Showing posts from category From the Wilson Center.
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The Ultimate Weapon Is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace
›To understand the security concerns of the developing world, we must understand that lack of institutional capacity has created a “house of cards,” said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Shannon Beebe, speaking at the Wilson Center on October 19. “When that card gets pulled out, the house is going to fall.”
Beebe, a senior Africa analyst for the Department of Defense, and Mary Kaldor, professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed their new book, The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace, in which they argue for a broader conception of human security. “The world is suffering from a lack of a security narrative,” said Beebe.
“The ultimate weapon is not the F-22,” said Kaldor, “it is a change of mindset.”
Creating Pirates: Threats vs. Vulnerabilities
“What happens when a man is already a fisherman and you take all his fish away? You create a pirate,” said Beebe. The environmental and human security threat of overfishing in Somalia was not taken seriously as a security threat until it was left unchecked for 20 years and developed into a “real kinetic threat” of piracy, he said.Beebe spent a year interviewing 80 to 90 Africans in 13 countries, including military leaders, academics, NGO leaders, and even Somali cabdrivers in the United States, about how they view their security. “What came back was resounding, sobering, and confusing,” said Beebe. Amongst those interviewed, few expressed traditional “kinetic” security concerns stemming from physical threats. Instead it was the “conditions-based vulnerabilities” — such as poverty, health, water and sanitation, gender equality, and climate change — that were identified as primary security threats.
“Until we stop giving Africans and the developing world our definition of what is right for their security and start listening to what they are saying is relevant to their security, we are going to continue to marginalize ourselves,” Beebe said.
Filling The Security Gap
There is currently “a profound security gap,” Kaldor said, and a failure to meet the diverse needs and root causes of violence in much of the developing world. Filling the security void has been an array of both good and bad actors – NGOs, humanitarian agencies, militias, and warlords. If we do not adapt our own security strategies to fill this gap, “it will be filled by someone [else],” Beebe warned.
Human security must be incorporated into our security narrative, Beebe and Kaldor argue in their book, which means addressing the security needs of individuals and communities, not just the state. It also involves protection from violence, material deprivation, and natural disasters. They advocate for more robust global emergency forces that would act as a global national guard or police force.
Integrating Human SecurityPromoting the rule of law domestically and shifting interventions “from a war paradigm to a law paradigm” is crucial, said Kaldor. Furthermore, we must change our mindset so that we value the lives of those in foreign countries as highly as we value American or European lives. “You can’t bomb your own people,” she said.
Our greatest challenge, Beebe explained, is to shift our language from “siloed approaches” to create an interconnected, coherent security narrative. Beebe cited former General Anthony Zinni’s UMC (Ret.) incorporation of environmental security into U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) strategy during his tenure in the late 1990s as evidence of the possible success of integrated approaches. More recently, the Belgian High Command adopted a human security policy, said Kaldor.
While human security is already being taken into account on the ground, “it is very much organic, rather than institutionalized…we understand that there is an imperative but again it is the security narrative that is lacking,” said Beebe. Only by engaging with individuals and taking their needs into account with a more comprehensive security narrative can we foster lasting and sustainable security, he said.
Photo Credit: “Elderly Woman Receives Emergency Food Aid,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Demography and Women’s Empowerment: Urgency for Action?
›Why do Middle Eastern women participate in economic life at a rate lower than that of female citizens of other regions? According to Nadereh Chamlou, a senior advisor at the World Bank, restrictive social norms are to blame. At the Middle East and Environmental Change and Security Programs’ “Demography and Women’s Empowerment: Urgency for Action?” event, Chamlou argued that the region’s women must be empowered to participate in a more significant way if their countries are to effectively exploit, instead of squander, the current economic “window of opportunity.”
According to Chamlou, the region is facing a “demographic window of opportunity” where its relatively high numbers of working-age people create the potential for rapid economic growth. However, Middle Eastern countries also have the highest dependency rates in the world. Without opening more economic opportunities for women, the region’s demographic window of opportunity will not be exploited to its full advantage.
