Showing posts from category *Blog Columns.
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New Study Finds Lower Population Growth Could Cut Carbon Emissions
›A new study, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” finds that slowing population growth by 2050 would meet 16-29 percent of the reductions in carbon emissions necessary to avoid dangerous climate change — roughly equivalent to 1-1.5 “stabilization wedges.” Published in PNAS this week, the article reports the results of a comprehensive assessment, led by Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), of the impact of demographic changes, including urbanization and aging, on global carbon emissions.
The authors conclude that policies designed to meet the substantial unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services, particularly in the United States and developing countries, would lead to emission reductions that amount to about one-half of a wedge. These results suggest that “family planning policies would have a substantial environmental cobenefit,” they write.
O’Neill will discuss the study’s results and recommendations on Friday morning at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference in Missoula, MT. The panel, “Population, Climate, and Consumption,” which I helped organize, will be moderated by Ken Weiss of the Los Angeles Times. Weiss wrote on the Times’ Greenspace blog that “the study offers a novel way to quantify how changes in human population influence the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
To tease out the complex connections between climate, population, and consumption, O’Neill and his coauthors looked beyond population size to delve into household location and composition. They found that urbanization and aging trends will have differential–and potentially offsetting–impacts on carbon emissions.
Aging, particularly in industrialized countries, will reduce carbon emissions by up to 20 percent in the long term. On the other hand, urbanization, particularly in developing countries could increase emissions by 25 percent.
The Taboo Against Mixing Condoms and Climate
Most coverage to date, including the widely distributed press release from the National Science Foundation, overlooked the study’s recommendations to increase access to family planning and meet unmet need for contraception as a climate mitigation strategy.
Unfortunately, that’s the case in many venues: “You don’t see policymakers talking about in the climate negotiations,” climate scientist Richard Somerville told Weiss. Family planning has long been off the table–Mother Jones recently called it “The Last Taboo” – especially at the big climate conferences. At Copenhagen, it was only discussed at side events; NYT’s Andrew Revkin called it the “missing ‘P’ word.“
One of this year’s panelists, Laurie Mazur, who last year published, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge, will likely explore the environmental cobenefits of improving women’s reproductive health. In addition to mitigation, some developing countries have identified family planning as a strategy in their national climate adaptation plans.
Growth Story: Population at SEJ
Friday’s panel is the only one to consider population’s role in environmental issues at this year’s SEJ conference, the premier event for U.S. environmental journalists. Given the issue’s historic marginalization within environmental community, that’s not necessarily surprising.
But there appears to be a growing interest among reporters: last year’s SEJ panel on population moderated by Tim Wheeler of The Baltimore Sun drew a standing-room-only crowd, following a popular 2008 SEJ panel on the topic moderated by Steve Curwood of Living on Earth.
More surprisingly, Friday’s panel is one of less than a handful at this year’s conference to address international environmental issues. I hope next year’s conference in Miami will draw on that city’s vibrant immigrant community and short flights to Latin America and the Caribbean to bring in more international flavor.
Sources: DotEarth, Greenspace, National Science Foundation, Population Action International, UNFPA. -
Youth on Fire at UN Climate Talks in Tianjin
›For the past week, as part of the Adopt a Negotiator program, I got the chance to observe many of the negotiations of the latest UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) intersessional meeting that took place in Tianjin, China. In many ways it was rather humdrum. I observed as negotiators debated changing agendas and the mandate of contact groups rather than the issues themselves, and made many of the same, tired position speeches again and gain.
When controversial issues did rise to the fore, they felt like more of the same old, same old: arguments between China and the United States about who is doing more to stall the talks and who should make legally binding emissions cuts; developed countries carving enormous loopholes into the LULUCF; the greenhouse gas inventory sector covering emissions and removals of greenhouse gases resulting from land use. But the dry nature of the talks concealed the more important truth – that the negotiators are not just discussing acronyms, but human lives, which could be catastrophically altered due to the effects of climate change.
The Adopt a Negotiator program is supported by the Global Campaign for Climate Action, a group of young people from countries around the world who come to the UNFCCC meetings to track the delegations from their own countries and share what is happening at the negotiations through social networking tools (be sure to check out our blogs).
If the UN climate talks fail, and if countries cannot muster the political will to make substantial economy-wide changes and greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the results for the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet will be catastrophic.
Last week was the first time that I have ever experienced any kind of UN negotiation first hand, and some of what I saw was incredibly depressing. Mitigation efforts are especially in danger, as disagreements primarily between the United States and China about who should agree to emissions cuts and international reporting and verification requirements sharpened and intensified.
