Showing posts from category climate change.
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IRP and TIME Collaborate on Indonesia’s Palm Oil Dilemma
›“Everything the company does goes against my conscience. But the question remains, who should work from the inside to inform everyone? Who should be pushing that these things are right, these things are acceptable, and these things are not?” says Victor Terran, in this video by Jacob Templin for TIME and the International Reporting Project (IRP). Templin traveled to Indonesia as part of IRP’s Gatekeeper Editor program in May 2011.
Terran is a resident of a village west of Borneo in the Kalimatan province, where he works as a field supervisor for one of the largest palm oil companies in Indonesia. Although the industry has supplied his village with much-needed employment and economic development, he worries that the influx of jobs has come at the expense of the health of the forests, agriculture, and clean rivers that sustain his village. “It’s not just about the money,” he says. “Will they sincerely keep the regulations and be fair to our community?”
An Industry with a Checkered Past
Terran’s skepticism of the industry is justified – palm companies, such as Sinar Mas, have a nasty track record of “abusing local labor and pilfering forests” for what they call “liquid gold,” says Templin.
Greenpeace released a report, “How Sinar Mas is Pulping the Planet,” in 2010 that alleged that Sinar Mas cut down important wildlife preserves, illegally planted on peat lands, and that these actions resulted in the release of considerable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and loss of critical wildlife habitat.
As a result, the company lost major contracts with Unilever, Kraft, and Nestle. Sinar Mas CEO Franky Widjaya tells Templin that the company is taking definitive steps to prevent such instances from happening again, but that change will not happen overnight.
Akhir bin Man, a manager for another palm oil company, PT Kal, says he does not want to experience a public relations nightmare similar to Sinar Mas, so his company is seeking certification from the internationally recognized Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The RSPO certification requires PT Kal to conserve nearly half of its land, use safer pesticides, and negotiate profit-sharing agreements with villagers.
Global Benefits
“These are not only vast forest landscapes which are home to species such as orangutans, elephants, and rhinos, but they’re also some of the globally most important reservoirs of carbon,” Adam Tomasek, director of the WWF Heart of Borneo Initiative, tells Templin.
Due to the wide-scale implications of disrupting such a substantial carbon sink, Tomasek and his colleagues see the destruction of these habitats as not just a local problem: “Sustainably managing the forest and carbon stocks that they contain here in Indonesia is not only important locally, not only important regionally, but an extremely important critical in the global approach to dealing with climate change,” he says.
Resisting the Juggernaut
Recognizing the inherent value of their natural resources, some villages are fighting to keep palm companies off of their land. Pak Bastarian is the head of such a village: “In my opinion, [palm] plantations are only owned by certain groups of people, and they don’t necessarily bring prosperity,” he tells Templin.
Bastarian is a reformed environmentalist whose hesitance toward the palm industry is a by-product of his own experiences – in the 1990s he worked for years running a timber company that illegally cut down trees. “I don’t know how many trees I cut down…a countless number.” Now, he uses his elected power to preserve trees like the ones he once cut down.
However, keeping the companies out of his village is an uphill battle, Templin explains. Bastarian says he faces mounting pressure from governmental officials, who make threats, and many villagers, who would rather have the jobs. He tells Templin that he even received bribes from PT Kal (an accusation they deny).
Bastarian’s position may cost him though – with elections right around the corner, he said does not know how much longer he can keep the palm companies out.
“My worry is that if our forests are cleared, our children will not be able to see what protected wood looks like, or what protected animals look like,” he tells Templin. When the palm oil companies first came, he chose to wait and see how the other villages fared before allowing them to come in. “To this day,” he says, “I’ve never changed my mind.”
Video Credit: “Indonesia’s Palm Oil Dilemma: To Cash In or Fight for the Forests?,” courtesy of the International Reporting Project. -
Laurie Mazur, RH Reality Check
Why Women’s Rights Are Key to Thriving in the Age of the “Black Swan”
›August 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Laurie Mazur, appeared on the RH Reality Check blog.
Welcome to the age of the “black swan.”
The tornado that nearly leveled the city of Joplin, Missouri in May was a black swan; so was the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan in March; and the “hundred-year floods” that now take place every couple of years in the American Midwest.
A black swan is a low-probability, high-impact event that tears at the very fabric of civilization. And they are becoming more common: Weather-related disasters spiked in 2010, killing nearly 300,000 people and costing $130 billion.