Chamlou disputed the commonly held assumptions regarding the historic lack of female participation in the Middle East’s economic sphere, such as the belief that women abstain from joining the workforce because they do not possess the necessary education and skills. She cited statistics showing that the region’s women are represented at a near-equal level as men in secondary school, and to an even greater degree at the university level. They are also studying in marketable fields, disproving the theory that they are not acquiring employable skills.
A survey conducted by the World Bank in three Middle Eastern capital cities — Amman, Jordan; Cairo, Egypt; and Sana’a, Yemen — showed that negative male attitudes regarding women working outside the home were the most significant reason for poor female representation in the workforce. Notably, negative male attitudes restricted women’s participation far more than child-rearing duties. Despite the successful efforts of most Middle Eastern states to improve female education, conservative social norms that pose a barrier to female empowerment remain in place.
Chamlou concluded her remarks with three policy recommendations: 1) Focus on medium-educated, middle-class women; 2) Undertake more efforts to bring married women into the workforce; and 3) Place a greater emphasis on changing attitudes, particularly among conservative younger men, towards women working outside the home. Such changes could more effectively utilize the Middle East’s demographic window of opportunity.
Luke Hagberg is an intern and Haleh Esfandiari is director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Obey Stikman,” courtesy of flickr user sabeth718. -
Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
›As geoengineering becomes a more politically and technologically appealing approach to addressing climate change, it is critical to heed the lessons of history and understand the limits of our control over nature, said James Fleming of Colby College. Speaking at the launch of his new book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, at the Wilson Center on October 6, Fleming brought what he called a “historically informed view of the humanities” to a growing policy discussion: the possibility of using geoengineering as a “quick fix” for the problem of climate change.
Not So Ancient History
“When facing unprecedented challenges, it’s good to take a look at the precedents,” said Fleming. He pointed to recent weather management projects conducted in China, U.S. experiments in the 1940s, and older historical discussions about geoengineering as evidence of humanity’s long fascination with “fixing of the sky.”In 2008, “they had 30,000 Chinese artillerists shooting chemicals at the clouds to keep either the venues clear or get the rain down on the weekend before the Olympics started,” Fleming said. “And they’re still doing this kind of stuff. So now there’s inter-regional tensions in China, because imagine rains comes across the country, some places get hit some places get missed, there’s intermittent showers, but now every intermittent shower is seen as a managed event where ‘you took my rain away from my farmland.’ So as soon as you start managing the sky, you start fighting about it.”
In 1839, the United States’ first meteorologist, James Espy, proposed lighting regular fires along the Appalachians to induce rainfall on the eastern seaboard. “What if Espy’s idea actually worked?” asked Fleming. “It’d very much like that Chinese story today, where there’s internecine struggles between keeping and taking the rain away from others,” he said.
The Threat of Militarization
Fleming highlighted a number of fundamental ethical concerns raised by atmospheric scientist Alan Robock:
In 1947 Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir, in conjunction with GE and the U.S. military, experimented with controlling Hurricane King by seeding it with dry ice. They expected the storm to continue its course off the coast of Florida into the Atlantic, but instead it veered west and hit Savannah, Georgia, causing considerable damage. The lesson, said Fleming, is that “you can intervene in a cloud, but you can’t point it downwind – you can’t tell it what to do.”- Who has the moral right to change the climate?
- Where would be the “global thermostat” be?
- Will it reduce incentives for mitigation?
- Could it be commercialized and/or militarized?
Other U.S. military research into geoengineering included researching the possibility of inducing west-to-east moving rain storms in Europe to help neutralize a Soviet invasion and using the magnetosphere to create selective blackouts over Moscow.
“Shall we fix the sky – is it broken?” asked Fleming. “And if it is broken should we have people with military hardware shooting at it?”
