Showing posts from category development.
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Lakis Polycarpou, State of the Planet
Finding the Link Between Water Stress and Food Prices
›March 19, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Lakis Polycarpou, appeared on State of the Planet.
Over the past decade, average global food prices have more than doubled, with 2008 and 2010 seeing excruciating price spikes that each had far-reaching economic, geopolitical, and social consequences.
What explains this long-term trend – and why did prices spike so much higher in the years that they did?
For policymakers at all levels, answering that question is of vital importance if there is to be any hope of feeding the world’s growing population in the coming decades, much less maintaining social order.
According to recent research by the New England Complex Systems Institute, spikes in food prices are so closely correlated with social unrest that they were able to identify a particular food-price threshold above which food riots are very likely.
The most obvious cause for high food prices is oil – in fact, charts showing the correspondence between food and oil prices show an eerie overlap, especially in the last half decade. Water scarcity and climate are major players as well, however. According to the just released United Nations World Water Development Report, demand for water will grow by 55 percent in the next 40 years, and farmers will need 19 percent more water by 2050 just to keep up with growing food demands.
Continue reading on State of the Planet.
Sources: Nature, New England Complex Systems Institute, UNESCO.
Photo Credit: “Farmers work on the arid land in Hertela village few kilometers from Mahoba in Bundelkhand, India on September 26, 2008.” Courtesy of flickr user balazsgardi. -
John Williams: Helping People and Preserving Biodiversity Hotspots
›March 16, 2012 // By Schuyler Null“Both humans and the number of species in the world are not evenly distributed across the globe,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, who recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his contribution to Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. “In particular we find that species diversity is concentrated in what’s called the biodiversity ‘hotspots.’”
Largely in the tropics, Mediterranean climates, and along mountain chains, biodiversity hotspots are “where there’s a real concentration in number of species and also unique species – plants and animals that exist nowhere else on Earth,” he said.
“It’s a very complex relationship between biodiversity and human population, because it’s not necessarily [true] that places of high human population are a threat to biodiversity,” said Williams. Many different factors play a role, “like education, like consumption, like economic development, different cultures – how people interface with the natural world – all these things create nuances as far as what that relationship is between biodiversity and where people live.”
“There are some basic things we can do that are going to be good for human welfare, as well as biodiversity,” he continued. A few are addressing lack of education, especially among girls, in areas of high biodiversity; providing basic health services, including family planning, where rural growth rates are highest; and improving physical access to rural areas to promote economic development.
“We see there’s a direct correlation between each additional year of schooling a girl has and their fertility during their lifetime,” Williams said. “As people climb out of poverty, they also choose to have smaller, healthier families.” -
Kavita Ramdas: Why Educating Girls Is Not Enough
›“I’m a big proponent of girl’s education. I believe that it’s a very important and a very valuable human rights obligation that all countries should be meeting,” said Kavita Ramdas, executive director for programs on social entrepreneurship at Stanford University, at the Wilson Center. However, “in the past seven to eight years we have found ourselves in a situation where there’s kind of an enchantment with girl’s education, as though it were the new microenterprise magic bullet to solve everything from poverty, to malnourishment, to inequality.”
“The outcomes that we ascribe to girl’s education…are not anything that I would argue with,” she said, yet, this enchantment “has happened simultaneously with a significant drop in both funding and support for strategies that give girls and women access to reproductive health and choices, particularly family planning.”
This is a problem, said Ramdas, because we cannot rely on education alone to do all the heavy lifting required to empower women.
“I think it’s important for us to recognize that there are societies where girls and women have achieved significantly high levels of education in which gender inequality remains,” she said, “for example, places like Japan and Saudi Arabia, where you have high per capita income, high levels of education, and yet…where women and girls are still marginalized and on the edges in terms of decision making.”
“I don’t think we have to wait for one to be able to do the other,” she said. “As we support programs for girls’ education, we also need to demand that those programs be buttressed by strong programs in adolescent health, strong programs in sex education, strong programs that actually provide girls and women with access to family planning and contraception.” -
Africa’s Demographic Challenges, Genderizing Food Security and Climate Responses
›Gender and Climate Change Research in Agriculture and Food Security for Rural Development is a detailed training guide produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The guide’s purpose is to support “work to investigate the gender dimensions of responding to climate change in the agriculture and food sectors…to improve food production, livelihood security and gender equality.” The authors write that “the number of hungry people in the world could be reduced by more than 100 million if women in rural areas were given equal access to the same resources as men.” The guide focuses on sensitizing researchers and practitioners “to the links between socio-economic and gender issues” and provides a suite of tools for gathering data about the gender and climate change aspects of agricultural development. Along with concrete tools to understand and address gender inequities in agricultural development, the report adopts a nuanced social definition of gender in which “people are born female or male, but learn to be women and men,” keeping the focus squarely on the socio-economic and political barriers to full equality.A report from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, Africa’s Demographic Challenges: How A Young Population Can Make Development Possible, argues that “if mortality and fertility decrease” across the African continent, there will be a “demographic bonus.” If nurtured through ample investment in human capital, this bonus may become a “demographic dividend,” as growing numbers of working-age people participate in the economy. The report argues that taking advantage of this demographic window, however, requires policy actions that both encourage fertility reductions and foster economic development throughout the continent, declaring boldly that “high birth rates and development are mutually exclusive.” Thus, according to the authors, the pathway to development is supporting the empowerment and education of women and girls, strengthening reproductive health services, and ensuring that both young women and young men are able to engage socio-economically within their societies. Though the report’s argument that demographic change can be critical for development is convincing, the form, strength, and causal direction of these linkages at times becomes confused. -
Eelke Kraak, ChinaDialogue
Central Asia’s Dam Debacle
›March 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Eelke Kraak, appeared on ChinaDialogue.