But there were many bright spots as well. Negotiators are very close to making the final decisions about an international architecture for technology transfer to help the most vulnerable and poorest countries adapt to the effects of climate change and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. They also spent the week narrowing and refining draft text with regards to climate finance and an international architecture to disburse “Green Funds,” and hopefully will be able to make final decisions at COP-16 in Cancun this November 29th through December 10th. These steps are small examples of potential good news for the people who will suffer, and are most likely already suffering, from climate change’s global impacts.
Unfortunately, negotiators are already in agreement that the only bright spots that we are likely to see at COP-16 are small items such as these. Almost no one believes that there is any chance that countries will agree on a final, legally binding text to reduce carbon emissions, and negotiators have instead pushed off this decision until the next Conference of the Parties (COP) in South Africa in 2011. Instead, the near-universal buzz at the conference was about a “balanced package.” Although the phrase in reality means something slightly different to everyone who uses it, it is generally understood to refer to a set of decisions on issues like climate finance, technology transfer, initiatives to cut back on deforestation, and putting some of the decisions made under the Copenhagen Accord into legally binding text, like “fast start” finance measures to the developing world.
In many ways the Tianjin session was itself a “balanced package” – a set of interactions and experiences that was both deeply discouraging and incredibly uplifting. One of the personally uplifting moments for me was having the honor of delivering a short intervention on the first day of the opening plenary on behalf of youth NGOs around the world (known as YOUNGOs). In the words I read, which had been drafted by a group of Chinese youth, all the particulars of policy were stripped away and the only thing that remained was the frustration – and also the hopes – of young people around the world (those who will actually experience the effects of climate change well within their lifetimes if UNFCCC negotiators don’t work harder to reach a consensus).
Through the disappointments of Copenhagen to the slow-moving intersessionals throughout this year, many pundits have cynically declared the UNFCCC process dead. This is certainly not the case. But if they are truly serious about saving the planet from climate change’s most serious impacts, negotiators will certainly have to work harder in Cancun.
Alex Stark is a Program Assistant at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, working on the Peaceful Prevention of Deadly Conflict Program. She attended the Tianjin negotiations as part of the Adopt a Negotiator team.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “COP11_lo,” courtesy of Neil Palmer and flickr user CIAT – International Center for Tropical Agricultu. -
The “Condom King” speaks at TEDxChange on Poverty Reduction and a “9th MDG”
›“We have now found the weapon of mass protection,” said Mechai Viravaidya (a.k.a. the “Condom King”) at the recent TEDxChange event in New York. Viravaidya is the founder and chairman of the Population and Community Development Association and a former senator of Thailand. He spoke about his innovative approaches to addressing Thailand’s once high rates of poverty, child mortality, and HIV through the promotion of family planning and condom use.
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Tracking the End Game: Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement
›The next nine months are critical for Sudan. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) sets January 9, 2011, as the date when southern Sudanese will vote on secession or unity, and the people of disputed Abeyei will vote on whether to be part of North or South Sudan. Between now and July 2011, when the provisions of the CPA come to an end, we could see the birth of the new country of South Sudan—or a return to a North-South war if the referendum is stalled, botched, or disputed. (Few currently expect that a unity vote will create the “New Sudan” envisioned by the late John Garang.)
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Tackling Youth Unemployment, Instability in Kenya
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Today, Kenya’s youth unemployment rate stands at 65 percent, among the highest in the world. Three in five unemployed Kenyans are 15 – 35 years old. The situation is exacerbated by a shrinking economy, political instability, and pervasive income inequality.
Significantly, youth are engaged in the informal sector, which is largely unregulated and subjects workers to low earnings and long hours, without any formal contract. Suffering under a slow-growing economy, youth, whether well educated or uneducated, have increasingly turned to crime and violence, serving as watu wa mkono (handymen) to the ruling elite and intimidating and harassing their political opponents.Violence during Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections left approximately 1,133 people dead and 650,000 displaced from their land. Many of these atrocities were committed by youth, for sums as low as $6. With the 2012 elections fast approaching, Kenya risks renewed violence if its daunting youth unemployment rate is not properly addressed.
Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government has established the Youth Enterprise Development Fund (YEDF) and Kazi kwa Vijana (KKV), which means “jobs for youth,” to boost employment and entrepreneurship among people 18 to 35 years old.