One possible institutional counter could be strengthening the UN Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), which Fleming said “has been revisited again twice, and could be revisited again if large-scale environmental modification were to get more serious – if there’s deployment of geoengineering techniques.” The treaty prohibits environmental modification “through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”
The Once and Future Earth
The Greek myth of Phaeton illustrates how old, but also flawed, the human desire to control climate really is, said Fleming. In the myth, Phaeton convinces his father, Helios, to let him drive the sun’s chariot for a day. However, Phaeton falters, lacking the strength and experience to control the reins, and Zeus intervenes to save the world from immolation. “Take up Phaeton’s reins,” said Fleming, should be interpreted as “control your carbon emissions,” rather than trying to control the sky.
We should consider geoengineering to be only an “interesting hypothetical exercise,” said Fleming, until the consequences and results of such colossal tinkering can be better assessed. “Even perfect climate prediction would lead to climate chaos, because the country that could do that could trump its competitors” in various markets, he said. However, such predictions might never be possible, considering the difficulty in modeling cultural and ethical norms, as well as the geostrategic implications – in short, the human element.
Fleming cautioned against the fundamental belief that you can accurately model the impact of geoengineering projects, reminding would-be geoengineers that “you can only have one Earth to experiment on, you don’t have a lot drosophila Earths or laboratory rat-Earths – you only have one.”
Event Resources
Sources: NASA, Toronto Star, U.S. State Department.
Image Credit: Adapted from original by Craig Phillips for The Wilson Quarterly, reproduced with permission. -
Choke Point U.S.: Understanding the Tightening Conflict Between Energy and Water in the Era of Climate Change
›Without sharp changes in investment and direction, the United States’ current strategy to produce sufficient energy — including energy generated from clean sources — will lead to severe water shortages, and cause potentially major damage to the country’s environment and quality of life. These are the conclusions from a comprehensive reporting project, “Choke Point U.S.” presented by Circle of Blue at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Sept. 22, 2010.
At the event hosted by the China Environment Forum and Environmental Change and Security Program, J. Carl Ganter, Director of Circle of Blue, Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue’s senior editor, and Jeffrey J. Fulgham, Chief Sustainability Officer and Ecomagination leader at General Electric, discussed the findings of “Choke Point: U.S.,” an analysis of the tightening linkage between the nation’s rising energy demand and finite domestic freshwater supplies. The four-month Circle of Blue project explored whether the nation’s transition to a clean-energy economy will have net dividends or deficits for U.S. freshwater resources in an era of climate change, rising population, and a projected 40-percent rise in energy demand by 2050.
“In the next decade, every single sector will need to reform due to water shortage. This is not in fifty years, this is in the next decade,” Schneider told an audience of more than 70 energy and environmental experts from the research, policy, business, and security sectors.As part of the project, Ganter said that Circle of Blue dispatched reporters to the coal fields of southern Virginia, the high plains of the Dakotas, California’s Central Valley, Midwestern farms, and other regions throughout North America. On one hand, their reporting revealed riveting narratives about the urgent contests between energy development and water supply, and how those contests can be resolved. On the other hand, the reports also recognized the extraordinarily difficult challenges that the energy-water nexus will pose to regional economies, governing practices, technological development, and the quality of natural resources.
Schneider, who directed the reporting, summarized the findings:- Unless the U.S. government plans more carefully, generating energy from clean alternatives is almost certain to consume much more water than the fossil fuels that green energy sources are meant to replace.
- The region confronting the energy-water choke point in the most dramatic fashion is the Southwest, where climate change is steadily diminishing snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains, and a prolonged drought is threatening to halt energy production at the Hoover Dam.
- The next era of hydrocarbon development is well underway in the United States, as energy companies invest billions of dollars a year to tap the “unconventional” oil sands of Canada, the oil shales of the northern Great Plains, and the gas shales of the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma, and the Upper Midwest. However, tapping each of these carbon-rich reserves is using three to four times more water than the conventional oil and gas reserves they are replacing.
- Developers in North Dakota are spending roughly $7 billion annually to drill 1,000 wells a year now into the Bakken Shale. That effort will produce 100 million barrels of oil and 100 billion cubic feet of gas this year, but will use billions of gallons of North Dakota’s scarce groundwater.
- Each of the thousands of wells drilled each year into the unconventional gas shales underlying the Northeast, Gulf Coast states, the West, and Midwest requires three million to six million gallons of water injected under high pressure to fracture the rock and enable gas to flow out of the rock.
