Showing posts by Geoffrey D. Dabelko.
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In Egypt, Record Food Prices Lead to Family Planning
›June 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAt Egypt’s National Population Conference on Monday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—whose government has struggled to respond to recent civil unrest over skyrocketing food prices and bread shortages—told attendees that high population growth is a “major challenge and fundamental obstacle” to development. The following day, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million national family planning program with the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Egypt’s current fertility rate is 2.7 children per woman.
With a population of 81 million, Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, and, according to Philippe Fargues of the American University in Cairo (AUC), excluding the desert, Egypt has the highest population density in the world—twice that of Bangladesh.
Is the government’s plan a productive long-term response to the food crisis? How can it be part of a larger package? Or is population a distraction from the real issue of corruption, as identified by interviewees in the Washington Post article where I first read about the programs.
I posed these questions to a demography and security listserv and got some interesting responses. According to Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, a political scientist known best for her book Bare Branches on the security implications of imbalanced male-female population ratios: “Mubarak would do more to achieve his goal of 2.0 children per woman by a focused plan to raise the status of women, for example, by:- Outlawing polygamy, or erecting such high legal barriers to it that it becomes impractical
- Fully implementing CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women]
- Enforcing the ban on FGM [female genital mutilation]; 97% of Egyptian women are circumcised
- Educating women on a parity with men; the median number of years of schooling for men is 6.3; that for women is 4.4
- Raising average age at first marriage for rural women (current average is 19)
- Creating more parity in family law for women in matters such as divorce, inheritance, etc.—all of which can be found in CEDAW.”
“I don’t think population pressure is a distraction from the real issue of corruption; though the government of Egypt is indeed corrupt by developed-world standards (or maybe by any standard). Corruption, which is symptomatic of state weakness, limits the ability of the Egyptian government to address this problem credibly and effectively. But it doesn’t mean they are wrong about the problem.
I was actually struck by the modesty of official ambition to reduce the fertility rate from 2.7 (which is slightly above the world median, apparently) to 2.0 (which I’m guessing is pretty close to the middle). This assumes that, basically, a steady state population of, say, 100M Egyptians would be sustainable indefinitely. I’m not so sure of that. The impact of anticipated climate change on Egypt may prove quite formidable by the end of this century. I’m not sure a leveling off after some additional increase will do the trick….Too pessimistic? I hope so.” -
PODCAST – Water Stories with Circle of Blue’s Carl Ganter
›May 21, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoCarl Ganter is a journalist with a mission. We tend to think journalists are supposed to be impartial observers, but much good reporting is done by journalists who are passionate about their subjects. And Carl is that—passionate about water, in its many forms, locations, and roles. Water and human health. Water and politics. Water and conflict. Water and food. Water and girls’ education. Water and ecosystems. Water and…
I could keep going because water is so central to so many natural and social systems. So central, in fact, that we often miss its critical importance, even when it is right in front of us.
Carl, his wife and fellow journalist Eileen, and an all-star team of journalists have come together under the banner of Circle of Blue to try to reveal the many faces of water: faces of joy when girls are freed from spending hours each day walking to collect water for their families, and faces of grief, as 2-4 million people every year—most of them children—die from complications associated with diarrhea.
We at the Woodrow Wilson Center have been lucky to have Carl as a working group member in our Navigating Peace Water Initiative.
I interviewed Carl about his work with Circle of Blue and their Water News website when he was last in Washington. -
PODCAST: Natural Resources and Conflict: Advice for Funders
›May 2, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoNatural resources, conflict, and human security were front and center at a premier forum for philanthropists focused on global issues last month. Five hundred experts and funders gathered in Redwood City, CA, at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum (GPF) to tackle a range of connected challenges under the rubric of “Human Security, Conflict, and the Responsibility to Protect.” I caught up with an old friend and social entrepreneur, Juan Dumas, executive director of Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), an NGO based in Ecuador. Juan and his colleagues work closely with a broad range of stakeholders in facilitating peaceful resolutions to natural resource conflicts. Resting on the premise that natural resource management is conflict management, their work prioritizes resolving these disputes in a peaceful manner. In this podcast interview, Juan highlights FFLA’s activities and lists some specific actions funders must take if they wish to make a real difference in supporting efforts to break the links between natural resources and conflict.
