“What we’re changing is how we do business, not what we do. And it is true, in Africa our focus has been basically around three issues…the first is civil control of the military and defense reform, which we see as sort of two sides of the same coin. The second is military professionalization, and the third is capacity building. And those three things are the things that DOD has been focused on in Africa for the probably about the last 10 years. And those three things will continue to be DOD’s focus in the context of capacity building and the mission of the command,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan, discussing the creation of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s new Africa Command, with a group of foreign policy and security bloggers.

One issue Whelan expects AFRICOM to focus greater attention on is maritime security. She explained that several illicit maritime activities are hurting African economies and environments, including trafficking in people, weapons, and drugs; piracy, which has been on the rise recently; and illegal fishing—which can also damage coral reefs. “I think the World Bank did a study not too long ago—a couple of years ago—in which they found that…countries like Mozambique were losing in excess of a billion dollars a year in lost revenue from illegal fishing and also the destruction to their reefs—reef structures and also the depletion of their fishing resources,” said Whelan. A full transcript of the October 24, 2007, discussion is available online.

Nicaragua is currently struggling to cope with the effects of a double environmental disaster. In September 2007, Hurricane Felix tore through the country’s impoverished northern Caribbean region, killing more than 100 people, leaving 220,000 homeless, and destroying vast amounts of agricultural land and forests.

But that wasn’t all. Fifty days of heavy rains—starting just before the hurricane hit—have continued the destruction, causing flooding in large areas of the country’s Pacific regions. In response, President Daniel Ortega’s government declared a state of national disaster on October 19. SINAPRED, Nicaragua’s disaster relief agency, estimates that the rains destroyed the homes of another 216,000 people.

The international response has been rapid, with numerous countries, international agencies, and NGOs sending aid to Nicaragua. But Laura de Clementi, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization representative to Nicaragua, warns that unless seeds are quickly purchased, distributed, and planted, parts of the country could face severe food shortages in the coming months.

These natural disasters have an unnatural component, however, reports Inter Press Service: deforestation. Of the 8 million acres of forest in the country in 1950, only 3 million remain, according to the country’s Environment Ministry. Deforestation exacerbated the damage done by Hurricane Felix and the rains, increasing the level of soil erosion and boosting the likelihood of landslides. Ironically—and unfortunately—a government plan to reforest 60,000 hectares each year that began just before the hurricane hit has since been put on hold.

“Nicaragua is not to blame for the hurricanes and storms, but it is responsible for the destruction of its forests, which form a protective barrier. Rain causes greater damage to land stripped of its trees than to forested areas,” biologist and geographer Jaime Incer Barquero told IPS. Yet the people who cut down trees are often impoverished, possessing few other ways to earn a living. An effective plan to combat deforestation will need to establish alternative, environmentally sustainable livelihoods for Nicaragua’s poor communities. These sustainable ways of generating income would also bolster—rather than undermine—the country’s natural protections against disasters, contributing to the security of all Nicaraguans.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently issued a “report card” for the Arctic, which warned that the polar ice cap is melting rapidly, and that air temperatures continue to rise. A brief sampling of stories covering the implications of this warming, melting Arctic.

Egyptians took to the streets to protest water shortages this summer, reports Inter Press Service (IPS), but despite widespread domestic press coverage of the groundbreaking protests and repeated assurances from Egyptian government officials, Egypt seems to have made little progress in resolving its water shortage problems. Even after President Hosni Mubarak and his cabinet announced a plan to invest $180 million in the construction of small water purification centers in areas susceptible to shortages, popular protests began or continued in multiple provinces. Mohamed Nagi, head of the Habi Centre for Environmental Rights in Cairo, told IPS, “The recent demonstrations show that citizens have lost faith in longstanding government promises to provide them with adequate drinking water.”