Through YEDF, groups of up to 12 people can submit a business plan and apply for funding, as well as other services such as training, mentorship, and market access. The fund also connects youth with local and international job markets. KKV facilitates access to temporary, labor-intensive jobs for generally low wages, and also offers some business training.
Given the high poverty levels among youth in Kenya, temporary jobs can help young people learn the marketable skills they need to find decent work. But it’s not a long-term solution, as these low-paying jobs can also trap people in poverty, making crime and violence seem like the only viable exit.
Kenya would do well to learn from other countries’ efforts, where similar programs have long existed. For example, Italy’s Imprenditorialita Giovanile, or “Young Entrepreneurs’ Company,” and the UK’s Prince Trust exist solely to support young people’s start-up businesses.
Like Kenya’s efforts, these two programs provide training and mentoring to young people. However, they also have autonomy from their respective governments, which gives them freedom to operate without political interference and burdensome bureaucracy. Services are delivered by highly competent, successful entrepreneurs, who inspire youth to become entrepreneurs, not as an alternative to joblessness, but as a genuine career path with financial reward and work satisfaction. Through these programs, youth have managed to start and sustain viable businesses, and attain financial independence and stability.
Compared to these cases, Kenya’s KKV and YEDF fall short. Their activities overlap, and their objectives are too broad, which makes them unachievable within a reasonable timeframe.
They are also constrained by heavy government control. The prime minister’s office oversees KKV, while the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs manages YEDF. As a consequence, the programs are burdened by politics rather than buoyed with professionalism.
The tendency to treat youth as a homogenous group could isolate some young people who cannot fulfill YEDF’s requirements, such as a business development plan, a registered group, or an existing bank account. The rules should be more flexible and needs-based in order to benefit some of the needy and illiterate youth who require more rigorous training and support to succeed.
Finally, the programs’ near-sighted focus on temporary employment is but a bandage; Kenya needs long-term strategies to enable youth to access more rewarding and productive work.
Fundamentally, the problem requires properly planned, well-structured, and broad-based programs, and so far the government seems to be tinkering at the superficial level without a long-term, comprehensive plan. Accelerating economic growth is central to creating employment opportunities for youth, as well as providing market-driven education, training, and life skills.
In order to make a smooth transition to adulthood, young people require decent work and the ability to actively contribute to economic and political development and stability. Short of this, youth will remain at the margin of the economy, to serve as the violent watu wa mkono in 2012 and beyond.
Margaret Wamuyu Muthee is Programs Manager for Kenya’s University of Nairobi Center for Human Rights and Peace, and is currently an Africa Program Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Promulgation,” courtesy of flickr user ActionPixs (Maruko). -
Nicholas Kristof on Maternal Health Challenges and Opportunities
›After a Wilson Center Global Health Initiative event last year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the importance of maternal health issues and what can be done about it.
“You just know that if men had uteruses and were dying at this rate, every country would have a Minister of Paternal Mortality, the Security Council would be meeting…this would be a real international priority,” said Kristof. “It just should not happen that one woman dies a minute for reproducing.” He recently revisited this topic with a column titled, “Birth Control Over Baldness.”
The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes. -
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. -
Ethiopian Case Study Illustrates Shortcomings of “Land Grab” Debate
›The lines have been drawn in the “land grab” debate: Will foreign investors displace small, local land-holders, damaging the environment with exploitive practices? Or will a combination of infrastructure investment and employment opportunities lead to a virtuous development cycle?
Recent reports suggest that the former is more likely than the latter (e.g., see the Oakland Institute, GRAIN, and the Food and Agriculture Organization). In each case, the proposed antidote is the typical wish-list: Boost institutional capacity to ensure that agreements are honored, environmental and labor regulations are observed, and local populations are given a stake in the process.
While it incorporates a broader swath of data and country case studies, the recent World Bank report, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Results?” largely recycles this tired diagnosis, as noted recently by Michael Kugelman on The New Security Beat.
But the two months we spent in the Amhara and Oromia regions of Ethiopia, surveying smallholders and profiling large-scale commercial farms, left us with a different impression. After completing 1,200 pages of surveys on smallholder livelihood strategies and farm management practices with 120 local farmers, as well as six profiles of private investors’ farms, we identified several key points that these reports missed.
Strong Laws Don’t Always Scare Investors Away
The World Bank report focuses on the belief that countries with weak institutions attract predatory investors, who use lack of oversight to their advantage by exploiting local populations, abusing regulations, etc. Ethiopia, however, has high institutional capacity relative to other African nations, yet still receives enormous land investment.
