“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.

A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”

In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.

Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.

In a foreign policy speech on Tuesday attended by several of the New Security Beat’s authors, Senator Barack Obama said the danger posed by the price of oil “is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next 50 years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline. This is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern—this is a national security crisis.”

“The US security community has been looking at environment and security links for much longer than the current attention around climate/security linkages would suggest,” ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko told the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, which published a piece examining climate change and national security earlier this week.

“The next president must strengthen civilian professional capacity to carry out diplomatic and development operations. More funding is needed to address the current 17 to 1 spending imbalance in staffing and resources between defense and diplomatic/development operations, and to reduce the use of contractors in foreign assistance programs,” argues a report from Refugees International, U.S. Civil-Military Imbalance for Global Engagement: Lessons From the Operational Level in Africa.

An opinion piece by Laurie Mazur and Priscilla Huang argues against blaming immigrants for environmental degradation. “Environmental impact is determined not just by our numbers, but by how we use resources—our systems of production and consumption and the policies that shape them,” they write. “It’s laughable to blame immigrants and population growth for traffic, as the [anti-immigrant] ads do, without mentioning, say, our chronic neglect of public transportation.”

The authors of an article in the most recent issue of Science report that population tends to grow, not decline, around protected areas. Population growth means increased donor funding for conservation programs, they say, but high population density can negatively impact the effectiveness of such programs.

The latest volume of the journal Population and Environment, featuring contributions from former ECSP speakers Lori Hunter, Roger-Mark De Souza, and Judy Oglethorpe, examines the links between the environment and HIV/AIDS in Africa, calling for greater attention to the connections between these seemingly disparate issues.

Population growth rates and conservation are closely and inextricably linked, says a new UN Population Fund fact sheet that argues that slowing growth rates worldwide through family planning programming is a vital, and currently underfunded, component of the fight against environmental degradation.

“Countries have historically been quick to rattle their sabers over water, but they have nevertheless been content to keep them sheathed,” write ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and ECSP Program Assistant Karin Bencala in “Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities,” published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs (PDF previews), which focuses on global water issues.

Mark Jenkins explores the July 2007 murders of the Virunga mountain gorillas in a piece in National Geographic. The piece is accompanied by a stunning photo slideshow by photographer Brent Stirton.

The Toronto Star takes a look at female feticide and infanticide in India, and how young women are now being trafficked from rural areas to serve as brides in areas where the gender gap is widest.

Climate change is responsible for an upswing in malaria in Kenya’s highlands, reports IPS News. “There is a clear correlation between climatic variations and malaria epidemics,” said Dr. Willis Akhwale, head of Kenya’s National Malaria Control Programme.

A New York Times article explores the causes of low birthrates in Europe—and particularly low ones in southern Europe.

The World Health Organization has released Safer water, better health, the first report to provide country-level estimates of the burden of disease caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene.

For the past several months, I have been working with a team of other researchers in partnership with WaterAid and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to find new techniques for measuring the benefits of improved water and sanitation in rural Madagascar (draft report). Studies of the impact of water and sanitation programs tend to focus on health treatment costs avoided and time saved obtaining water, but our field visits and analysis suggest that water and sanitation development projects can also improve food security, education, and local community governance, and may even introduce new forms of conflict resolution.

After our team’s initial field visit to rural communities around Ambositra, a small commercial town several hours south of the capital, we decided to broaden our scope of analysis. We had noticed that livelihoods and community management were dramatically different in villages with clean water nearby than in villages whose residents continued to walk long distances to sources of questionable quality.

By conducting focus group interviews with community organizations, community councils, and other community leaders, we discovered that the new water projects led to the creation of water committees to oversee the maintenance and long-term use of these services. As these committees gained respect and legitimacy within their communities, they encouraged and managed additional community improvement projects. For instance, one committee collected contributions and organized the construction of a community storage facility for surplus rice harvests (which also stored the tax payments for the new water system, which are often made in rice, not currency). In another village, the water committee members coordinated efforts to self-finance and build a new one-room primary school, which subsequently required the government to fund water and sanitation facilities for the school. This brought water services to an entire new section of the village in addition to the school.

The committees’ direct interaction with the users of the tap stands increased the communities’ trust in the committees, a fact reflected in statements gathered through household surveys. Several water committees organized their communities to participate in a regional economic fair, showcasing their vegetable production and arts and crafts, an opportunity that other villages did not seize.

In addition, the committees codified conflict resolution mechanisms in their founding committee rules, formalizing a crucial tool for mediating conflicts between community members over water. These committees are also empowered to resolve water-related conflicts that existed prior to the project. The water committees are evidence of the first institutions developing in these small communities. Although our report includes suggestions for measuring some of the diverse impacts of improved water and sanitation, such as education and livelihoods, further questions remain: How do we measure the impact of water and sanitation projects on governance and natural resource management? Are there ways to quantify community-level social changes?