Black swan events are proliferating for many reasons – notably climate change and the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise. World population doubled in the last half-century to just under seven billion people, so there are simply more people living in harm’s way, on geologic faults and along vulnerable coastlines. As the human enterprise has grown, we have reshaped natural systems to meet human needs, weakening resilience of ecosystems, and by extension our own. In effect, we have re-engineered the planet and ushered in a new era of radical instability.
At the same time, the world’s people are increasingly linked by systems of staggering complexity and size: think of electrical grids and financial markets. What were once local disasters now reverberate across the globe.
So what does this have to do with women’s rights, you may ask? A lot, as it turns out. The great challenge of the 21st century is to build societies that can cope with the flock of black swans that are headed our way. Advancing and securing women’s rights, especially reproductive rights, is central to meeting that challenge.
Continue reading on RH Reality Check.
Laurie Mazur is the editor of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice & the Environmental Challenge, which received a Global Media Award from the Population Institute in 2010.
Sources: Munich Re.
Photo Credut: “Cygnus atratus (Black Swan),” courtesy flickr user Arthur Chapman. -
International River Basins: Mapping Institutional Resilience to Climate Change
›Institutions that manage river basins must assess their ability to deal with variable water supplies now, said Professor Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University at the July 28 ECSP event, “International River Basins: Mapping Institutional Resilience to Change.” “A lot of the world currently can’t deal with the variability that they have today, and we see climate change as an exacerbation to an already bad situation.”
Wolf and his colleagues, Jim Duncan of the World Bank and Matt Zentner of the U.S. Department of Defense, discussed their efforts to map basins at risk for future tensions over water, as identified in their coauthored World Bank report, “Mapping the Resilience of International River Basins to Future Climate Change-Induced Water Variability.” [Video Below]
Floating Past the Rhetoric of “Water Wars”
Currently, there are 276 transnational water basins that cross the boundaries of two or more countries, said Wolf. “Forty percent of the world’s population lives within these waters, and interestingly, 80 percent of the world’s fresh water originates in basins that go through more than one country,” he said. Some of these boundaries are not particularly friendly – those along the Jordan and Indus Rivers, for example – but “to manage the water efficiently, we need to do it cooperatively,” he said.
Wolf and his colleagues found that most of the rhetoric about “water wars” was merely anecdotal, so they systematically documented how countries sharing river basins actually interact in their Basins at Risk project. The findings were surprising and counterintuitive: “Regularly we see that at any scale, two-thirds of the time we do anything over water, it is cooperative,” and actual violent conflict is extremely rare, said Wolf.
Additionally, the regions where they expected to see the most conflict – such as arid areas – were surprisingly the most cooperative. “Aridity leads to institutions to help manage aridity,” Wolf said. “You don’t need cooperation in a humid climate.”
“It’s not just about change in a basin, it’s about the relationship between change and the institutions that are developed to mitigate the impacts of change,” said Wolf. “The likelihood of conflict goes up when the rate of change in a basin exceeds the institutional capacity to absorb the change.”
Expanding the Database for Risk Assessment
Oregon State University’s Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD) tracks tabular and spatial information on more than 680 freshwater treaties along 276 transboundary river basins, said Jim Duncan. The team expanded the database to include recent findings on variability, as well as the impacts of climate change on the future variability of those basins. “We have a lot more information that we are able to work with now,” Duncan said.
Analyzing the institutional vulnerability of treaties along with hydrological hazards, they found the risk of tension concentrated in African basins: The Niger, Congo, and Lake Chad basins “popped out,” said Duncan. When predicting future challenges, they found that basins in other areas, such as Southeastern Asia and Central Europe, would also be at risk.
Duncan and his colleagues were able to identify very nuanced deficiencies in institutional resilience. “Over half of the treaties that have ever been signed deal with variability only in terms of flood control, and we’re only seeing about 15 percent that deal with dry season control,” said Duncan. “It’s not the actual variability, but the magnitude of departure from what they’re experiencing now that is going to be really critical.”
Beyond Scarcity
“Generally speaking, it’s not really the water so much that people are willing to fight over, but it’s the issues associated with water that cause people to have disagreements,” said Matt Zentner. Water issues are not high on the national security agendas of most governments; they only link water to national security when it actively affects other sectors of society, such as economic growth, food availability, and electric power, he said. Agricultural production – the world’s largest consumer of water – will be a major concern for governments in the future, he said, especially in developing countries economically dependent on farming.
Some experts think that current international treaties are not enough, said Zentner. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute has said that “the existing agreements and international principles for sharing water will not adequately handle the strain of future pressures, particularly those caused by climate change.”
