Christian Aid’s “Growing Pains: The Possibilities and Problems of Biofuels” finds that “huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.”

The famous mathematician John von Neumann called climate engineering a “thoroughly ‘abnormal’ industry,” arguing that large-scale interventions, including solar radiation management, were not necessarily rational undertakings and could have “rather fantastic effects” on a scale difficult to imagine. Tinkering with the Earth’s heat budget or the atmosphere’s general circulation, he said, “will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done”—and possibly leading to “forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined.”

I have a few responses to Will Rogers’ thoughtful critique of my report, “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era.”

Rogers says that “the report could be read as inferring that the Department of Defense (DoD) has an unnecessarily oversized budget”: that’s true. I think a single country that spends 43 percent of the world’s total military budget—more than the next 14 countries put together—and whose spending has nearly doubled since FY 2000 to the highest level in real terms since World War II, could find some ways to provide for the common defense with less money.

The Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet shows that global population numbers will reach 7 billion in 2011. Among its key findings, PRB notes that “population growth is one root cause of increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the complexity of the mechanisms through which demographic factors affect emissions is not fully taken into consideration in many analyses that influence governments’ climate change mitigation efforts.”

Update: Read a response by Miriam Pemberton

“The Obama administration…has identified the task of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as one of its top priorities,” writes Miriam Pemberton in a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era.”

The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.

A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.

In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.

DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security

A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.

Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.

Raising a REDD Flag

A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.

For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.

REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.

The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.

Jim Jarvie is director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps. In a recent video interview, he spoke to ECSP about how humanitarian groups are responding to new climate challenges.

Photo: Stoves that are more fuel-efficient not only help curb rapid deforestation, but help women spend less time gathering wood in dangerous areas. Courtesy Dee Goluba/Mercy Corps.

MORE

The NYT’s Andrew Revkin muses about whether “whether family planning programs should be able to get into the carbon business,” citing a study released by Oregon State University that says that the number of children an American resident has could have the greatest environmental impacts of any decision taken by that individual. Reporting on the study, The Oregonian observes that “having fewer children is best way to reduce your carbon footprint.” An interactive graphic from Breathing Earth maps the relationship between population and carbon emissions.

Colorado State University’s Nicole Detraz and Michelle M. Betsill examine whether the April 2007 United Nations Security Council debate, “which emphasized the threat of climate-related conflict, reflects a discursive shift” in an International Studies Perspectives article, “Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts.”

A study in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” warns that overfishing has decimated global marine resources. However, it also reports that careful, collaborative restoration efforts at the international level could yield significant improvements.

In Der Speigel (republished on Salon.com), Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt report that investors, corporations, and governments are angling to profit from future food shortages (the result of a burgeoning global population and inhospitable climate changes) by buying arable land in less developed countries—particularly in weak states—with little concern for the food security of the host nation.

Now available online, a special issue of the International Social Science Journal from 2005 examines the resource curse. Eleven articles explore “how to translate revenues derived from natural resource exploitation into real benefits for citizens of resource-rich countries.”

Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.)

On Monday he wrote about India and China’s agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from seasonal snow and glacier melt is finally seeping into the consciousness of policymakers outside the climate world, including the diplomatic and security communities. Lamont frames the step as a rare instance of cooperation in a strategically sensitive area at the center of a 1962 territorial war between the countries.