic diversity, and biodiversity, the Great Lakes region is one of the most volatile intersections of human development and the environment. A new population, health, and environment (PHE) initiative from Pathfinder International, announced Monday at the International Conference on Family Planning in Senegal, aims to help address these issues by supporting sustainable resource management and women’s right to choose when and how often they have children.

Jointly funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, with additional support from USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, the project will focus on Ugandan and Kenyan sections of the Lake Victoria basin.

Lake Victoria is the second largest freshwater source in the world, a biodiversity hotspot, and an important regional waterway, but a population growth rate among the highest in Africa and economic development have led to declining water quality, reduced fish stocks, and industrial pollution. The basin as a whole supports upwards of 35 million people.

“This new project is a welcome development for many reasons,” said ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko. “It brings the integrated PHE approach to one of the world’s greatest lakes, it enables respected health NGO Pathfinder to pursue PHE efforts, and marks the return of a leading private donor, the MacArthur Foundation, to a group of foundations willing to support this innovative approach.”

Sono Aibe, senior advisor for strategic initiatives at Pathfinder emphasized the integrated challenges facing the region. “In these remote, resource dependent areas of the world, the interconnectedness between the health of people and the health of the environment is undeniable,” she said in a press release. “When women are empowered to participate in the sustainable management of natural resources alongside men and youth, as well as have access to sexual and reproductive health care services, their lives will improve and so will the condition of the ecosystems that they depend on.”

The project’s objective, according to Pathfinder, is to reduce threats to biodiversity, conservation, and ecosystem degradation by increasing access to family planning and sexual/reproductive health services. The project plans to develop scalable approaches that can be adopted by communities, local governments, and national governments. Technical support is to be provided by the BALANCED Project, ExpandNet, and the Population Reference Bureau.

“Lessons learned from this new project will help us better develop and design projects for vulnerable communities in fragile ecosystems, while simultaneously advocating for increased government support for integrated programs throughout the Lake Victoria Basin,” said Lucy Shillingi, Pathfinder’s country representative for Uganda.

The Lake Victoria effort will build upon the experiences of other integrated PHE efforts in the region, such as Rwanda’s SPREAD Project, Uganda’s Conservation Through Public Health, and Tanzania’s TACARE and Coastal Management Partnership.

Sources: Lake Victoria Basin Commission, Pathfinder International, UNEP.

At Family Planning Plenary, Youth’s Messages Captivate Audience Sarah Lindsay, Ministerial Leadership Initiative

2011-12-02T12:00:00.002-05:00

The original version of this article, by Sarah Lindsay, appeared on the Ministerial Leadership Initiative’s Leading Global Health blog.

With more than 2,200 family planning policymakers, researchers, and advocates watching the opening plenary of the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) – including some in seaside tents outfitted with big-screen TVs – two youth leaders captivated the audience.

The featured speakers included international dignitaries, headlined by the president of Senegal, but the younger leaders made a dramatic plea with an adamant demand: involve youth in family planning decision making.

As many family planning advocates say, family planning can improve the lives of future generations. Based on this argument, the youth leaders said they should be fully included in the discussions in making policy, and not have policymakers make decisions for them.

Both speakers, Saudou Node and Mohammed Barry, expressed disappointment that more has not been done to ensure universal access to family planning. Node told the plenary that projects and policies created to increase family planning access often never make it to the field.

Continue reading on Leading Global Health. For more on ICFP 2011, see Sarah's full series of posts.

Beat on the Ground: Reaching Rural Rwandans With Integrated Health and Livelihood Messages Jeanne Nyirakamana, PHE Champion

2011-12-02T09:00:00.002-05:00

This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.

Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, with more than 11 million people in one of Africa’s smallest countries, most of whom depend on the land as subsistence farmers. The country has diverse mountain, lake, and savannah landscapes, and the Virunga Mountain chain in the northwest part of the country is home to one-third of the world’s threatened mountain gorilla population. At the same time, the population throughout the country suffers from high rates of unmet need for contraception, and three percent of the adult population lives with HIV/AIDS. In a land under such intense pressure on natural resources, rural livelihood initiatives are critical to ensuring people have options for meeting their daily health and well-being needs.

