Showing posts from category climate change.
-
Population and Climate: It’s Not Me, It’s You (China), Say Candidates’ Environmental Advisers
›April 28, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerAt a news conference (watch; listen; read) with the three presidential candidates’ environmental advisers, Constance Holden of Science dropped the population bomb, asking what each candidate proposed to do about the role of population growth in the climate change problem. The advisers immediately scrambled to duck and cover, mentioning China and its growing consumption, then quickly moving on to something—anything!—else.
Jason Grumet, environmental adviser to Sen. Barack Obama and the president and founder of the Bipartisan Policy Council in Washington, DC:
“It’s not just a question of population growth, but it’s also a question of the rest of the world beginning to aspire to the comforts that we have come to take for granted here. When people achieve an annual income of about $5,000 a year they start to buy cars and you are going to see somewhere between 3 and 500 million people in China find themselves in that position in the next decade.”
Todd Stern, adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and partner at the Washington, DC, law firm WilmerHale:
“I don’t have an absolute direct answer on the population question, but let me make a point that’s perhaps relevant, which is that the controlling of CO2 and greenhouse gases in developing countries is going to be increasingly critical. I think 75 percent of emissions growth in the next 25 years is expected to come from developing countries and China is, far and away, the lead among them.”
Jim Woolsey, environmental adviser to Senator John McCain, former CIA Director, and attorney with Goodwin Procter:
“[W]e shouldn’t assume that just because the Chinese young couple who have finally kind of made it into the middle class want to buy an automobile, that for the foreseeable future it’s always going to be an automobile propelled by carbon emitting sources of one kind or another. The technology is changing.”
The upcoming SEJ Annual Conference in Roanoke, Virginia, will include a panel discussion on population and climate. -
Weekly Reading
›An article in Time magazine surveys the growing awareness of climate change’s links to traditional and nontraditional security threats.
“Unless some way can be found to stop the explosive rise in food prices generally, and rice prices in particular, we will see sharply higher mortality….This will not be mass starvation, with people dying in the streets, but it will be sharply higher infant and child mortality and weakened adults succumbing prematurely to infectious diseases,” said Peter Timmer, an expert on agriculture and development and a current Center for Global Development non-resident fellow, in an interview earlier this week.
A report on “How a Changing Climate Impacts Women,” a high-level meeting sponsored by Council of Women World Leaders, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, is now available online. Gro Harlem Bruntland and Mary Robinson, among other speakers, explained that women—who constitute the majority of the world’s poor—will be more vulnerable to many of climate change’s expected impacts, including reduced crop yields, the spread of infectious diseases, and increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters. -
IPCC Head Says Climate Change Could Be “Problem for the Maintenance of Peace”
›April 24, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski“The impact of climate change is going to be most likely so harmful that it would threaten governments,” said 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra K. Pachauri in an interview with Reuters earlier this week. Pachauri focused his remarks on Africa, whose one billion people are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and whose governments frequently lack the capacity to adapt to the impending changes.
“If the situation in Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, then if the world has a conscience it has to remove that scar,” Pachauri said. While a number of high-profile conflicts in Africa’s recent history have revolved around natural resources, Pachauri warned that environmental change could soon eclipse the so-called “resource curse” as a driver of conflict, citing research predicting that by 2020, climate change could leave between 75 million and 250 million additional Africans without access to water and could reduce the yields of farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture by half. “Climate change has the potential to be a problem for the maintenance of peace,” he said.
The rapidly worsening global food crisis has hit certain parts of Africa particularly hard—instigating riots in Egypt and Burkina Faso, for example—and with food and water becoming increasingly precious commodities, dire outcomes seem increasingly likely. “The answer,” Pachauri said, “is for developed nations to realize that we are living on one planet. We are all inhabitants of spaceship earth.” But, he conceded, “we are nowhere close yet.”
-
Jeffrey Sachs’ Memo to the Next U.S. President
›April 22, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffIn his keynote address at the 5th Annual Unite for Sight International Health Conference, held earlier this month, Jeffrey Sachs argued that world leaders must redouble their efforts to alleviate poverty, protect human and environmental health, and balance economic growth and sustainable development. He advocated many of the same solutions that appear in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, including increasing investment in sustainable technology research and development; hastening the diffusion of sustainable technologies to the poorer regions of the world; and allocating a smaller percentage of the national budget for military spending and instead achieving the international target of 0.7 percent of GNP for foreign aid.