- In Kern County, California, where the agriculture and oil industries compete for diminished supplies of water for irrigation and energy production, the winner is the oil industry.
- The energy vector in the United States points strongly to more fossil fuel consumption, not less.
- All new energy technologies except wind and solar PV will require increased freshwater withdrawals.
Jeffrey J. Fulgham of General Electric addressed the potential solutions to the tight water-energy nexus, focusing on water demand, water pricing, and the use of new technologies. According to Fulgham, smarter policies coupled with the implementation of new low-flow irrigation technology could potentially reduce the use of water for agriculture by 50 percent. Applying the same “reduce before we produce” principle to energy production could achieve significant water-use reductions in that sector as well, he said.
From General Electric’s perspective, the next five to ten years will produce significant leaps in water technology that, if combined with efficient water use, appropriate valuation of water, and more holistic policies, will be key in avoiding an impending water Choke Point.
The speakers said that the trends identified in “Choke Point U.S.” could have serious implications not just for the United States, but also for freshwater supplies around the world. In August, Circle of Blue joined with the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum to develop “Choke Point: China,” — a companion to the “Choke Point: U.S.” study — which will produce front-line research, reporting, and analysis about one of China’s most important resource competitions.
Peter Marsters is a Program Assistant with the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: “Hoover Dam overlook,” courtesy of flickr user Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton. -
The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
›The latitudinal tenth parallel — located 700 miles above the equator — constitutes a “faith-based fault line” between Islam and Christianity, said Eliza Griswold at the launch of her latest book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam at the Wilson Center on September 16, 2010. The former Wilson Center public policy scholar traveled more than 9,000 miles to six countries along the line. One quarter of the world’s Muslim population lives north of the line, while one-fourth of the world’s Christian population lives south of it.
Religious Conflict and Environmental Peacemaking
The tenth parallel is vulnerable to intense religious conflicts, exacerbated by the imposition of colonial-era national borders. Griswold collected stories from tribal leaders, presidents, and missionaries that reveal subtle linkages between religious conflict, politics, and environmental change. “Every single religious conflict I saw had a worldly trigger, whether land, oil, or water,” she said, because these groups tend to self-identify along lines of religion, “even over any kind of ethnicity.”
In the town of Abiay, Sudan, Griswold described a fight “over who’s going to get that oil, and how they’re going to divide themselves. Religion comes in as an overlay, because the north pushes the people of the south farther south by saying, ‘Guess what? We need that land, and why? Because our Muslim people need that land for their cattle,’ but underneath that land runs a river of oil.”
But in these origins of conflict Griswold finds an avenue to peace: “Environmental challenges seem to work well in areas of religious conflict” as a neutral meeting ground, she said.
For example, in the Nigerian city Kaduna, where Christians and Muslims have clashed violently, two former mortal enemies and self-avowed fundamentalists work together to deprogram the youth they trained to protect their faith through violence. At the Interfaith Reconciliation Center, Pastor James (who lost an arm to a group of Muslims) and Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa use practical aspects of living to encourage interfaith dialogue. During Griswold’s visit, it was fuel-efficient cookstoves, “because that’s one of the things Christians and Muslims fight about…whether land, water, oil.”
Such concrete examples of environmental peacemaking offer future policy options for mitigating conflicts in other areas. “The tenth parallel is one of the most sensitive environmental zones in the world…so do I think it’s replicable? Absolutely,” said Griswold.
The Changing Demographics of Religion
Today, “four out of five of the world’s one billion Muslims don’t live in the Middle East; they live in Africa and they live in Asia. More than half of them live along the tenth parallel, and about half of the world’s two billion Christians also live along the tenth parallel,” sais Griswold.
She explained that the migration of Islam to Africa stopped along the tenth parallel because of the tsetse flies and the devastating sleeping sickness they carried.
Later, colonial-era European missionaries arrived, many with “the express purpose of stopping Islam from winning Africa, from spreading south of the tenth parallel,” she said. For example, Britain’s division of Sudan restricted Muslims to the north and Christians to the south, where missionaries developed and constructed the southern Sudanese state.
