Showing posts from category climate change.
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Weekly Reading
›In impoverished Chongzuo, in southern China, biologist Pan Wenshi has partnered with the local community to save the white-headed langur, a highly endangered monkey, by initiating sustainable development projects that lessen their dependence on the forest—and in turn, the pressures on the langur’s habitat.
In the latest issue of Forced Migration Review, 38 articles grapple with how climate change may affect the movement of people—and how communities can best adapt to a changing climate.
“Poverty and habitat loss go hand in hand in Madagascar and in much of the developing world, and only win-win solutions will work for conservation,” says an article in Time magazine about an innovative conservation and livelihoods project in Madagascar.
Two articles (“Economies of Scales”; “A Rising Tide”) in the Economist argue that privatizing fisheries through what are known as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) could help save the world’s dwindling fish stocks. ECSP’s fisheries series, “Fishing for a Secure Future,” highlights a variety of innovative ideas for fisheries governance and reform.
Conservation and Use of Wildlife-Based Resources: The Bushmeat Crisis, a new report from the Center for International Forestry Research, recommends ways to preserve the biodiversity of species eaten as bushmeat while also sustaining local people’s livelihoods. -
Senators McCain, Obama Announce Priorities for Alleviating Poverty, Tackling Climate Change at Clinton Global Initiative
›September 25, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarSpeaking at a Clinton Global Initiative plenary session (webcast; podcast) this morning, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) laid out their proposals for addressing the interconnected problems of global poverty, climate change, and disease. Excerpts from each senator’s speech are below.
Senator McCain:
“We can never guarantee our security through military means alone. True security requires a far broader approach using non-military means to reduce threats before they gather strength. This is especially true of our strategic interests in fighting disease and extreme poverty across the globe.”
“Malaria alone kills more than a million people a year, mostly in Africa….To its lasting credit, the federal government in recent years has led the way in this fight. But of course, America is more than its government. Some of the greatest advances have been the work of the Gates Foundation and other groups. And you have my pledge: Should I be elected, I will build on these and other initiatives to ensure that malaria kills no more. I will also make it a priority to improve maternal and child health. Millions around the world today—and especially pregnant women and children—suffer from easily prevented nutritional deficiencies….An international effort is needed to prevent disease and developmental disabilities among children by providing nutrients and food security. And if I am elected president, America will lead that effort, as we have done with the scourge of HIV and AIDS.”
“America helped to spark the Green Revolution in Asia, and…[we] should be at the forefront of an African Green Revolution. We should and must reform our aid programs to make sure they are serving the interests of people in need, and not just serving special interests in Washington. Aid’s not the whole answer, as we know. We need to promote economic growth and opportunities, especially for women, where they do not currently exist. Too often, trade restrictions, combined with costly agricultural subsidies for the special interests, choke off the opportunities for poor farmers and workers abroad to help themselves. That has to change.”
Senator Obama:
“Our security is shared as well. The carbon emissions in Boston or Beijing don’t just pollute the immediate atmosphere, they imperil our planet. Pockets of extreme poverty in Somalia can breed conflict that spills across borders. The child who goes to a radical madrassa outside of Karachi can end up endangering the security of my daughters in Chicago. And the deadly flu that begins in Indonesia can find its way to Indiana within days. Poverty, climate change, extremism, disease—these are issues that offend our common humanity. They also threaten our common security….We must see that none of these problems can be dealt with in isolation; nor can we deny one and effectively tackle another.”
“Our dependence on oil and gas funds terror and tyranny. It’s forced families to pay their wages at the pump, and it puts the future of our planet in peril. This is a security threat, an economic albatross, and a moral challenge of our time.”
“As we develop clean energy, we should share technology and innovations with the nations of the world. This effort to confront climate change will be part of our strategy to alleviate poverty because we know that it is the world’s poor who will feel—and may already be feeling—the effect of a warming planet. If we fail to act, famine could displace hundreds of millions, fueling competition and conflict over basic resources like food and water. We all have a stake in reducing poverty….It leads to pockets of instability that provide fertile breeding-grounds for threats like terror and the smuggling of deadly weapons that cannot be contained by the drawing of a border or the distance of an ocean. And these aren’t simply disconnected corners of an interconnected world. And that is why the second commitment that I’ll make is embracing the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. This will take more resources from the United States, and as president, I will increase our foreign assistance to provide them.”