One part of Sachs’ presentation that was not included in his book was a memo to the next U.S. president, consisting of ten objectives to achieve global sustainability. Included in this list were the following recommendations, which illustrate Sachs’ view that human health, the environment, economic growth, and security are all integrally linked:
- “Stop putting food into the gas tank.” Sachs spoke out against the current U.S. subsidies for converting corn into ethanol. He linked the initiative to the recent global increase in food prices and the resulting turmoil in areas such as Haiti and Burkina Faso.
- Create a global forum for the leaders of dry lands. Sachs argued that it is important for leaders of areas such as Senegal, Mali, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and California to discuss water scarcity, its impact on livelihoods, and strategies to ensure human security.
- Immediately send a U.S. envoy around the world to back climate change negotiations. Sachs emphasized the need for the United States to step up as a leader on curbing climate change and its environmental and social impacts, rather than stalling international cooperation and progress, as he believes the current administration has done.
- Increase U.S. funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Sachs disapproved of the U.S. government’s decision to decrease its financial support of the UNFPA, which he argued is instrumental in fueling the voluntary decline of fertility rates in less developed countries. He identified access to contraceptives and reproductive services, the empowerment of girls and women, and the promotion of maternal and child health as crucial strategies for slowing population growth and maintaining resource sustainability.
- Make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the heart of international development policy. Sachs noted that he had heard President Bush make reference to the MDGs only once during his two terms in office. He hoped the new administration’s approach to foreign relations and international aid would put a stronger emphasis on achieving the MDGs, which aim to increase health, stability, and prosperity worldwide.
-
Three Out of Three Candidates Agree: Climate Is a Security Issue
›April 17, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerIt was hard to tell which environmental adviser was representing which presidential candidate at a recent news conference sponsored by SEJ on climate change (watch; listen; read)—all three explicitly named it a security priority, and called for a mandatory cap and trade program and the development of new technology. (The question of whether to build new nuclear power plants revealed the only major difference: Clinton’s generally con, McCain is pro, and Obama falls somewhere in the middle.)
Clinton adviser and WilmerHale partner Todd Stern charged out of the gate first, deeming climate a “first-order national security issue” that is “going to exacerbate food security problems. It’s going to exacerbate water scarcity. It’s going to make desertification worse, increase resource competition, and produce, undoubtedly, large-scale migration and refugee problems and increase border tension.” Citing the CNA report, he called climate change a “threat multiplier for instability in volatile parts of the world.” He also quoted Sir Nicholas Stern’s claim that climate change has the potential to cause “economic disruption at a scale of the Great Depression and the wars of the last century.” Clinton will establish a National Energy Council (à la the National Security Council), form an “E8” of major emitters, and increase R&D; efforts—including creating a government agency for energy R&D; modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). No proposals, however, on how to mitigate the existing impacts on our current security situation.
Quoting McCain, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said climate change was “a serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenge.” Taking a harder security stance, Woolsey linked U.S. oil dependence to terrorism not only because it increases “our vulnerability to cutoffs, to terrorist attacks in Middle East” on energy infrastructure, but also because oil fuels oil fuels “Saudi Arabia’s spreading of its hateful Wahhabi doctrine, into madrasas and religious schools around the world”—and funds Iran’s belligerence as well. Unlike Clinton’s representative, Woolsey did not focus on environmental degradation’s links to conflict. He supports market-based incentives to encourage the commercialization of existing technologies—such as plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles, new lighter car body construction, alternative liquid fuels—that could end the “oil monopoly on transportation” and thus fight terrorism at same time. Somewhat cynically, he promoted this vastly oversimplified argument as a politically practical way to convince climate change skeptics to back mitigation efforts.
Like his boss, Obama’s representative Jason Grumet took a big-picture approach, telling the crowd that Obama “gets it”; he recognizes that energy “affects our national security in a dramatic way” and thus requires “dramatic change”—a fundamental transformation of our energy policies to “make us safe and secure.” However, he offered few specific details. Obama supports the development of clean coal (he’s from Illinois, putative site of the now-stalled FutureGen project) and advanced nuclear power, but says we must solve the existing problems with nuclear technology before beginning new development. -
Climate Change and Instability in West Africa
›April 14, 2008 // By Liat Racin“A changing climate has been a feature of life in West Africa for thousands of years,” explain Oli Brown and Alec Crawford of the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Assessing the security implications of climate change for West Africa: Country case studies of Ghana and Burkina Faso. “Ghanaians and Burkinabes have not been passive recipients of climate change in the past and have developed many ingenious ways of adapting to their climate. Some analysts suggest that the inherent adaptability of the Sahelian peoples is one of their greatest assets. Nevertheless, this adaptability has been severely tested in the last few decades.”