“Many of these places are failed states…and religion has come in largely to fill the gaps,” said Griswold. “The world is breaking down on tribal lines and religion is the largest tribe there is, more so than ethnicity, more so than other global markers.”
Based on population projections, Griswold pointed out that “the center of Christianity, in 2050 will be on the tenth parallel…in Muslim Nigeria.”
Historical Echoes
Historically, aid and development work along the tenth parallel “was not a secular enterprise,” Griswold said, since most of the aid workers were Christian missionaries. “So there is a very long history and a very strong association between the West and Christianity in many, many places,” she pointed out.
This history has long affected American foreign policy and perceptions of the United States abroad. According to Griswold, “foreign policy [has] come to reflect the interests of selective groups of Americans.” For that reason, “we really need to call for caution in how we allow ourselves to be represented and in the diversity of voices that get out there,” she advised.
For example, the evangelical preacher Franklin Graham met with Bashir in 2003 to ask for the right to proselytize in northern Sudan. In exchange, Bashir hoped to avoid being added to “the American ‘hit list’ after Afghanistan and Iraq,” reported Griswold. Graham told her that in response he took out a George W. Bush re-election pin and said, “Mr. President, I understand you’ll be talking to my president later today. Why don’t you tell him you’re his first voter here in the Sudan?”
In the same vein, Griswold cautioned against perpetuating American ignorance of Muslim culture:We, especially in America, are extremely aware of this fight over who speaks for God. Because I think, when we see what’s happening on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or at Ground Zero, we’re looking at a struggle inside of a broader Christian context between Franklin Graham and Barack Obama over who a true Christian is. And Islam becomes the easiest bogeyman. The quickest way to whip up fear in followers is to create a shared enemy.
“The single most important finding of the book,” Griswold concluded, “was that the clashes within religions, the clashes between Christians and Christians, Muslims and Muslims, over who has the right to speak for God, are the most important and most overlooked religious conflicts going on today.”
Shawna Cuan is an intern with the Environmental Change and Security Program. Edited by Meaghan Parker.
Photo Credit: “Farmer Harvests Sorghum Seeds in Sudan,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
India’s Threat From Within
›Once a modest pro-peasant movement, India’s Maoist (or Naxalite) insurgency has become what New Delhi describes as the nation’s biggest internal security threat. The insurgency has spread to 20 of India’s 29 states, and across more than a third of the country’s 626 districts, most of them in the impoverished east. Earlier this summer, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, with assistance from the Environmental Change and Security Program, hosted, “The ‘Gravest Threat’ to Internal Security: India’s Maoist Insurgency,” to examine the insurgency’s main drivers, identify its prime tactics and strategies, and consider the best ways to respond.
Same Insurgency, Different Motivations
P.V. Ramana, a research fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, discussed the motivations that draw people to the insurgency. Some people are aggrieved by the resource exploitations they witness in their villages. Others join the Maoist cause because of the “high-handedness” of Indian security forces. Still others do so because family members are already in the movement.
Ramana underscored a “serious disconnect” at play — people have such varied reasons for joining the insurgency, yet top Maoist leaders are inspired by one sole motivation: capturing political power. Ramana also highlighted the “increasing militarization” of the insurgency. Maoists have amassed an immense arsenal of weaponry, from “crude” tools to more sophisticated weapons such as rocket launchers and landmines. Their attacks increasingly target not only government security forces, but also national infrastructure such as power lines and railways.
Andhra Pradesh: Leading By Example
K. Srinivas Reddy, a Hyderabad-based deputy editor for The Hindu, offered a case study of the insurgency in his home state, Andhra Pradesh (AP), in southeastern India. He noted that New Delhi’s response to the insurgency in AP is often cited as a success story. This response, according to Reddy, can be attributed to an “attitudinal change” within the security ranks. From the 1970s through the mid-1990s — a period of mass Maoist recruitment and escalating insurgent violence — New Delhi’s counterinsurgency measures had been “panicky,” haphazard, and reactive, Reddy said. The “turning point” came in 1996, when a new “unity of thought” emerged within the government that emphasized better training of security forces, stronger intelligence, and greater attention to economic development. Later in the 1990s, security forces further softened their strategies and tactics, emphasizing “problem-solving rather than hunting Naxals.” As a result, in the early 2000s, popular support for Maoists in AP began to wane.