“Disease stands in the way of progress on so many fronts. It can condemn populations to poverty, prevent a child from getting an education, and yet far too many people still die of preventable illnesses….When I am president, we will set the goal of ending all deaths from malaria by 2015. It’s time to rid the world of a disease that doesn’t have to take lives.” -
Paul Ehrlich: Human Technological Achievement Has Outpaced Ethical Evolution
›September 25, 2008 // By Rachel Weisshaar
Human beings have harnessed culture and technology to become the most dominant animals on Earth, said Paul Ehrlich at a September 18, 2008, launch of his new Island Press book, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, but “we’re really backward ethically—in terms of how we treat each other and…the environment. And this leads to a lot of problems, not the least of which is we’re destroying our life-support system.” -
New Video “Water Wars or Water Woes?” Unveils Surprising Truths About Water, Conflict
›September 18, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the new video “Water Wars or Water Woes? Water Management as Conflict Management,” Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) Director Geoff Dabelko explains that although newspapers and politicians constantly warn of impending “water wars,” water rarely leads to interstate violence. By focusing on “water wars” – which evidence shows are extremely rare – we “are missing a lot of what is important around conflict management around water,” argues Dabelko.
According to Dabelko, cooperative water management can also help resolve conflicts caused by unrelated problems, such as those between India and Pakistan or Israel and Palestine. “You’ve got to go through it to get out of the conflict and support a sustainable peace,” he says.
“Water Wars or Water Woes?” is the newest addition to ECSP’s YouTube channel, which was launched earlier this summer with “Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections,” which offers a lively, brief, and accessible explanation of population, health, and environment (PHE) connections, with examples and photos from successful programs in the Philippines. -
Weekly Reading
›In a speech last week, National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar hinted at the contents of Global Trends 2025, the intelligence report being prepared for the next U.S. president on future global threats. It predicts that U.S. global dominance will decline over the next several decades, as the world is buffeted by climate change and shortages of energy, water, and food. The intermediate draft of the report was reviewed this summer at a Wilson Center meeting hosted by ECSP.
U.S. Population, Energy and Climate Change, a new report by the Center for Environment & Population, explores how various aspects of U.S. population—including size and growth rate, density, per capita resource use, and composition—affect greenhouse gas emissions.
An extensive Congressional Research Service report compares U.S. and Chinese approaches to diplomacy, foreign aid, trade, and investment in developing countries. “China’s influence and image have been bolstered through its increasingly open and sophisticated diplomatic corps as well as through prominent PRC-funded infrastructure, public works, and economic investment projects in many developing countries,” write the authors.
ICLEI-Europe has released a set of reports designed to help local governments reap the benefits of integrated water resources management. Available in English, Portuguese, and French, the reports are geared toward southern African countries.
“The potential is there with undetermined boundaries and great wealth for conflict, or competition” in the Arctic, says Rear Admiral Gene Brooks, who is in charge of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Alaska region.
Negussie Teffera, former head of Ethiopia’s Office of Population, and Bill Ryerson of the Population Media Center (PMC) discussed PMC’s extraordinarily successful radio soap operas last week on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s program “The Current.” -
“Code Green”: Friedman Calls for an American-Led Revolution in Energy, Environment
›September 12, 2008 // By Will RogersAmerica has a problem and the world has a problem,” argues Thomas Friedman in his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America, set to launch at the Woodrow Wilson Center on September 29 (RSVP). Plagued by inaction, the United States and the rest of the world have watched as “global warming, the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable.”
Yet undergirding Friedman’s book is his sense of optimism that renewed American leadership on energy conservation, population, and multilateral cooperation could not only stave off the worst climate change scenarios but also bolster the U.S. economy and improve America’s flagging global reputation. Whether you defend or challenge Friedman’s perspective, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is certain to become a lightning rod in the debates over climate change, energy, and environmental security. Stay tuned to the New Security Beat for a more thorough review of Friedman’s book from ECSP staff.