Food security is another area that changed after the introduction of improved water sources. The close proximity of water to the houses dramatically increased the variety and quantity of vegetables grown. Our interviews revealed a dramatic upsurge in the cultivation of high-value crops that are more sensitive to rainfall variability. The reliable small-scale irrigation made possible by the water project allowed farmers to cultivate crops that had previously been off-limits to them. These new crops diversified production and decreased dependence on other foods for basic consumption, promoting better nutrition and sustainable harvests. In addition, one water committee actively sought out secondary water sources in order to ensure sufficient water flow throughout the dry season, further increasing households’ food security.

There are additional indicators that we did not have time to adequately study and quantify, including increased environmental awareness; the impact on gender dynamics and women’s earning power; the psychological impact of clean water and improved sanitation; and higher earning potential due to higher rates of school attendance and the attainment of more advanced education levels. The team hopes that additional work will be carried out on these and other potential benefits of water and sanitation projects, so that governments, donors, NGOs, and private citizens will see that these projects are not just investments in pipelines and latrines, but in food security, governance, education, economies, and conflict resolution—all of which contribute to human dignity and security.

Alex Fischer is a policy associate at WaterAid America, where he works on the management and development of water resources. He is also involved with several projects focusing on environmental governance in post-conflict settings. He holds a master of international affairs degree from Columbia University.

Photo: A water system in a village near Ambositra has multiple uses, including drinking water, small-scale irrigation, clothes washing, and composting. Courtesy of Alex Fischer.

“The geopolitics of the twenty-first century may well be the geopolitics of scarcity—of land, of food, of water, of energy,” write the authors of Environmental Change and the New Security Agenda: Implications for Canada’s security and environment, a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The report says current approaches to environmental issues are “short-sighted” and calls for international acknowledgement that the environment is not a “soft” security issue.

“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told The Guardian in an interview. He warned that the number of people displaced is rising dramatically and will continue to do so, and that global funding has failed to keep pace with the growing challenge. He also noted that existing legal structures to manage refugee flows are out of touch with the increasing influence of climate change.

“The world’s poorest of the poor live in the toughest areas of the planet—the drylands,” says recent ECSP speaker Masego Madzwamuse in the BBC’s latest Green Room feature. She argues that “humanitarian and food relief follow the TV headlines,” and that only sustained and concerted efforts respecting indigenous experience and wisdom will be able to ease the plight of the world’s “dryland dwellers.”

The 2008 EPD WaterAid Madagascar team at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs presented its findings in WaterAid Madagascar: Valuating Economic and Social Impacts of Improved Water and Sanitation Services. The team found that “Madagascar’s development goals could be significantly advanced by adequate water and sanitation services” and encouraged increased public awareness of the links between access to safe water and sanitation services and economic development.

The Population Council has released a new working paper, “Fertility transitions in developing countries: Progress or stagnation?” While recent declines in fertility levels in developing countries have led many to assume that the trend will continue, the paper finds that fertility rates in many countries have in fact stalled, a trend that could have long-term security implications worldwide.

An alert from USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network warns that despite generally good rains, “conflict, livestock disease, and high prices for cereals and other essential goods have minimized the extent to which pastoralists can benefit from these rains, undermining their recovery from drought and elevating their food insecurity, which is evidenced by alarming rates of child malnutrition in several areas.”

The UN Security Council held a special session on gender-based violence this week, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof applauded the Council’s (belated) attention to the issue. ECSP recently sponsored an event on gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.

East Timor’s citizens are demanding that the government revoke an MOU signed with an Indonesian company that would grant the company 100,000 hectares of land to plant sugarcane.

New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century, a report from the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, was unveiled at a packed House Foreign Affairs Committee event this week.

The Economist continues to brush off those who worry that there are too many people consuming too many resources on Earth: “If global growth and development continue, worries about overpopulation may, in hindsight, seem a uniquely 20th century phenomenon.”

“Countries that stagnate are less able and sometimes less willing to help address transnational issues, many of which originate within their borders, including illegal migration; trafficking in narcotics, weapons, and persons; health threats such as HIV/AIDS and avian flu; and environmental concerns such as loss of biodiversity,” says USAID’s economic growth strategy.

“We know that the cruel indignities of life without clean water, adequate sanitation, sustainable livelihood, or democratic governance can deny us our basic freedoms as surely as any despotic regime,” says Condoleezza Rice, quoted in USAID’s report Expanding the Impact of Foreign Assistance Through Public-Private Alliances.

The Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa, headed by Wilson Center collaborator K. Y. Amoako, presented its report Securing Our Future to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon earlier this week.