For the past three years, Jeanne Nyirakamana has served as head of the health program for the Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD) Project. Supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development through Texas A&M University, the SPREAD Project is integrating a dynamic coffee production and quality improvement program in Rwanda with health outreach to improve community well-being. The health component works to improve the lives of coffee farmers and cooperative members by providing them with health information and services related to family planning, maternal and child health, prevention of sexually-transmitted infections (including HIV), and water and sanitation.

Training Peer Educators

Working closely with the coffee program, Nyirakamana’s team has trained more than 540 men, women, and youth peer educators who have reached more than 95,000 coffee farmers with education and services. Key communication messages highlight the links between sound decision-making and health-seeking behaviors, productive farms and agribusinesses, and strong and healthy families.

The program also leverages and supports local health resources through referrals to existing public health services, organization of mobile clinics, and community-based distribution of a socially marketed water purification solution (Sur Eau) and condoms (Prudence). According to Nyirakamana, one of the project’s greatest successes is the increased acceptance of family planning by farmers and their families and the more than 7,500 farmers who have been tested for HIV. In order to draw in as many coffee farmers as possible, many of the health and livelihood activities take place at the stations where the coffee beans are washed, at other buildings used by the coffee farmer cooperative, or during combined community meetings or home visits. At the washing stations, Nyirakamana’s team supports local health center staff to provide voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) and de-worming services while at the same time SPREAD-trained peer educators and coffee/health extension agents disseminate family planning information.

The cooperatives’ buildings have clean water, hand-washing stations, and small kiosks where condoms and Sur Eau are sold. These community health agents work with SPREAD to ensure that the greater community, not just the coffee farmers, has access to health knowledge and services. They learn how to teach the community about a range of health issues and each month they submit reports showing how many people they reached and with what kinds of messages. They are also becoming increasingly engaged in coffee and agribusiness activities. Through the success of their health activities, these agents are seen as vital community resources.

Integrated Results

By implementing this integrated population, health and environment (PHE) approach, the SPREAD Project staff is ensuring the health of the people and environment and success of the agribusiness. “You cannot care for the environment without first caring for the people who live and use that environment, so when you transmit dual messages [agriculture and health] you are able to hit two birds with one stone,” said Nyirakamana.

According to a 2010 evaluation of the project, farmers and their families reported improvements in personal and household hygiene; an increase in understanding and acceptance of family planning; uptake of HIV and VCT services; and use of condoms and other local health services. As well, they noted shifts in gender norms affecting household revenue use, alcohol, and reproductive health. The agribusiness stakeholders value the integrated approach as a means to more holistically meet farmers’ goals of increased incomes and improved lives and livelihoods.

This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project. A PDF version can be downloaded from the PHE Toolkit. PHE Champion profiles highlight people working on the ground to improve health and conservation in areas where biodiversity is critically endangered.

Photo Credit: BALANCED Project.

What You Are Reading: Top 10 Posts for November 2011

2011-12-01T09:38:00.004-05:00

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko’s look at seven ways seven billion people affect the planet led the top 10 last month (by unique page views), followed by a number of posts on trends: visualizations of population, health, and climate trends; what El Niño and conflict patterns say about the relationship between the two; the policy decisions that led to a commitment to family planning in Rwanda; and the effects of global population on “peak water.” Captain Wayne Porter and Colonel Mark Mykleby’s new national security narrative presentation at the Wilson Center also remained popular, and a new guest contributor, American University student Olimar Maisonet-Guzman, joined the list for the first time:

1. Seven Ways Seven Billion People Affect the Planet

2. India’s Maoists: South Asia’s “Other” Insurgency

3. Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us

4. Eye On: STATcompiler: Visualizing Population and Health Trends

5. Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions

6. Eye On: Twin Challenges: Population and Climate Change in 2050

7. El Niño, Conflict, and Environmental Determinism: Assessing Climate’s Links to Instability

8. Building Commitment to Family Planning: Rwanda

9. In Search of a New Security Narrative: The National Conversation Series Launches at the Wilson Center

10. Guest Contributor Olimar Maisonet-Guzman: Bring the Water-Energy Nexus to Rio+20

Book Preview: In War and Conflict in Africa, GWU Scholar Skeptical That Natural Resources Play a Leading Role Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, Wilson Center