Photo: Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist of the New York Times. Courtesy of flickr user Charles Haynes. -
Weekly Reading
›“African and global leaders must promote better integration of environment and health sectors and sustain more effective coordination across the continent,” argues an op-ed in The Lancet addressing the recent meeting of African health and environment ministers.Strengthening Land Tenure and Property Rights in Angola evaluates a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project to bolster the land tenure and property rights of Angolans living in peri-urban and rural areas.
According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, rebel groups in the
The Sierra Leone Integrated Diamond Management Program, which “was designed to improve local incentives for clean diamond management, enable local communities to benefit from the diamond resource, and to assist the Government of Sierra Leone (GOSL) in its effort to manage this critical resource,” has achieved considerable success over a short time period, according to a final report on the program.
The 2007 Liberia Demographic and Health Survey, available in full online, covers population; family planning; fertility; child health, mortality, and nutrition; maternal health, mortality, and nutrition; malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases; gender-based violence; and a variety of other topics.
The
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Climate Change and Security
›Presidential administrations usually end with sepia retrospectives and long, adulatory lists of accomplishments. The present administration is unlikely to end this way, but it will certainly go out with many “what if” epitaphs. Near the top of my “what if” list is, “What if this administration had taken the threat of global climate change seriously and acted as though our future depended on cutting emissions and cooperating on adaptation?”
From July 27-30, 2008, my organization, the Center for a New American Security, led a consortium of 10 scientific, private, and public policy organizations in an experiment to answer this particular “what if.” The experiment, a climate change “war game,” tested what a change in U.S. position might mean in 2015, when the effects of climate change will likely be more apparent and the global need to act will be more urgent. The participants were scientists, national security strategists, scholars, and members of the business community from China, Europe, India, and the Americas. The variety was intentional: We hoped to leverage a range of expertise and see how these different communities would interact to solve problems.
Climate change may seem a strange subject for a war game, but one of our primary goals was to highlight the ways in which global climate change is, in fact, a national security issue. In our view, climate change is highly likely to provoke conflict—within states, along borders as populations move, and, down the line, possibly between states. Also, the way the military calculates risk and engages in long-term planning lends itself to planning for the climate change that is already locked in (and gives strategic urgency to cutting emissions and preventing future climate change).
The players were asked to confront a near-term future in 2015, in which greenhouse gas emissions have continued to grow and the pattern of volatile and severe weather events has continued. The context of the game was an emergency ad-hoc meeting of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters in 2015—China, the European Union, India, and the United States—to consider future projections (unlike most war games, the projections were real; Oak Ridge National Laboratory analyzed regional-level Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data from the A1FI series specifically for the game). The “UN Secretary-General” challenged the top emitters to come up with an agreement to deal with increased migration resulting from climate change; resource scarcity; disaster relief; and drastic emissions cuts.
Although the players did reach an agreement, which is an interesting artifact in itself, that was not really the point. The primary objective was to see how the teams interacted and whether we gained any insight into our current situation. While we’re still processing all of our findings, I certainly came away with an interesting answer to that “what if” question. If the United States had been forward-leaning on climate change these past eight years, taking action at home and proposing change internationally, it would have made a difference, but only to a point. As important as American leadership will be on this issue, it is Chinese leadership—or followership—that will be decisive. And it is going to be very, very difficult—perhaps impossible—for China to lead, at least under current circumstances. The tremendous growth of China’s economy has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but there are hundreds of millions more still to be lifted. The stark reality is that China will be fueling that economic growth with coal, oil, and natural gas—just as the United States did in the 20th century—unless and until there is a viable alternative.
If the next administration hopes to head off the worst effects of global climate change, it will not only have to find a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions at home, it may well have to make it possible for China to do so, too.
Sharon Burke is a national security expert at the Center for a New American Security, where she focuses on energy, climate change, and the Middle East.
Photo: The U.S., EU, and Chinese simulation teams in negotiations. Courtesy of Sharon Burke.
Human beings have harnessed culture and technology to become the most dominant animals on Earth, said Paul Ehrlich at a 
America has a problem and the world has a problem,” argues Thomas Friedman in his new book, 
Presidential administrations usually end with sepia retrospectives and long, adulatory lists of accomplishments. The present administration is unlikely to end this way, but it will certainly go out with many “what if” epitaphs. Near the top of my “what if” list is, “What if this administration had taken the threat of global climate change seriously and acted as though our future depended on cutting emissions and cooperating on adaptation?”