Juan was just one of the voices on natural resources, conflict, and human security at the GPF conference. Patrick Alley of Global Witness weighed in on the “resource curse,” Maria Theresa Vargas of Fundación NATURA Bolivia outlined her group’s innovative use of payment for ecosystem services to solve upstream-downstream resource use conflicts, and I commented on the need for donors to fund cross-sectoral efforts to capture the peacebuilding benefits of environmental management.
While they didn’t address natural resource management issues, you can watch plenary session stars Archbishop Desmond Tutu on forgiveness as a reconciliation strategy, Annie Lennox on HIV/AIDS, and Peter Gabriel on the power of the cell phone for social progress.
Click below to stream the podcast:
Natural Resources and Conflict: Advice for Funders: Download. -
Diversifying the Security Toolbox
›March 27, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoIn today’s USA Today, General Anthony Zinni (Ret.) and Admiral Leighton Smith (Ret.) make a succinct argument for why addressing global issues such as poverty, disease, corruption, and climate change is essential to making the United States safer. Such an op-ed provides a prime example of how military leaders can play a productive role in advocating for non-military tools that will advance a broader human security agenda. “We understand that the U.S. cannot rely on military power alone to keep us safe from terrorism, infectious disease and other global threats that recognize no borders,” write Zinni and Smith. “We [the United States] must match our military might with a new commitment to investing in improving people’s lives overseas.” -
Trip Report: Garmisch, Germany
›January 4, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoVisiting Garmisch, Germany, is not exactly hardship duty. The snowy peaks of the German Alps are visible well before arriving at this Bavarian skiing haven, located 88 kilometers south of Munich. But this is no typical vacation paradise: Garmisch is home to the joint U.S.-German George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a leading security and defense educational institution, and its College of International and Security Studies (CISS). For the past 15 years, the Center has brought together security officials from militaries, intelligence services, and ministries for dialogue and education. These collaborative programs help security experts develop and maintain crucial personal connections with their counterparts in other countries.
At the Fall 2007 “Program in Advanced Security Studies” course at CISS, representatives from 34 countries met in the classroom during the day, and, perhaps just as importantly, in the local watering holes at night. The 12-week course, filled with traditional topics such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and asymmetrical warfare, ended with a curveball this December: The capstone lectures, meant to provoke students to look beyond traditional security concerns, focused on climate change. On December 3, 2007, three of us—Wolfgang Seiler of the Fraunhofer Institute for Atmospheric Environmental Research in Garmisch, Alexander Carius of Adelphi Research in Berlin, and I—did our best to mix things up.
Seiler led off with an energetic and sweeping presentation on the latest climate science, and proceeded to outline the likely social, economic, and agricultural effects of higher temperatures, intensified storms, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels. He urged Europeans to start addressing this fundamental challenge by recognizing the inadequacy of their own climate change mitigation activities, rather than simply pointing fingers at the United States.
Carius unpacked the findings of a major climate and security study by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. He used the case of Central Asia to walk the more than 160 students through climate change’s expected impacts on regional water supply and their larger social, economic, political, and security implications. For the next few decades, melting glaciers will provide Central Asia with adequate water. But as they continue to recede, this water supply—so critical for agriculture and energy in the region—will diminish greatly. Any government—let alone the relatively new countries of Central Asia, which consistently fall in the World Bank’s lowest quartile of governance rankings—would struggle to prepare for and adapt to this impending water scarcity.
In my remarks, I urged security officials around the world to abandon the stereotype that climate change and other environmental issues are the preserve of tree-hugging environmental activists. In fact, climate change poses real threats that security officials have a responsibility to examine. To address concerns that climate science is too uncertain, I cited the parallel drawn by retired U.S. Army General Gordon Sullivan between making battlefield decisions with incomplete information and tackling climate change without precise predictions.