2011-11-30T09:13:00.003-05:00

While there is widespread agreement that the incidence of conflict in Africa is high, scholars and development agencies alike debate its driving forces and how to move toward solutions. Paul Williams, associate professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University and collaborator with the Wilson Center’s Africa Program, recently published a book that aims to both quantify African conflicts and devise a framework of their causes. In War and Conflict in Africa, Williams evaluates which factors explain the frequency of conflict in Africa during the post-Cold War era and how the international community has tried to build peace and prevent future conflict.

Although there have been promising trends toward establishing peace and democracy in some African countries, the continent still accounts for about one-third of all armed conflicts annually – more than Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas combined. International responses to these events range from focused humanitarian and conflict resolution efforts, to new regional organizations and global strategic and defense partnerships.

Seven of the 16 current UN peacekeeping missions operate in Africa, more than any other continent. The UK government has elected to spend nearly one-third of its development assistance in conflict-affected areas, and more than half of its “focus” countries are in Africa. In 2008, the Department of Defense created the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), whose commander, General Carter Ham, in a speech to Congress earlier this year, described “an insidious cycle of instability, conflict, environmental degradation, and disease that erodes confidence in national institutions and governing capacity,” as motivation for American military attention. “This in turn often creates the conditions for the emergence of a wide range of transnational security threats,” he said.

Evaluating the Ingredients of Conflict

Williams rejects earlier theses that attribute conflict across the continent to a single factor, such as the boundary legacies of colonialism, greed, or ethnicity. Instead, he characterizes African conflicts as “recipes” composed of case-specific mixes of factors, many of which are underlying and only some of which are sufficient triggers for conflict. “Collier is wrong,” Williams explained in an email interview. “Governance structures are always an important part of the buildup to war.”

Lou Rios and Amy Krakowka on teaching environment and security at West Point.

Five “ingredients” of conflict are examined in-depth: neo-patrimonial governance structures; natural and human resources; sovereignty and self-determination; ethnicity; and religion. Among these, the book presents a fairly skeptical view of resources, ethnicity, and religion as immediate drivers of conflict. This assessment that environmental and identity issues are not sufficient to generate conflict on their own aligns with the book’s overarching argument: The decisions of political actors can instigate conflict or motivate peace from virtually any context, manipulating factors such as ethnicity and religion for their own advantage.

Effects of Natural Resources Are “Open-Ended”

A widely publicized thread of peace and conflict studies posits that resources, either when scarce or abundant, have an important role in triggering wars. A 2009 UN Environment Programme report found that 40 percent of all internal conflicts since 1950 “have a link to natural resources.” Recent peer-reviewed research has suggested that certain environmental changes increase the likelihood of civil conflicts or are directly responsible for it. Yet the question remains a source of much debate. For his part, Williams asserts that natural resources alone are insufficient to cause conflict.

War and Conflict in Africa presents several reasons that researchers and policymakers should avoid linking resources directly to conflict without considering the influence of intervening factors. Chief among them is that the value of any resource is socially constructed – no stone or river carries worth until humans decide so. Therefore, Williams argues that “it is political systems, not resources per se, that are the crucial factor in elevating the risk of armed conflict.”

The book suggests that two extant theories successfully demonstrate the connection between resources and conflict. The first body of research finds that conflict is more likely in regions that face a combination of resource abundance and a high degree of social deprivation. The second theory suggests that the link between resources and conflict lies in bad governance, whether exploitative or unstable. Both theories have explanatory power for Williams’s central line of thinking: Resources can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on leadership.

“Inserted into a context where corrupt autocrats have the advantage, resources will strengthen their hand and generate grievances,” he writes (p. 93). “Inserted into a stable democratic system, they will enhance the opportunities for leaders to promote national prosperity.”

Population and the Environment

Williams does accede that particular resource factors – land and demography, for example – may play a more significant role than others in conflict, but calls for more research. In a brief discussion of population age structure, the book suggests that there is no single relationship between demography and conflict but multiple ways that the two can relate. Williams mentions the theory that “large pools of disaffected youth” with few opportunities can raise the risk of volatility. However, he then notes other research showing that the most marginalized members of certain African societies are less likely to participate in political protests and more likely to tolerate authoritarian rule than those who are better off.