Indeed, as the University of Maryland’s Ken Conca points out in “The New Face of Water Conflict,” “Amid the talk of looming ‘water wars,’ a less dramatic—but more immediate—link between water and violence is often ignored: the violence engendered by poor governance of water resources.” The IPS article seems to confirm Conca’s assertion that how well water is managed can be as important as how much water is available. According to Nagi, Egypt’s water infrastructure is chronically underfunded and mismanaged. The article also notes that a study by Egypt’s state-run National Research Centre found that 85 percent of Egypt’s total potable water was wasted due to the poor condition of water distribution systems.

Egypt faces persistent water shortages despite the fact that it and Sudan hold absolute rights to use 100 percent of the Nile’s water under agreements signed in 1929 and 1959. The other countries that depend on the Nile—Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—are poorer and less powerful than Egypt, so their access to water is even more precarious than Egypt’s. For one scholar’s vision of how the 10 countries of the Nile River basin could cooperate around shared water management, see Patricia Kameri-Mbote’s “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons from the Nile River Basin.” Kameri-Mbote believes that the combined efforts of local and national civil society groups and the Nile Basin Initiative, a high-level forum that brings together ministers from the Nile basin countries, could lead to more stable, sustainable, and equitable use of the Nile’s water.

Last week, policymakers, business leaders, and farmers gathered in Oslo at the second annual African Green Revolution Conference to discuss ways to increase agricultural productivity in Africa. The conference, inspired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s July 2004 call to revolutionize African farming, and co-sponsored by two Norwegian public development organizations and two transnational companies, focused on how partnerships between the public and private sectors can offer valuable opportunities for agricultural development. Pedro Sanchez of Columbia University’s Earth Institute cited Malawi, which last year managed to turn a 40 percent grain deficit into a 25 percent surplus, as the first successful African Green Revolution country. Yet other attendees warned that this growth had been achieved partially at the expense of environmental degradation—particularly deforestation—and urged agricultural development programs in Africa to strive for growth that will be sustainable in the long-term.

Also last week: Representatives from 158 countries met in Vienna for a weeklong UN conference on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The delegates agreed that industrialized nations should aim for a non-binding target of reducing their emissions by between 25 and 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. This goal is expected to serve as a loose framework for the major UN-sponsored international climate talks that will be held in Bali, Indonesia this December. At the conference, China rejected criticism that it has not been doing enough to combat climate change, arguing that its one-child policy, by preventing 300 million births over the past three decades, has also kept the country’s levels of greenhouse gas emissions significantly lower than they would have otherwise been.

An environmental security threat is heating up in one of the world’s coldest places: the North Pole. Climate change is causing the polar ice caps to melt, making the Arctic’s vast oil and natural gas reserves more easily accessible. But because this area was previously nearly impossible to access, the rights to the territory are in dispute, with the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, and Denmark all laying claim to it.

The newest podcast from the Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies highlights how engineers are using nanotechnology to develop more efficient and cost-effective ways to desalinate seawater and purify wastewater. In the future, these new water purification technologies could be adapted for use in poor countries where access to safe water is limited. The podcast is the third in the “Trips to the Nano Frontier” series, which also includes podcasts on green nanotechnology and nanomedicine. The full series is available online.

The Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) also produces an original podcast series. ECSP’s podcasts, which feature interviews with leading scholars and practitioners, have examined the role of gender in population, health, and environment programs; the challenges and opportunities presented by urban population growth; and the link between international trade and aid policies and conflict.

The recent discovery of a vast underground lake in Darfur has prompted hope for a resolution to the region’s terrible conflict, which is partially rooted in tensions over scarce resources—particularly water. Yet the lake is not a silver bullet. First of all, there may not be any water in it. Alain Gachet, a French geologist who has studied mineral and water exploration in Africa for 20 years, told BBC News that he thinks the lake is probably dry.

In addition, as The New York Times astutely observed, it is the way in which natural resources are managed—not simply their scarcity or abundance—that determines whether they further peace or conflict. Time and again, inexpert or corrupt management of plentiful natural resources has plunged nations into violence and poverty, rather than granted them prosperity. In Africa, this “resource curse” has been a regrettably common phenomenon.

A report released by the UN Environment Programme last month and an opinion piece by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also highlighted how environmental factors have contributed to the crisis in Darfur.