Brown and Crawford identify several ways in which climate change could challenge economic and political stability in West Africa in general and Burkina Faso and Ghana in particular. They wrote their report after consulting with local agronomists, hydrologists, development specialists, and other experts. Responsibly, Brown and Crawford have deliberately narrowed the report’s focus from climate change’s potential security implications (which they acknowledge includes an extremely broad range of events) to climate change’s potential threats to 1) economic and 2) political stability.
In Ghana, climate variability is expected to aggravate five preexisting challenges: the north-south social divide (with poverty more pronounced in the rural north); the sharing of water between the north and the south (with the north using water primarily for agriculture and the south primarily for energy); the management of regional water sources; border security; and economic stability (if changes in climate reduced the profitability of cocoa production). Four main challenges were identified in Burkina Faso: food security; water availability; relations between pastoral and agricultural communities; and internal migration.
Non-climate factors—including governance, regional relations, and income distribution—play a significant role in determining a society’s vulnerability to climate-induced insecurity. Brown and Crawford emphasize that only extremely high levels of climate change will pose insurmountable challenges to economic and political stability in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which have both enjoyed relative peace over the past decade.
For more on climate change and security in West Africa, see Anthony Nyong’s article in ECSP Report 12. -
Weekly Reading
›The theme of this year’s World Health Day, observed on April 7, was “Protecting Health From Climate Change.” This World Health Organization report outlines many of the links between climate change and human health.
Kenya’s post-election strife has decimated its once-thriving nature tourism industry, reports Reuters. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people has driven up demand for bush meat, and in the absence of tourism revenues, reserves can no longer afford to pay rangers to protect the wildlife.
Per capita water availability in the Middle East and North Africa will be halved by 2050, estimates the World Bank, so it is critical for governments to address growing water scarcity now, including making agriculture—which accounts for 85 percent of total water use in the region—more water-efficient. -
Indigenous Ingenuity Frequently Overlooked in Climate Change Discussions
›April 11, 2008 // By Sonia SchmanskiIndigenous groups from 11 countries met in Manaus, Brazil, last week to develop a plan by which developing countries would be compensated for preserving designated forested areas. The plan, officially known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), could be an important step in distributing both the costs and benefits of tropical forest preservation. It could be a significant boon to indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazon, where native groups have permanent rights to 21 percent of the territory—some 49 million acres. An international carbon-trading plan has been on the table since last year’s climate conference in Bali, and this recent meeting demonstrates indigenous peoples’ commitment to keeping their collective knowledge, voice, and needs on the table.
The vast experience of indigenous people in adapting to changing climates “will not be sufficient—they also need better access to other information and tools,” says Gonzalo Oviedo, a contributing author for the IUCN report Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and Climate. Indigenous groups are often most vulnerable to climate change’s impacts, but their expertise in adapting to climate change has long been overlooked by policymakers. These oversights could prove disastrous, the report warns, as the adverse effects of climate change may overwhelm their capacity to adapt, especially given the marginalization of many indigenous communities. The report describes an “urgent need to help indigenous peoples living in tropical forests to prepare for different climate change scenarios.”
Indigenous groups have already seen the effects of climate change. The frequency of forest fires has increased in Borneo, the Congo basin, and vast tracts of the Southern Amazon basin, while indigenous communities in the Arctic have been affected by changes in the “migration patterns, health, and range of animals” on which they depend for their livelihoods. The IUCN report cautions that while plans like REDD are steps in the right direction, they may benefit corporations and large landowners as much as or more than indigenous peoples.
To address the heavy burdens that climate change will place on indigenous communities, the report makes a number of recommendations, including:
• Actively involving indigenous communities in formulating policies to protect their rights and entitlements;
• Supporting further research of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable cultures;
• Promoting collaboration between indigenous peoples and scientists; and
• Raising awareness of traditional adaptation and mitigation strategies.