Is the Government Also to Blame?
Nandini Sundar, a professor of sociology at Delhi University, focused on the human impact of both the insurgency and the government’s response. Much of her presentation centered around Bastar, a sparsely populated, heavily forested, mineral-rich district of Chhattisgarh state — one of the areas hardest-hit by the insurgency. Maoist “entrenchment” is strong, she argued, because locals are treated so dreadfully by the government. “Very poor people are jailed” for committing minor forestry transgressions, Sundar explained, while “powerful people” get away with large-scale offenses. Additionally, the police are deeply unpopular and “a source of repression.” They also regularly rape women and extort money, she said.
Sundar identified and condemned a raft of repressive government policies — from throwing locals off their land to commandeering schools — and insisted that such repression constitutes the prime reason for recruitment to the insurgency. “Injustice more than inequality” explains why people join the Maoists, she said.
The panel was far from sanguine about the future. Ramana contended that immediate prospects for peace talks between the government and the Maoists are slim, and that civil society has been “quiet” and has offered little assistance. While he predicted that some sort of resolution could be reached in “7 to 10 years,” Sundar countered that the harsh nature of New Delhi’s response means that 7 to 10 years “could finish off” not just the Maoists, but also village populations.
Compounding the challenge is what Sundar described as “official contempt” toward the culture of the Adivasi, the tribal peoples of India whose homeland comprises the insurgency’s epicenter. Dehumanizing, anti-adivasi language from the government enables New Delhi to justify the waging of forceful counterinsurgency, Sundar argued.
Glimmers of Hope
Several speakers, however, gave reasons to be guardedly optimistic about the Maoist issue. Pointing to Maoist strategies in Andhra Pradesh, Reddy suggested that the insurgency’s poor policies could spell its demise. Maoists in this state chose to escalate violence, but their inability to spread their ideology along with this violence has cost them public support, particularly in urban areas. (A recent survey by The Times of India actually found that 58 percent of those in AP think Naxalism has been good for the area – a devastating poll for those in the government who thought they were winning there – Ed.)
Sundar, meanwhile, noted that much good would come out of simply implementing long-dormant constitutional protections for the rural poor in Maoist-affected areas. This, she concluded, would reflect rights-based development, which is necessary for success — as opposed to development based on “hand-outs” by the elite, which is destined to fail.
Michael Kugelman is a program associate with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program.
For more on the resource conflict aspect of the insurgency see The New Security Beat’s, “India’s Maoists: South Asia’s ‘Other’ Insurgency.”
Sources: BBC, Foreign Policy, Times of India.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “CPI Flag (Andhra Pradesh),” courtesy of flickr user Shreyans Bhansali. -
Scarcity, Climate, Population, and Natural Resources
Integrated Analysis for Development and Security Policymakers
›Development, population, security, scarcity, climate, and natural resources: Increasingly, policymakers are realizing that the issues in this laundry list are inextricably linked. But how do policymakers break out of their institutional stovepipes to address these connections in an integrated way?
In an event hosted by the Environmental Change and Security Program on September 2, 2010, Alex Evans of New York University and Global Dashboard and Mathew Burrows of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) focused on the current state of integrated scarcity issues in the policymaking world.
A Developing Problem
“Why should we be worried with scarcity issues in the first place?” asked Evans. The crux of the problem, he said, is that people are simply consuming more across the board – particularly more energy, water, and food. In addition to general population growth, higher demand is driven by an expanding global middle class that is shifting to more Western-style diets and consuming more energy.