“The most marginalized from society are the truly destitute without patrons and suffering from severe poverty. They may well be inclined to join an insurgency movement once it begins to snowball but they will not usually play a key role in establishing the rebel group in the first place,” Williams said. However, “any time there are large pools of poor and unemployed youth there is the potential for leaders to manipulate them.”

On environmental resources, the book argues that land should be a central feature of quantitative research on the relationship between resources and conflict. Most African economies continue to rely on agriculture, and Williams observes that land has been “at the heart” of many conflicts in the region through a variety of governance-related mechanisms relating to its management and control. He places less emphasis on water scarcity as a potential factor in conflict, noting that the 145 water-related treaties signed around the world in the past decade auger well for cooperation rather than competition.

Williams is also dubious of emerging arguments that climate change could directly increase the incidence of conflict, either through changing weather patterns or climate-induced migration.

“Because armed conflicts are, by definition, the result of groups choosing to fight one another, any process, including climate change, can never be a sufficient condition for armed conflict to occur,” he argued. “Armed conflicts result from the conscious decisions of actors which might be informed by the weather but are never simply caused by it.”

No Simple Formula

Williams is not the only observer to find the narrative that resource shortage (or abundance) precipitates conflict too simplistic. His message to policymakers is a common refrain from academics and analysts seeking to counteract policymakers’ quest for simple formulas: We need more data.

“When deciding how to spend our money, we need to spend more of it on developing systems which deliver accurate knowledge about what is happening on the ground, often in very localized settings,” Williams said. War and Conflict in Africa contributes to a more complex understanding of the political actors and systems that catalyze or prevent conflict and offers a cautionary tale to those who seek only proven, easy predictions.

Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International. Full disclosure: She was a graduate student of Paul Williams’ in 2007.

Sources: DFID, Englebert and Ron (2004), Ham (2011), Hsiang et al (2011), Kahl (1998), Leysens (2006),Østby et al (2009), Radelet (2010), Themnér and Wallensteen (2011), UNEP (2009), UN Peacekeeping, Williams (2011)

Image Credit: Conflicts in Africa 2000-09, reprinted with permission courtesy of P.D. Williams, War and Conflict in Africa (Williams, 2011), p.3.

You Are Invited, November, 30 2011: Aiding Without Abetting: Making Civilian Assistance to Pakistan Work for Both Sides

2011-11-29T09:47:00.000-05:00

Asia Program, Environmental Change and Security Program
Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
6th Floor Auditorium
Agenda Directions Webcast

Jonah Blank, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Mirza Jahani, Chief Executive Officer, Aga Khan Foundation USA
Polly Nayak, Chair, Woodrow Wilson Center Working Group on Pakistan
Robert M. Hathaway, Director, Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson Center
Jane Harman, Director, President, and CEO, Woodrow Wilson Center

More than two years after President Obama signed the Kerry-Lugar-Berman (KLB) Act into law, the U.S. civilian assistance program to Pakistan is under fire in both countries. Many are prepared to deem it a failure. What can be done to salvage KLB? This event marks the release of a major new report on U.S. civilian assistance, the culmination of the year-long deliberations of a Wilson Center working group convened to reevaluate the aid program.

If you are interested, but unable to attend the event, please tune into the live or archived webcast.

Location: Woodrow Wilson Center at the Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington DC, USA ("Federal Triangle" stop on Blue/Orange Line), 6th floor auditorium. A map to the Center is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/directions. Note: Due to heightened security, entrance to the building will be restricted and photo identification is required. Please allow additional time to pass through security.

Guest Contributor Ivonne Baki: The Yasuní-ITT Initiative Is a Practical Climate Solution That Must Be Embraced at Durban

2011-11-28T09:00:00.010-05:00

As the world turns to Durban, South Africa, for this year’s UN climate summit, new findings are turning up the heat on the urgency to address climate change. The reality though is that we no longer have the luxury of resting our hopes solely on an internationally binding climate agreement; we must begin to look more closely at supporting immediate and tangible solutions. By complementing a global top-down effort of continued international negotiations with bottom-up approaches, we increase our chances at mitigating the most damaging effects of climate change. One of the most innovative models of such a bottom-up approach is the Yasuní-ITT Initiative being undertaken by the Government of Ecuador and supported by the UN Development Programme’s Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office).

