Showing posts by Geoffrey D. Dabelko.
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Hot Water: High Levels of Radioactivity Found in Jordan’s Groundwater
›February 23, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoStartling new research in the peer-reviewed Environmental Science & Technology shows that fossil groundwater in southern Jordan is radioactive at levels up to 2000% higher than the international drinking water standard. That the radioactivity is naturally occurring is little consolation for Jordanians—and perhaps for residents of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, who sit atop the same sandstone Nubian aquifer system.
The shocking findings in “High Naturally Occurring Radioactivity in Fossil Groundwater from the Middle East” by Duke University’s Avner Vengosh and colleagues should be cause for major concern. As Vengosh, a geo-chemistry professor with long-standing research collaborations with Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian colleagues, wrote in an email: “Most of the Jordanian population is not using the fossil water for drinking—for now. Only few thousand people in Aqaba and Karak might be currently exposed to this water. However, Jordan has launched a huge water project to transfer the water from the aquifer in the south to the capital Amman, which would expose a large population to this water.”
According to Vengosh, although these specific findings are limited to the water groundwater under in Jordan, Saudi Arabia is using groundwater from the same aquifer (the Saq) extensively, mostly for agriculture but also for drinking. In this arid part of the world, countries have turned to nonrenewable fossil groundwater as one of the few remaining options. As stated in the article’s abstract, “These findings raise concerns about the safety of this and similar nonrenewable groundwater reservoirs, exacerbating the already severe water crisis in the Middle East.”
Vengosh shared the findings with Jordanian authorities ahead of publication. While it is hard to predict the social, economic, and political reactions to this news, it is easier to anticipate the effects of sustained consumption of water contaminated with radium isotopes. Vengosh says exposure to much lower levels of radium resulted in higher frequencies of bone cancer in a New Jersey community.
Photo: Avner Vengosh. Copyright Duke University Photography. -
Caroline Thomas: Environmental, Human Security Pioneer
›November 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoI never met Caroline Thomas. But I certainly benefited from her human security insights.
The Southampton University professor passed away last month at 49, leaving behind notable contributions to the field of environment and human security. In her 1987 volume In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations, Thomas was one of the first to enunciate the insufficiency of traditional security approaches. She explained that statist security perspectives said little about the immediate environment, development, and health threats facing the majority of the world’s population—residents of the so-called Third World.
Thomas’ call for a broader definition of security was rooted in her focus on pressing threats to human well-being in developing countries. In an obituary of Thomas in The Guardian, Tony Evans describes the book’s contributions:While today the term is used in a variety of contexts – environmental security, food security, fresh water security, health security and so on – this was not the case until the 1980s. Security previously meant only the military security of the state. In proposing to broaden the agenda beyond its narrow focus on war and arms control, Caroline sought to include issues that confront the people of the developing nations, rather than their states….Caroline argued that questions of security and insecurity were qualitatively different for people in developing nations because the imperial powers had withdrawn, having paid little regard for their future. The people of decolonised states were left in conditions of economic, political, social and military turmoil, with fewer resources for avoiding future misery.
Reflecting a common British academic perspective, Thomas highlighted power inequities between the global North and South in the post-colonial era. At the same time, she did not undercut the utility of her arguments by descending into over-the-top caricatures or creating straw-man arguments, blunders that other British critics of environmental and human security research have not always managed to avoid.
Thomas’ focus on power extended to inequities in market relationships. Much of the early environment and conflict work spent too little time considering international trade in natural resources between developing and developed countries and consumer behavior in industrialized nations. Too often, early environment and conflict research focused narrowly on the local dynamics of natural resource extraction or environmental scarcity and what roles they played in contributing to violent conflict.
Thomas’s work should place her permanently on the short list of key early contributors responsible for broadening security’s definitions. -
Dispatches From the World Conservation Congress: Geoff Dabelko on Wartime Environmental Protection, Post-Conflict Peacebuilding
›October 8, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
The lawyers are out at the World Conservation Congress Forum in Barcelona. Carl Bruch of the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC, was one of several speakers at “Armed Conflict and Environment: Protecting the Environment During War and Improving Post-Conflict Natural Resource Management.”