At the same time, I warned against overselling the links between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism. Climate change is likely to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intra-state conflict—for instance, competition over declining resources such as arable land and fresh water, or declining state capacity or legitimacy—but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of conflict. Labeling the Darfur genocide a “climate conflict” is both wrong and counterproductive: It lets the regime in Khartoum off the hook and ignores proximate political and economic motivations for fighting. In the case of Darfur, examining climate change’s role in desertification, the long and deep drought, declining soil moisture levels, and declining agricultural productivity provides a fuller understanding of how conflict between Sudanese pastoralists and agriculturalists has reached this extreme.
I also suggested analyzing whether policy responses to climate change—such as the increased use of biofuels—could create new social conflict. The surge in palm oil cultivation in Indonesia, for example, is arguably accelerating deforestation rates and increasing the chances of conflicts between the owners of palm oil plantations and people who depend on forest resources for their livelihoods.
Small-group discussions ranged widely: European border control officials took great interest in potential increases in South-to-North migration flows from Africa and South Asia. Naval officers focused on the implications of an ice-free Northwest Passage in the Arctic, as well as sea-level rise that may swamp harbors and low-lying island bases.
As with all classes—whether constituted of military officers or not—some students couldn’t get enough of the discussion, while others were less inspired. I left with the impression that, like most military audiences, they did not welcome climate change as a new mission for security institutions. They perhaps recognized the need to study the potential impacts of climate change that may influence their traditional security concerns, even as they remained skeptical that climate change is as critical as some policymakers and researchers claim. -
Agriculture as Key Post-Conflict Step
›December 12, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoMore evidence against treating natural resource management as a luxury item in post-conflict settings comes from the November edition of the New Agriculturalist. Seven short pieces on agriculture after conflict highlight the necessity of utilizing agriculture as part of a post-conflict recovery strategy.
Some of these pieces delve into “rehabilitating coffee in Angola,” livestock health initiatives as confidence-builders in Sudan, and land ownership reform in Guatemala. Articles on Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Uganda round out the special focus on agriculture as “an essential part of the rehabilitation process.” -
PODCAST – Simulated Negotiations for Integrated Development in East Africa
›December 7, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoI recently traveled to Ethiopia to attend “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa,” a conference sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) and LEM Ethiopia. The conference was attended by more than 200 development practitioners from around the world, including many from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
For the meeting, I worked with my colleague Gib Clarke and Shewaye Deribe (pictured above) of the Ethio Wetlands and Natural Resources Association to write and conduct a role-playing simulation designed to bring to life the connections between population growth, natural resource management and environmental health, and development priorities. Participants worked with a scenario involving competing interests and rising tensions among a range of internal and external stakeholders in the fictional nation of Arborlind. 
Four teams representing government, civil society, a donor, and the private sector negotiated responses to short-term opportunities and long-term risks.
This podcast gives you a taste of the trip–specifically the simulation. We begin and end the audio with the voices of local children welcoming some of us to their school at the Berga Wetland Project, an especially inspiring inauguration to a valuable conference. -
Lieberman-Warner Bill Includes Climate and Conflict Provisions
›November 2, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoYesterday, Senators Lieberman and Warner teamed up to move the America’s Climate Security Act (S. 2191) to the full Committee on Environment and Public Works. The act would go beyond recent legislation mandating that the intelligence community assess climate-security linkages and would create more formal institutional structures and resources for addressing climate-conflict connections.
Hill Heat summarizes the provisions for a new Climate Change and National Security Council as:The Secretary of State is the Council’s chair, and the EPA Administrator, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence are the Council’s other members.
Some environmentalists don’t care for the provisions. They are wary of national security discretion for some adaptation resources and find the strings reminiscent of Cold War conditionality, when foreign assistance went to those who stood with the U.S. against the Communist menace. We will be watching the progress of this bill with interest; check back in this space for the latest developments.
The Council makes an annual report to the President and the Congress on how global climate change affects instability and conflict, and recommends spending to mitigate global warming impacts and conflict.
Up to five percent of auction proceeds, at the President’s discretion, may be used to carry out the report recommendations.