The Yasuní-ITT Initiative prevents a significant output of carbon dioxide while preserving biodiversity and indigenous rights by keeping the petroleum industry permanently out of the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil fields, located predominantly within Ecuador's Yasuní National Park. In exchange, Ecuador is compensated, through a voluntary international fund, for a fraction of the oil’s value, which goes towards funding renewable energy projects and sustainable development – a true intersection of environmental security issues.

The initiative may serve as a model for developing counties seeking to shift away from carbon-laden industrialization towards renewable energy matrices and needs to be seriously debated at Durban. But this first-of-its-kind program needs more support from the international community in order to make the loss of oil revenues politically viable.

The Yasuní-ITT Initiative

The ITT oil fields, deep within the Ecuadorian Amazon, hold 846 million proven barrels of heavy crude oil, accounting for 20 percent of Ecuador’s proven reserves. But these fields are located beneath one of the most biodiverse spots in the Western hemisphere.

In April 2007, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa stated that his administration’s preferred option for the ITT was to leave the oil permanently beneath Yasuní National Park in exchange for partial compensation from the international community of forgone revenue. Ecuador officially launched the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in June 2007. The primary goals of the initiative, codified in President Correa’s address at the UN General Assembly in 2007, are to respect the territory of indigenous peoples, particularly of those who choose to live in voluntary isolation; protect the park and its biodiversity; and mitigate climate change by keeping 407 million metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Dr. Eric Chivian, founder and director of Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment on Yasuní's biodiversity.

To support the innovative initiative, the Government of Ecuador, with the support of the UNDP, established the Yasuní-ITT Trust Fund in August 2010. Administered by the MPTF Office, the fund’s objectives are to raise half of the expected oil revenues (in 2010 prices) and channel contributions into two windows. The first window’s objectives are to help finance renewable energy projects (hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, biomass, and tidal plants) to offset the presumed loss of power production. The second’s objectives are to fund sustainable development programs (conservation, reforestation, energy efficiency, social programs, and research). In exchange for these contributions, the fund provides certificates of guarantee ensuring that “the crude [would] stay, in an indefinite manner, below ground.”

Crowd Funding for Yasuní: Time Is of the Essence

When the fund was established, the UNDP and the Government of Ecuador set a goal of raising $100 million in contributions by December 2011 to test the viability and international support of the initiative. At a high-level meeting on the Yasuní-ITT Initiative during the UN General Assembly this September, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and President Rafael Correa announced $52.9 million in contributions from Italy, Australia, Turkey, Colombia, and Peru, amongst others, but the outstanding balance of sought-after contributions remains unmatched. Next month, there will be a complete review, at which point if the sought-after contributions are not received, it will become increasingly more difficult to maintain a policy of non-extraction in Quito.

Given the position of petroleum in its economy, Ecuador is willing to make a tremendous financial sacrifice by supporting this initiative. Petroleum accounts for nearly half of all of Ecuador’s exports and one-third of tax revenues. According to a study by Carlos Larrea of the Simon Bolivar Andean University, Ecuador would receive around $7.25 billion in revenues if the oil were extracted (that estimate, however, was based on the benchmark price of $76.38/barrel of WTI crude, which hovered around $96/barrel this week). The Ecuadorian government seeks half of the expected 2010 oil revenues and will foot the rest. GDP per capita was $4,290 in 2010. Over a third of the country’s population – 36 percent – live below the poverty line. Despite all of this, there is strong domestic support for the initiative. Of the 63.4 percent of Ecuadorians polled last month who knew of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, 83.4 percent supported the initiative. Just this past weekend, Ecuadorian citizens donated over $2 million to the initiative during a civic campaign.