The Toktogul Dam in Kyrgyzstan is an imposing structure. The dam guards the largest and only multi-annual water reservoir in central Asia. The cascade of five hydroelectric stations downstream produces 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s power. Cotton fields thousands of kilometers away in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan depend on the release of water from this dam.
The Toktogul is literally and figuratively the “valve” of the Syr Darya River. But by relying on large-scale engineering projects to control the river, these countries have ignored the fundamentally political nature of water management.
The significance of the Toktogul dam goes beyond its economic benefits. It was the center piece of the Soviet Union’s efforts to conquer nature in its drive to modernize central Asia. When it became fully operational in the late 1980s, the project to control the region’s rivers seemed complete.
But the costs have been high. The Aral Sea, the terminal lake of the main sources of water in central Asia, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, has shrunk to almost nothing. Many areas surrounding what is left of the lake are heavily polluted. Moreover, the now independent Syr Darya riparian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan – disagree on how the Toktogul should be operated.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.
Syr Darya River Floodplain, Kazakhstan, courtesy of NASA and the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. -
Geoff Dabelko on Finding Common Ground Among Conservation, Development, and Security at the 2011 WWF Fuller Symposium
›Bridging the divide between the conservation and security communities “requires that we check some stereotypes at the door,” said ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko at the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Forward: Ideas That Work and How Science Can Effect Change symposium. Changes in global climate, as well as environmental threats more local in origin, require us to “find ways to minimize threats [and] maximize opportunities…from the dialogue between these different communities – and get out of our silos to do that,” said Dabelko.
However, this dialogue faces real challenges and concrete trade-offs. “There are big imbalances in terms of the resources that these different communities have,” and this often cuts the conversation short, he said. The conservation and security communities are also orientated towards some very different objectives and toolsets. But “given the levels of stress that our natural systems are under, given the level of dysfunction that are political systems are exhibiting, to me, it suggests that it’s a call for all hands on deck,” asserted Dabelko.
“The relationship between environment, natural resources, and violent conflict” is not the “only part of the story,” he said. Conservation goals can be achieved by preserving biodiversity on military sites and demilitarized zones, and through the Department of Defense’s new focus on reducing energy consumption. In the past, Russian-Norwegian-U.S. cooperation around de-commissioning Soviet-era nuclear submarines protected fragile Arctic habitats, prevented potentially dangerous technology from reaching world markets, and built confidence between recent adversaries. The dual potentials of “peace parks” in fragile and insecure borders across the Middle East have also garnered attention.
Environmental Peacebuilding
“Too often…natural resources are viewed as luxury items – what you worry about once you get rich, democratic, and peaceful,” yet, the environment is an “essential ingredient” for peace, Dabelko said. It is often “key to restoring livelihoods and jump-starting the economy” in conflict affected countries.
“Under a rubric or umbrella that we’re calling ‘environmental peacebuilding’ we have systematic efforts to…break those links with conflict,” he said. The future “concern is that because of environmental change, growth in population, growth in consumption,” and rampant inequities, climate change will act as a “threat multiplier.” “A risk analysis frame” is required to think through not only the risk of failing to act but also the risk of acting in ways that have the potential to create conflict if done poorly.
“We’re talking about changing access to resources and introducing money into uncertain political contexts – who gets it for what. That can be done well and that can be done poorly, and if you are talking to the folks in the conflict community, that’s often an inflection point for when conflict is a potential,” Dabelko said. In the context of potentially troublesome adaptations such as biofuel production, hydropower projects, and REDD+, this means taking seriously the well-worn, but apt, mantra of “do no harm” and working to maximize the “triple bottom line” of development, peace, and climate stability.
A question and answer period, moderated by USAID’s Cynthia Gill, followed the presentation with fellow speakers Anne Salomon of Fraser University, Michael Jenkins of Forest Trends, and Martin Palmer from the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (available below). -
International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Ethiopia Provides Model for Improving Climate, Other Data Services in Africa
›The original version of this article appeared on the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence, and many other types of data. Decisionmakers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems, and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it to test hypotheses, make forecasts, and tweak projections from computer models. What’s more, much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access for free (see examples for climate and health).
Across much of Africa, however, it’s a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty, and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in socioeconomic and environmental data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall, and other climate variables are scarce or nonexistent. If they do exist, they’re usually deemed as proprietary and users must pay to get access. This is not an inconsequential matter. Without readily available, reliable data, policy makers’ ability to make smart, well-informed decisions is hobbled.
The problem of data access persisted even in Ethiopia, regarded as having one of the better meteorological services on the continent. Thanks to the recent efforts of Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the situation has improved considerably.
Continue reading on IRI.
Video Credit: Overview of Ethiopia Climate Maprooms, courtesy of IRI. -
The Missing Links in the Demographic Dividend
›March 9, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThe “demographic dividend,” a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics, is on the rise in policy circles – Rajiv Shah, Melinda Gates, and African government ministers have all discussed it recently in high-level forums. Most notably for demographers, World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin wrote a blog post that focuses on the demographic dividend’s potential to give developing countries a powerful economic boost through declining dependency ratios and a proportionately large working-age population.