Bruch is leading a forward-leaning initiative entitled “Strengthening Post-Conflict Peacebuilding and Recovery Through Natural Resource Management” that is collaborating with Tokyo University and the UN Environment Programme’s Conflicts and Disasters Programme to analyze cases from around the world where the environment is key to causing, extending, ending, or recovering from conflict. Bruch and his team of authors are trying to glean lessons for peacebuilding by examining natural resource management in post-conflict societies. Bruch emphasized that the goal is to provide actors on the ground who are not environmental practitioners with the practical means to integrate natural resource management into their operations.
Michael Bothe, an expert on the environment and laws of war from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, suggested IUCN could play a positive role in using the parks-for-peace process to establish parks as demilitarized zones. He noted that peacetime treaties often remain in effect in times of conflict, but that obligations in international environmental treaties are promotional and therefore have limited impact during war. Bothe called for more work in three areas:- Passing laws that use parks-for-peace mechanisms to prevent valuable habitats from becoming military objectives;
- Clarifying how the military doctrine of proportionality of response applies to environmental damage; and
- Specifying the application of customary (i.e., traditional) law regarding environmental protection during armed conflict.
Illustrating the diversity of participants at the World Conservation Congress, questioners from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Angola, Georgia, and Germany focused on environmental damage from conflicts in their regions.
- Passing laws that use parks-for-peace mechanisms to prevent valuable habitats from becoming military objectives;
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Dispatches From the World Conservation Congress: Geoff Dabelko on Environment, Security
›October 7, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
“The input of the security sector is indispensable for finding the balance” between mitigation and adaptation efforts to combat climate change, said Wouter Veening, co-founder and chairman of the Institute for Environmental Security, based in The Hague, Netherlands. Veening was the first among many speakers in a linked set of panels entitled “Environment and Security Challenges for Change” here at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona. -
The More Things Change…Russia Embraces Free Trade (in Nuclear Waste)
›September 29, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
I was disappointed but not surprised to receive a recent e-mail from Wilson Center Senior Scholar Murray Feshbach, warning me off visiting
The beginning of a September 26 St. Petersburg Times article gives us a glimpse of this selective Russian embrace of free trade:Up to 10,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride are expected to travel through St. Petersburg in the next six months, according to the local branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona….According to official sources, cargos containing depleted uranium hexafluoride arrive in the city on average ten times a month…radioactivity levels near the trains have significantly exceeded the norm on several occasions over the past year.
Environmental and health issues in Russia have not always looked so dire. In the early 1990s, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, two exciting developments came out of northwest Russia from two unlikely sources: the military and civil society. In one of the most militarized regions of the world, the Russian military cooperated with the Norwegian military and eventually the
Health concerns connected to nuclear waste also formed the basis of a blossoming civil society movement in early-1990s
But even by the mid-1990s, the tide was beginning to turn back to a secretive and securitized approach to environmental data. The celebrated treason case of former Russian submarine captain Aleksandr Nikitin was merely the most visible example of the recriminalization of sharing environmental data. Nikitin’s “crime” was co-authoring the 1996 Bellona Foundation report The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination. Following a year of imprisonment and the achievement of Amnesty International prisoner status, Nikitin was released, but his celebrated case was succeeded by the Russian government’s broad-stroke efforts to dial back environmental openness and the rights that came with it. We may be seeing the effects of this return to environmental secrecy in the current row over nuclear waste transportation through St. Petersburg.
Photo courtesy of Woodrow Wilson Center. -
PODCAST – Virunga National Park and Conflict in the DRC
›September 11, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko“The resource base is a point of contact for local residents, refugees, rebel groups, park rangers, [and the] military as they struggle to survive,” says Richard Matthew of the University of California, Irvine, in this podcast interview, describing the significance of Virunga National Park to the diverse collection of actors in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Matthew cites a fundamental tension between the needs of the park—which is home to some of the few remaining mountain gorillas in the world—and the desperate humanitarian needs of the people living in and around it. On a recent assessment trip to the area for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Matthew and his colleagues met with many of these groups to help find ways to reduce pressure on the park’s natural resources, while recognizing they are key to the livelihoods of millions of needy people in the region.
I also asked Matthew to highlight some of the human security topics he and his colleagues pursue at the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at UC Irvine. One such topic is microfinance. “Microfinance lending rarely takes into consideration the environmental impact and conflict-inducing impacts,” says Matthew. He and his colleagues are convening practitioners and conducting research on practical ways to “green” and reduce the conflict-generating impacts of this increasingly popular development strategy.