Carbon Mitigation, Biodiversity Protection, and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Global carbon dioxide output in 2010 grew by 564 million tons more than in 2009 – an increase of almost six percent. At these levels of output, the IPCC has forecasted temperature rise between 4°F and 11°F by the end of century, the median figure of 7.5°F being the best estimate. By not extracting the oil underneath the ITT block, the world would avoid the release of an additional 407 million metric tons of CO2. If last year’s increased output pushed global temperature rise into worst case scenarios for this century, imagine adding the CO2 output from Yasuní’s petroleum?

There is more to the Yasuní-ITT Initiative than merely mitigating climate change though; it is also about protecting valuable species diversity. The Yasuní National Park benefited from being a refuge during the Pleistocene Era – it was one of three places in the Amazon that did not freeze over during the Ice Age. According to a 2010 study in the science journal PLoS One, a typical hectare (2.54 acres) of forest in Yasuní contains upwards of 655 tree species – more than is native to the continental United States and Canada combined – as well as 100,000 species of insects. One section of the park holds at least 200 species of mammals, 247 amphibian and reptile species, and 550 species of birds, making Yasuní National Park one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

This incredible biodiversity also holds the potential for scientific and medical breakthroughs. “Yasuní’s enormous biodiversity will lead to new medicines and medical-research models to treat human diseases and relieve human suffering,” says Founder and Director of Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment and Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Dr. Eric Chivian. “If the Yasuní is destroyed we may lose those species of amphibians that contain painkillers that are better than any we have and that contain antibiotics that will prevent the crisis of antibiotic resistance that is coming down the pike,” he warns (see video above).

On top of these issues is Ecuador’s commitment to its indigenous population. Ecuador has realized that indigenous rights cannot be secured without simultaneously ensuring environmental protection. Two relatives of the Waorani Indigenous group (the predominant indigenous group of the Yasuní National Park), the Tagaeri and the Taromenane, live in voluntary isolation deep within the park’s boundaries, precariously close to the ITT zone. They depend on Yasuní for their survival, and their way of life would be forever altered by oil extraction in the ITT block.

The Way Forward

Many developing countries have their eyes on the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. If the initiative fails to garner international support, it will discourage developing countries from adopting bold climate measures that require significant financial sacrifices. This is not to say that initiatives like the Yasuní-ITT should replace a far-reaching, international climate agreement, but we must be pragmatic and support ready-to-implement solutions now. The cost of inaction is too high. We cannot wait until 2015 or 2020 for a binding international agreement, and most importantly for the people of Ecuador, Yasuní cannot wait.

There is no undoing the damage that may be caused by oil extraction in such a pristine part of the Amazon. With a review forthcoming from President Correa in December on whether to continue with the bold plan, the Yasuní-ITT Initiative needs support. We must all show our commitment to mitigating climate change and protecting the earth’s rich biodiversity by taking a step forward at Durban, not backward. The excuses are many. The realities, however, necessitate action.

Ivonne Baki is the plenipotentiary representative of Ecuador to the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. She is also the founder of the Galapagos Conservancy Foundation and UNESCO Goodwill Minister for Peace. She previously served as Ambassador of Ecuador to the United States and as Ecuador's Minister of Foreign Trade, Industry, Regional Integration, Fisheries, and Competitiveness.

Sources: AP, Bass et al. (2010), Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Integration Ministry (Ecuador), International Energy Agency, IOP Publishing, PLoS ONE, Project Syndicate, SOS Yasuní, The Huffington Post, U.S. Energy Information Administration, UN Development Programme, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, World Bank, Yasuní-ITT Initiative, Yasunizate (via YouTube).

Image Credit: "Yasuní-ITT," courtesy of Plataforma Climatica Lationamericana; video courtesy of Yasunizate; chart from "Global Conservation Significance of Ecuador's Yasuní National Park" (Bass et al. 2010) courtesy of PLoS One.

UNiTE To End Violence Against Women

2011-11-25T09:00:00.006-05:00

Today is the International Day to End Violence Against Women, an awareness and advocacy campaign organized by a host of UN agencies and offices “to galvanize action across the UN system to prevent and punish violence against women.”

Gender equity and inequity play a role in a myriad of international development, health, security, and even environmental issues, from rape as a weapon of war; demography’s effects on political stability; maternal health and its impact on child development; women’s rights as a social stability issue; and the disproportionate effect of climate change on rural women.