Globally, demand in key resources is outpacing supply:
You can’t address one of these scarcity issues without affecting another, argued Evans. In Haiti, for example, deforestation led to soil loss and erosion, thus degrading agricultural land. Deforestation also changed the country’s precipitation patterns. Together, these effects reduced food supplies even before the earthquake. Today, the UN estimates that more than 2.4 million people in Haiti are food-insecure.- Demand for oil is rising by a percentage point each year, and the International Energy Association has warned that investment is not keeping up;
- Demand for water will increase 32 percent by 2025, but one of the first impacts of climate change is expected to be less available water; and
- Demand for food will increase 50 percent by 2030, but food supplies are only growing by one percent annually.
Evans recommended that these concerns be better integrated into current development and aid efforts, focusing on five areas:
A New International System- Establishing land tenure and renewable resources;
- Exploring the overlaps between resilience and peacebuilding;
- Empowering women and stabilizing population growth;
- Improving agricultural investment; and
- Increasing general investment in the energy sector.
In addition to the physical dangers of scarcity, Evans pointed out that the perception of scarcity can drive what he sees as dangerous behavioral dynamics such as protectionism.
“Look at the way 30-plus countries slapped export restrictions on their exports of food in 2008,” said Evans. “It’s perceptions of scarcity driving irrational behavior, it’s fertile ground for panic and we need to factor that into our policymaking.” He called for a mechanism similar to NAFTA, which restricts sudden price changes, to help the global trade system become more resilient to changes in energy and food supplies.
Burrows pointed out that a big reason for the rising disparity between food, water, and energy demand and supply is the large “middle class” of emerging powers. “You are seeing this phenomenal change going on on the resource side, but at the same time, the international system is in great flux,” he said.
Scarcity will also affect the international legal system as well. “Of the world’s 263 transboundary river systems, 158 lack any kind of cooperative management framework,” said Evans, asking if they could be peacefully managed during times of scarcity. He offered another example: How will the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea handle coastlines that change with the climate? “We haven’t really begun to ‘stress test’ existing legal infrastructure, to look for these kinds of instances,” said Evans.
The biggest elephant in the “international room,” however, is how to settle the issue of carbon sharing, without which there can be little global cooperation on these issues that does not end in a zero-sum game, Evans said:For me the jury is still very much out on whether there are limits on growth per se, as a result of scarcity – I’m not convinced of that yet. But I think it is clear that there are obviously limits to how much carbon we can put in the atmosphere, how much oil there is, how much land and water is available, and so on. We can do a huge amount with efficiencies and new technologies, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think that efficiencies and new technologies get us off the hook all together from having to face up to the distributional questions, the questions of fair shares that arise in a world of limits.
Is Integrated Policymaking Possible?
Government has come a long way towards addressing scarcity, said Burrows, but serious structural issues remain because there are too many established, vested interests at stake. Often, the tactical takes priority over the strategic: “A lot of these issues, by their very nature, are long-range in character,” he said. “In my experience there are more policymakers that are simply focused on the tactical [and] fewer that take these longer-range perspectives.” In addition, he pointed out that the divide between government and the scientific community continues to impede policymakers’ understanding of the technological options available.
On the positive side, Burrows highlighted improved work by government planning offices, particularly in the intelligence community and the military. “If you compare Global Trends 2020 and Global Trends 2025…you’ll see a huge difference in terms of how we dealt with climate change, environment, and the resource issues,” said Burrows of the NIC’s reports. He said that the intelligence community is performing more long-range analyses, and that other countries like China are now starting similar global trends analyses.
Despite the silo problem, the best solution may not be in creating new government agencies and closing down others, said Evans. “I think instead perhaps we need to see the challenge as more creating shared awareness, common analysis; a common sense of objectives among existing institutional configurations. I think we may find we get better rates of return on that,” he said.
While U.S. and other governments are only beginning to grasp these issues, Burrows praised NGOs and think tanks, which “have played such a big part… in creating those sorts of networks and inter-relationships” that have raised the profile of scarcity issues.
While the political space for dealing with these issues is not there yet, Evans argued that it will eventually emerge – most likely after some kind of shock, because “after sudden-onset crises, people are often, for a short time, prepared to think the unthinkable.”
