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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category biofuels.
  • Indian Military Recognizes Environment as “Critical” Security Issue, But Response Is Still Fragmented

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    Guest Contributor  //  January 29, 2018  //  By Dhanasree Jayaram
    India-UK-Joint-Exercise

    For the first time, the Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces acknowledges that the “environment has emerged as a critical area of the security paradigm,” and warns that if environmental degradation and related issues increase security risks, the military will need to respond. Released in 2017, the doctrine lists a series of non-traditional security challenges linked to the environment that could influence conflict and war, including “climate change, ecosystem disruption, energy issues, population issues, food-related problems, economic issues of unsustainable modes of production, and civil strife related to environment.” While the military has taken steps to address its impacts on the environment, it can do much more to support the nation’s environmental goals and mitigate environment-related security risks.

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  • An Unholy Trinity: Xinjiang’s Unhealthy Relationship With Coal, Water, and the Quest for Development

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    China Environment Forum  //  November 1, 2017  //  By Meredith Peng

    A desert road near Kuqa. Photo credit Meredith Peng, 2016.

    Sitting shotgun in a beat-up vehicle en route to Tashkorgan a small town in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, I soaked in the magnificence—or what I could see through the dust-coated windshield. The unpaved and rocky road, which carves through the precipitous Karakorum pass, will be (when finished) a key link in China’s “One Belt One Road”  plan to connect China to Pakistan. China’s ambitious plans for westward expansion will demand an almost inconceivably enormous amount of energy and resources, and water-scarce Xinjiang will play a central role. With plans like these, how can China meet its water needs?

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  • Top 5 Posts for September 2017

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    What You Are Reading  //  October 4, 2017  //  By Julianne Liebenguth
    Rohingya-camp-feature

    Myanmar’s inter-ethnic disputes undermine an otherwise favorable backdrop for a peaceful democratic transition, write Rachel Blomquist and Richard Cincotta in New Security Beat’s most read story last month. Their analysis was published in April 2016, but it presciently foreshadows the current crisis. Through their multi-dimensional assessment of the demographic tension in Myanmar, the authors show that “[t]he path to democracy seems to cut directly through the Rohingya issue.”

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  • Managing Sludge Mountains: What Beijing Can Learn From Brooklyn

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    China Environment Forum  //  Choke Point  //  September 7, 2017  //  By Carl Hooks
    Newtown Creek Digester Eggs

    This is the first article in a series of case studies of innovative wastewater treatment plants in Brooklyn and Brazil from the China Environment Forum and Circle of Blue’s Choke Point China Initiative, which since 2010 has been exploring challenges and solutions to water-energy-food confrontations in the world’s most populated country.

    Chinese cities are being encircled by untreated sludge—a pungent, viscous mixture of human excreta and stormwater runoff. Four years ago in Beijing, trucks loaded with untreated sludge from the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant were illegally dumping mountains of sludge in the outskirts of the capital as “free fertilizer” for peri-urban farms. Similarly, in the southern China city of Guangzhou, disposing toxic sludge into the nearby river required nothing more than a hired boat. From the far western desert city of Urumqi to the eastern metropolis of Shanghai, more and more of China’s cities are struggling to manage mountains of sludge and municipal waste, as well as floods of wastewater and stormwater runoff. 

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  • From Trash to Treasure: How Effective Sorting Helps China Utilize Food Waste

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    China Environment Forum  //  August 17, 2017  //  By Lizhong Liu
    Garbage-Sorting

    Launched in Beijing in 2013, the highly successful grassroots “Empty Your Plate” campaign encourages Chinese consumers to eliminate food waste from their meals. Starting with blog posts on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter), this campaign rapidly swept the entire country and attracted support from the central government, which later issued a series of policies urging restaurants to use smaller dishes and remove minimum charges. However, the volume of food waste in China is still astonishing.

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  • No Room for Waste: Honolulu’s Sludge Plant Points Toward More Sustainable Urban Development

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    Choke Point  //  Guest Contributor  //  June 23, 2017  //  By Codi Kozacek
    HPower01W

    HONOLULU – Sludge. The final, unwanted byproduct of a toilet flush. The semi-solid stuff that even wastewater treatment plants send packing to the landfill. Unseen in the steel pipes snaking high on the exterior of Honolulu’s H-POWER plant, sludge is injected into a massive boiler where it joins the city’s trash in a roaring inferno. From the gravel lot outside, it all seems very antiseptic and smells less than a stroll past the neighborhood dumpster. But the 70-megawatt waste-to-energy facility is a workhorse, processing as much as 2,000 tons of refuse each day from Oahu’s 1 million residents. All told, it generates up to 10 percent of the electricity needed to power this Pacific island.

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  • European Parliament Passes Conflict-Minerals Bill; UN Releases Report on Money Flows in DRC

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    Reading Radar  //  June 18, 2015  //  By Carley Chavara

    MONUSCO-reportA new report prepared by the UN Environment Program and UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (known as MONUSCO) found that just two percent of the total value of illicit natural resources smuggled from the country comes back to armed groups. Still, these funds, which amount to around $13 million a year, allow some 25 to 49 groups to continue operating in the country’s war-torn eastern provinces. Much more, as much as 50 percent, ends up in the hands of transnational criminal networks with the remaining profits flowing to individuals or companies elsewhere in the DRC or in Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

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  • “Climate Change Makes the World More Violent”: How One IPCC Author Would Rewrite His Chapter

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    Eye On  //  June 18, 2015  //  By Carley Chavara

    With thousands of scientists representing 195 countries working for more than a quarter of a century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the world’s leading authority on of assessing climate change and its potential socio-economic impacts. However, Marc Levy, an IPCC lead author and deputy director of Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, says he’d have gone further in connecting climate change to conflict in their latest report if it were up to him.

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