The numbers around gender-based violence are staggering. According to the UN:

70 percent of women experience physical or sexual violence from men in their lifetime.
Approximately 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls were raped in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at least 200,000 cases of sexual violence, mostly involving women and girls, have been documented since 1996, though the actual numbers are considered to be much higher.
In the United States, one-third of women murdered each year are killed by intimate partners; in South Africa, a woman is killed every six hours by an intimate partner; in India, 22 women were killed each day in dowry-related murders in 2007; and in Guatemala, two women are murdered, on average, each day.
Over 60 million girls worldwide are child brides, married before the age of 18, primarily in South Asia (31.1 million) and sub-Saharan Africa (14.1 million).

Here are some of New Security Beat’s posts on gender-based violence and inequity and their intersection with development, the environment, and security:

Gender-Based Violence in the DRC: Research Findings and Programmatic Implications:
Dr. Lynn Lawry, senior health stability and humanitarian assistance specialist at the U.S. Department of Defense, presented findings from the first cross-sectional, randomized cluster study on gender-based violence in the DRC at the Wilson Center this year. The first of its kind in the region, the population-based, quantitative study covered three districts in the DRC and a total of 5.2 million adults, comprehensively assessing gender-based violence, including its prevalence, circumstances, perpetrators, and physical and mental health impacts.

Pop Audio: Judith Bruce on Empowering Adolescent Girls in Post-Earthquake Haiti: “The most striking thing about post-conflict and post-disaster environments is that what lurks there is also this extraordinary opportunity,” said Judith Bruce, a senior associate and policy analyst with the Population Council. Bruce spent time last year working with the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network, a coalition of humanitarian groups conducting workshops focused on the educational, health, and security needs of the country’s vulnerable female youth population.

The Walk to Water in Conflict-Affected Areas: Constituting a majority of the world’s poor and at the same time bearing responsibility for half the world’s food production and most family health and nutrition needs, women and girls regularly bear the burden of procuring water for multiple household and agricultural uses. When water is not readily accessible, they become a highly vulnerable group. Where access to water is limited, the walk to water is too often accompanied by the threat of attack and violence.

Weathering Change: New Film Links Climate Adaptation and Family Planning: “Our planet is changing. Our population is growing. Each one of us is impacting the environment…but not equally. Each one of us will be affected…but not equally,” asserts the new documentary, Weathering Change, launched at the Wilson Center in September. The film, produced by Population Action International, explores the devastating impacts of climate change on the lives of women in developing countries through personal stories from Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru.

Sajeda Amin on Population Growth, Urbanization, and Gender Rights in Bangladesh:
The Population Council’s Sajeda Amin describes the Growing Up Safe and Healthy (SAFE) project, launched in Dhaka and other Bangladeshi cities last. The initiative aims, to increase access to reproductive healthcare services for adolescent girls and young women, bolstering social services to protect those populations from (and offer treatment for) gender-based violence, and strengthen laws designed to reduce the prevalence of child marriage – a long-standing Bangladeshi institution that keeps population growth rates high while denying many young women the opportunity to pursue economic and educational advancement.

No Peace Without Women: On October 31, 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, which called for women’s equal participation in all efforts to maintain and promote peace and security; however, little progress has been made over these last 10 years and women remain on the periphery when it comes to post-conflict reconstruction and development. A report from the humanitarian organization CARE concedes that “much of the action remains declarative rather than operational.”

Addressing Gender-Based Violence to Curb HIV: At last year’s International AIDS Conference in Vienna an astonishing development in the campaign to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS was unveiled – a microbicide with the ability to reduce the risk of transmission of HIV. This welcome development coincides with an intensified focus on women’s health and security needs among donors, especially the United States.

The Future of Women in the MENA Region: A Tunisian and Egyptian Perspective: Lilia Labidi, minister of women’s affairs for the Republic of Tunisia and former Wilson Center fellow, joined Moushira Khattab, former minister of family and population for Egypt, this summer at the Wilson Center to discuss the role and expectations of women in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, as well as issues to consider as these two countries move forward.

Sources: UN Secretary-General’s Office.