How transboundary water treaties fare as the climate and consumption rates change is not as simple as measuring flow; the strength of governing institutions, the parties involved, and other variables all play major roles as well, said Zentner. “When you have flexibility built within [a treaty], it allows it to be a living, breathing, and important part of solving those [water] problems.”
Download the full event transcript here.
Sources: Oregon State University, Pacific Institute.
Photo Credit: “Confluence of the Zanskar and Indus,” courtesy of Flickr user Sanish Suresh. -
Watch: Aaron Wolf on the Himalayan and Other Transboundary Water Basins, Climate Change, and Institutional Resilience
›When Aaron Wolf, professor in the Department of Geoscience at Oregon State University, and his colleagues first looked at the dynamics behind water conflict in their Basins at Risk study, they found that a lot of the issues they’d assumed would lead to conflict, like scarcity or economic growth, didn’t necessarily. Instead they found that “there is a relationship between change in a [water] basin and the institutional capacity to absorb that change,” said Wolf in this interview with ECSP. “The change can be hydrologic: you’ve got floods, droughts, agricultural production growing…or institutions also change: countries kind of disintegrate, or there are new nations along basins.”
However, these changes happen independently. “Whether there is going to be conflict or not depends in a large part to what kind of institutions there are to help mitigate for the impacts of that change,” explained Wolf.
“If you have a drought or economic boom within a basin and you have two friendly countries with a long history of treaties and working together, the likelihood of that spiraling into conflict is fairly low. On the other hand, the same droughts or same economic growth between two countries that don’t have treaties, or there is hostility or concern about the motives of the other, that then could lead to settings that are more conflictive.”
Wolf stressed the importance of understanding hydrologic variability in relation to existing treaties around the world. After carefully examining hundreds of treaties, he and his colleagues created a way of measuring their variability to try to find potential hotspots.
“We know how variable basins are around the world; we know how well treaties can deal with variability. You put them together and you have some areas of concern: You may want to look a little closely to see what is happening as people try to mitigate these impacts,” said Wolf.
“We know that one of the overwhelming impacts of climate change is that the world is going to get more variable: Highs are going to be higher, and lows are going to be lower,” Wolf said.
Wolf used the Himalayan basins to illustrate the importance of overseeing the potential effects of climate change and institutional capacity. “There are a billion and half people who rely on the waters that originate in the Himalayas,” he pointed out. Because of climate change, the Himalayas may experience tremendous flooding, and conversely, extreme drought.
Unfortunately, Wolf said, “the Himalayan basins…do not have any treaty coverage to deal with that variability.” Without treaties, it is difficult for countries to cooperate and setup a framework for mitigating the variability that might arise. -
Backdraft: Minimizing Conflict in Climate Change Responses
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“What are the conflicts or risks associated with response to climate change?” asked ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko at the Wilson Center on July 18. “How we respond to climate change may or may not contribute to conflict,” he said, but “at the end of the day, we need to do no harm.”
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Sajeda Amin on Population Growth, Urbanization, and Gender Rights in Bangladesh
›“One of the reasons why population grows very rapidly in Bangladesh is women get married very early and have children very early,” the Population Council’s Sajeda Amin told ECSP in a recent interview. “So even though they are only having two children, they are having them at an average age of around 20. As demographers would say, women ‘replace’ themselves very rapidly.”
Largely through the promotion of contraceptive use, family planning programs implemented over the past 35 years by the Bangladeshi government and a variety of NGOs have helped lower the country’s total fertility rate to 2.7 from 6.5 in the mid-1970s. To build on this progress, the Population Council has joined a consortium of other organizations – including the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, Marie Stopes International, and We Can End All Violence Against Women – to launch the Growing Up Safe and Healthy (SAFE) project in Amin’s native Dhaka and other Bangladeshi cities.
Currently nearing the completion of its first year, the four-year initiative has several aims, among them increasing access to reproductive healthcare services for adolescent girls and young women and bolstering social services to protect those populations from (and offer treatment for) gender-based violence. The project also looks to strengthen laws designed to reduce the prevalence of child marriage – a long-standing Bangladeshi institution that keeps population growth rates high while denying many young women the opportunity to pursue economic and educational advancement.
A Focus on Gender and Climate
Amin says the SAFE project boasts several qualities that collectively set the initiative apart from similar-minded programs in Bangladesh dealing with gender and poverty. These include a strong research component incorporating quantitative and qualitative analysis; the holistic nature of the program, which incorporates educational outreach, livelihood development, and legal empowerment; a commitment to working with both male and female populations; and an emphasis on interventions targeting young people, with the hope that such efforts will allow adolescents to make better-informed decisions about future relationships and reproductive health, thus reducing the likelihood of gender-based violence.