An adequate response requires readying integrated approaches to address the integrated problem of scarcity. “It’s necessary to have the solutions, so when the crisis hits, you can have some action, and I think we are doing that legwork,” said Burrows.
Sources: International Energy Agency, MSNBC, UN. -
Latin America’s Future: Emerging Trends in Economic Growth and Environmental Protection
›Economic development and environmental sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean are intrinsically connected, as evidenced by a seminar this summer organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute (on behalf of the Latin American Program), and co-sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The seminar — the culmination of six workshops and a regional meeting in Panama — presented the new Wilson Center report Emerging Trends in Environment and Economic Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean (also available in Portuguese and Spanish), which identifies key trends likely to shape the economy and natural environment in Latin America and the Caribbean over the next 10 years.
Janet Ballantyne, acting deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s Latin America and the Caribbean Bureau, stated that Latin America is “not our backyard, it’s our front yard.” It’s time that we “open the front door,” she claimed, and address the issues facing Latin America — issues that have long-term consequences for not only the region, but the United States and the world as well.
A Broad Range of Challenges
Christine Pendzich, principal author of the report and technical adviser on climate change and clean energy to USAID, covered the five interrelated economic and environmental trends that the report discusses: climate change, clean energy, indigenous and minority issues, challenges facing small economies, and urban issues. To capitalize on the Latin American demographic transition that will soon result in a large number of working age adults, Pendzich argued that the region needs to increase skilled job creation, educate workers to fill those positions, and maintain economic stability. She also declared that recent climate change trends are a “game changer,” which can fundamentally alter development paths.
While closer economic ties with China have contributed to Latin America’s above-average recovery from the global economic downturn, Pendzich argued that this economic relationship could add to the social and environmental problems facing the region. She added that insufficient innovation could lead to the continuation of the region’s dependence on commodity exports, while also noting that the inadequate economic integration and educational opportunities for indigenous and minority groups “drags everyone down.”
In terms of the regional economic trends, Eric Olson, co-author of the report and senior associate of the Mexico Institute, highlighted six challenges and opportunities for Latin America and the Caribbean. Olson claimed that the recovery of the global economy will hurt net importers of fossil fuels, especially in Central America and the Caribbean; have a negative impact on the environment; increase natural resource exploitation that may exacerbate inequality and social conflict; increase demand for primary products that will decrease the incentive to diversify Latin American economies; provide opportunities to promote environmentally friendly growth; and allow for increased utilization of existing trade benefits and intra- and sub-regional trade opportunities.
Recognizing the Need for an Integrated Response
Three of the 77 participants involved in the formation of the report explored in greater depth what Geoffrey Dabelko with the Environmental Change and Security Program described as the “integration and interconnectivity” of the five trends discussed in the report. Blair Ruble, chair of the Comparative Urban Studies Project, noted that with 78 percent of the Latin American population living in urban areas, “cities and urban life create a context in which there are opportunities for solutions to problems,” opportunities that can be used to further innovation, encourage social equality, and promote good governance.
Meanwhile, working with rural indigenous communities and minority groups can also provide valuable opportunities for change, specifically in the area of climate change, according to Judith Morrison, senior adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank’s Gender and Diversity Unit. Morrison argued that indigenous populations are the ones most affected by climate change, but also the most able to improve environmental stewardship as a result of their unique knowledge of the local geography.
Maria Carmen Lemos, associate professor at the University of Michigan, highlighted that vulnerability to climate change depends on two sets of factors: geographical location and socioeconomic factors. As a result, Lemos asserted that climate-change adaption measures must focus on poverty reduction as well as the vulnerability of specific geographic locations.
Julie L. Kunen, senior adviser to the Bureau of Policy, Planning, and Learning at USAID, applauded the report for its cross-trend analysis and called the development community to work together to address these trends in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The next step, Kunen claimed, must be to develop an ambitious strategy and “convene everyone who cares about the issues and rally them around the agenda.”
Elizabeth Pierson is an intern with the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: “The River Runs Through the Andes,” courtesy of flickr user Stuck in Customs.