Every commercial farm we profiled received yearly visits from multiple regional and federal agencies investigating regulatory compliance. Moreover, two of the farms had been sold to their current owners because the previous business ventures failed to observe the terms of their business proposals. These terms included bringing certain amounts of foreign exchange into the country and hitting export targets.
Ethiopia attracts investors for other reasons. Official documents tout the diversity of its micro-climates, but we suspect investors are more likely drawn by a lease rate roughly 100x lower per hectare than the African average.
Given the emphasis on boosting institutional capacity as a means to ensure positive development outcomes, it’s too bad that the World Bank didn’t choose to conduct one of its case studies on Ethiopian commercial farms. Such a study could provide grounds for discussing what investment governed by stronger institutions would look like.
An Incomplete Paradigm
The potential for population displacement (with or without compensation), job creation, and infrastructure development is a well known and well studied paradigm. The World Bank report investigates the occurrence of these phenomena in its case studies, and the results are unsurprising: Sometimes things go OK and sometimes they go badly. This same story emerges in studies of foreign investments of all stripes: logging, oil and natural gas extraction, precious mineral mining, among others.
A more inventive analysis of land grabs could yield meaningful findings, however. Investors and smallholders are engaged in the same activity — farming — and in the case of cereal farms, they are producing the same crops. The resulting overlap allows for a multitude of creative interactions between smallholders and investors that should receive more attention.
Two of the investors we interviewed used these creative interactions to promote their business plans to regional development authorities. One farm sold certified seed to local farmers; another imported an irrigation system new to the region and plans to introduce it to the broader community. They each rented farm equipment to smallholders and held demonstration days to discuss farming techniques and new crop types with community members. One had already introduced new crops to the adjacent village via an “outgrowing” scheme and was exporting smallholder products from the farm, thus diversifying livelihoods for local farming households.
These are, of course, anecdotal accounts. But they suggest a broader point: More attention must be given to “secondary” benefits like technology and knowledge transfers, outgrowing or renting schemes, and informal interactions. Given the unique attributes of large-scale commercial investment in the agricultural sector, which continues to provide most Ethiopians’ livelihoods, these secondary benefits are the mechanism through which livelihoods seem most likely to be transformed. In this case, the preoccupation with displacement, formal compensation, jobs created, and infrastructure development only leads to generalized and ineffective analysis.
Our smallholder surveys and commercial farm profiles point to one conclusion: The commercial farms in our sample that engaged most fully in those creative interactions will generate substantial benefits for local populations over the next 5-10 years (quantitative analysis to be published in our final report this spring). The particular interactions taking place between these smallholders and commercial farms directly alleviate the primary constraints to smallholder livelihoods identified by our survey, such as lack of mechanization, lack of access to inputs, and inability to generate cash through sale of crops.
It’s far from clear that the World Bank analysis would have captured this reality in Ethiopia given its limited focus. Ideas like outgrowing receive scant attention, and are usually only discussed in hypothetical terms or in parentheticals – a trend the World Bank report unfortunately continued.
Incorporate Case Studies and Put Livelihoods First
So while our limited analysis may not enable us to speak broadly about the effects of commercial farming, we can offer two observations.
First, the creative arrangements that accompany the introduction of commercial farming must be front and center of any study. The study should be grounded in an understanding of the livelihood constraints faced by local populations, followed by an analysis of the types of interactions between commercial farms and smallholders that may affect those constraints, including not only traditional effects, such as displacement and employment, but also atypical impacts, such as improved seed distribution and technology demonstration.
Second, since Ethiopia has enough institutional capacity to be selective when choosing commercial investors (and to ensure they adhere to the terms), it embodies a number of principles the promoted by the World Bank report. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi views large-scale private farms as one piece of a broader commercialization effort to revolutionize smallholder agriculture, as described in the government’s development plan, PASDEP. This effort is in keeping with the report’s basic recommendation that host governments ensure that investment is compatible with domestic needs.
Understanding the phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions should be at the top of the international research agenda. The effects on livelihood security and food security (in both developed and developing countries), as well as the potential contributions to resource conflicts, place such land deals among the most consequential recent trends in the international arena.
We believe a new framework must be brought to the analysis of land grabs. To effectively implement this framework, important but overlooked cases, such as we found in Ethiopia, should be included in future studies.
Nathan Yaffe and Laura Dismore are students at Carleton College, who just returned from researching commercial farming in Ethiopia. They can be reached at yaffen@carleton.edu and dismorel@carleton.edu.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “P8060261,” courtesy of flickr user Ben Jarman.