Finally, while many existing gender-based programs focus exclusively on rural communities, Amin points out that the SAFE project also stands apart because of its focus on the country’s rapidly expanding urban areas. To date, the initiative is focusing many of its early interventions in a Dhaka slum that has seen an influx of rural migrants in recent years due to climate-change impacts in the country’s low-lying coastal areas.
“A lot of the big problems in Bangladesh now are climate-driven in the sense of creating mass movements out of areas that are particularly vulnerable or have been hit by a major storm,” Amin said. “Usually these are people who, once they lose their homes and their livelihoods, will have no choice but to move to urban areas, and that’s a process that is kind of a big outstanding issue in Bangladesh now.”
By building programming around girls and young women in such communities, the SAFE project is looking to spark change from the bottom up, prioritizing the unmet health and social needs of some of Bangladesh’s most vulnerable populations.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: Global Post, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (Bangladesh), Shaikh and Becker (1985). -
Reducing Health Inequities to Better Weather Climate Change
›In an article appearing in the summer issue of Global Health, Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), brings to light what she calls the starkest statistic in public health: the vast difference in the mortality rates between rich and poor countries. For example, the life expectancy of a girl is doubled if she is born in a developed country rather than in a developing country. Chan writes that efforts to improve health in developing countries now face an additional obstacle: “a climate that has begun to change.”
Climate change’s effect on health has increasingly moved into the spotlight over the past year: DARA’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor measures the toll that climate change took in 2010 on human health, estimating some 350,000 people died last year from diseases related to climate change. The majority of these deaths took place in sub-Saharan Africa, where weak health systems already struggle to deal with the disproportionate disease burden found in the region. The loss of “healthy life years” as a result of global environmental change is predicted to be 500 times greater in poor African populations than in European populations, according to The Lancet.
The majority of these deaths are due to climate change exacerbating already-prominent diseases and conditions, including malaria, diarrhea, and malnutrition. Environmental changes affect disease patterns and people’s access to food, water, sanitation, and shelter. The DARA Climate Vulnerability Monitor predicts that these effects will cause the number of deaths related to climate change to rise to 840,000 per year by 2030.
But few of these will be in developed countries. With strong health systems in place, they are not likely to feel the toll of a changing environment on their health. Reducing these inequities can only be achieved by alleviating poverty, which increases the capacity of individuals, their countries, and entire regions to adapt to climate change. It would be in all of our interests to do just this, writes Chan: “A world that is greatly out of balance is neither stable nor secure.”
Sarah Lindsay is a program assistant at the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health and a Masters candidate at American University.
Sources: DARA, Global Health, The Lancet, World Health Organization.
Image Credit: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the World Health Organization. -
Lakis Polycarpou, Columbia Earth Institute
The Year of Drought and Flood
›August 1, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Lakis Polycarpou, appeared on the Columbia Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog.
On the horn of Africa, ten million people are now at risk as the region suffers the worst drought in half a century. In China, the Yangtze – the world’s third largest river – is drying up, parching farmers and threatening 40 percent of the nation’s hydropower capacity. In the U.S. drought now spreads across 14 states creating conditions that could rival the dust bowl; in Texas, the cows are so thirsty now that when they finally get water, they drink themselves to death.
And yet this apocalyptic dryness comes even as torrential springtime flooding across much of the United States flows into summer; even as half a million people are evacuated as water rises in the same drought-ridden parts of China.
It seems that this year the world is experiencing a crisis of both too little water and too much. And while these crises often occur simultaneously in different regions, they also happen in the same places as short, fierce bursts of rain punctuate long dry spells.
The Climate Connection
Most climate scientists agree that one of the likely effects of climate will be an acceleration of the global water cycle, resulting in faster evaporation and more precipitation overall. Last year, the Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences published a study which suggested that such changes may already be underway: According to the paper, annual fresh water flowing from rivers into oceans had increased by 18 percent from 1994 to 2006. It’s not hard to see how increases in precipitation could lead to greater flood risk.
At the same time, many studies make the case that much of the world will be dramatically drier in a climate-altered future, including the Mediterranean basin, much of Southwest and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the western two-thirds of the United States among other places.
Continue reading on State of the Planet.
Sources: Associated Press, The New York Times, Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences, Reuters, Science Magazine, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Photo Credit: “Drought in SW China,” courtesy of flickr user Bert van Dijk.