I conducted this interview in a noisy UN cafeteria in New York City. We were both in town to meet with David Jensen and colleagues from UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme and the UN Peacebuilding Commission. Expect a podcast and article soon from Jensen on the New Security Beat and in the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program Report, respectively.
Photo: A charcoal checkpoint in Virunga National Park. Courtesy of Richard Matthew. -
World Water Week Draws Attention to Taboo Topics Like Sanitation
›August 22, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoA recent post on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog—entitled “Poop is Funny, But It’s Fatal”—highlights a UNICEF World Water Day video about the necessity of destigmatizing human waste. Bacterial infections caused by contact with human waste kill 1.5 million people every year—most of them children. The stakes are high. The film uses kids and humor—two good ingredients for education through entertainment—to explain the importance of sanitation. The film emphasizes that although we may not like talking about feces, urine, toilets, and the like, we need to because the fact that 2.6 billion of us lack adequate sanitation is a fundamental threat to human health, productivity, and dignity. It’s a short film—YouTube friendly—and these are complex links, but they are key to understanding the need to invest in available technologies.
The UNICEF video rightly emphasizes the additional costs of lack of sanitation, noting that girls often won’t attend school if there isn’t adequate sanitation. The benefits of attending school longer include higher educational attainment, of course, but also the less-obvious knock-on effects: These young women are more likely to know and assert their rights in the household; they are more likely to earn more income; they often choose to have smaller families and better-spaced births, and are consequently able to concentrate their resources on the well-being of those children; their children are more likely to be better-educated—the list goes on.
The video leaves unspoken another sensitive topic: When adolescent girls begin to menstruate, they often either choose not to come to school or their parents (usually the father) pull them out of school if there aren’t “adequate” and separate facilities. This timing often correlates with young women’s assumption of greater responsibilities in the household, but it is also about the stigma associated with menstruation.
I’ve seen the connections between sanitation, education, and women’s equality have tremendous resonance with what is presumably a primary target audience of the UNICEF film—leaders in donor, government, and civil society communities who can mobilize resources. This example illustrates the urgency of overcoming the stovepiping that plagues so many development efforts, which often tackle education, economic growth, sanitation, and human health in isolation from one another, rather than in an integrated fashion. This year, the International Year of Sanitation, we should all make an effort to step out of our comfort zones and speak out about these “taboo” topics. -
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Climate Scientists in the Policy Realm
›August 14, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
As someone who sits between scholarship and policy at the Woodrow Wilson Center, I am sympathetic to Harvard Professor John Holdren’s efforts to articulate critical scientific issues in short, digestible formats. Holdren, who also directs the Woods Hole Research Center, recently tackled what he views as the dangers of climate change deniers in a Boston Globe op-ed—which is, by definition, brief. According to an email sent by Holdren, the reaction to “Convincing the climate-change skeptics” has been quite critical, with castigation running 6 or 7 to 1 over praise.
Holdren’s op-ed neglected to explicitly note that healthy skepticism is a necessary foundation for good science. In a response posted online, Holdren provides his original text including this point, which was edited out by the Globe—a common frustration of scientists who attempt to simplify complex arguments to fit the constraints of newspapers and more popular outlets (he was on Letterman in April).Those scientists who excoriate Holdren for underplaying skepticism are often the same ones who complain about bad (or no) climate policy—but refuse to engage policymakers and the media (and, therefore, forfeit their right to complain). Just as bad, some scientists assume policymakers will find their book or article, read it, understand it, and glean the correct conclusion from the scientific evidence—with no translation necessary. I’ve said it before: to reach policymakers, we have to speak their language.
I also think headline writers are the bane of every serious op-ed or news story. As someone who spends a lot of time on the faux water wars argument, I have come to believe that headline writers seeking to make a splash are a big part of the continued belief that states go to war over water.
Holdren’s experience suggests scientists should take proactive steps, such as setting up supporting web pages when the piece is published, and including the URL as part of their byline. This annotated or fully referenced and extended online version may help temper some of the outrage in cases like this. Jeff Sachs’ “Sustainable Developments” column in Scientific American, Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog, and Nick Kristof’s New York Times column and “On the Ground” blog commonly include links to more extensive discussions.
