Showing posts from category conflict.
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Lithium: Are “Blood Batteries” Next?
›July 17, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThe strategic minerals debate is back—but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.
Turns out lithium isn’t found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.
Our good friends over at the Center for New American Security are taking a fresh and systematic look at the strategic minerals question in their new Natural Security initiative. And we are hearing more and more about it from the advocacy community. For example, ENOUGH has ramped up its Come Clean 4 Congo campaign, which stresses the links between our cell phones, mineral extraction, and continuing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is reminiscent of the “blood diamonds” campaigns that led to the Kimberly Process.
The lithium story and the complex social, economic, and political disputes it could engender in Bolivia should flag for us an important consideration in the fight against climate change: trying to do right by climate change and energy security might trigger unforeseen conflicts. Greening our transportation sector with more powerful batteries is going to create a new set of winners and losers around the material inputs like lithium.
We need to be much more cognizant of these impacts as we move forward in addressing climate change and the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program will be tackling this specific dimension of the climate and security debates—the potential for conflict induced by climate mitigation efforts—in the months ahead. -
Post-Conflict Recovery in Biodiversity Hotspots
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The prevalence of armed conflict in areas of high biodiversity is alarming, though not entirely surprising. According to “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots” (abstract online), which was published earlier this year in Conservation Biology, 80 percent of the major armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 took place in biodiversity hotspots. While natural resources are rarely the principal causes of conflict, their allocation and ownership are frequently among its drivers. -
VIDEO: Dan Smith on Climate Change, Development, and Peacebuilding
›July 1, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffClimate change will have serious impacts on fragile states. To effectively address the potential for instability, the climate community must communicate and collaborate with the development and peacebuilding communities.
In an interview recorded in Washington, Dan Smith of International Alert makes the case for extending this dialogue: “This is not just an environmental issue, not just a development issue, it’s not just a peace and conflict issue, if we don’t understand the connectivity and the interactions between all of these categories, we’re going to get it wrong.”
Smith enumerates the shortcoming of failing to account for the special circumstances of states in conflict or emerging from conflict by “Adaptation and peacebulding are very, very closely related. A society which can adapt against the threat of climate change is a society that can you imagine can handle conflict and peace issues quite well and quite constructively…and vice versa,” he tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
With the Copenhagen negotiations set for December, the climate community is negotiating over significant funds for adaption in the realm of development. Yet the climate and development communities have too few overlaps in terms of people and understandings.
At a Woodrow Wilson Center event, Smith and colleague Shruti Mehrotra provided an update on the climate-conflict arguments and called for better trilateral dialogue among these three communities, drawing on the November 2007 co-authored report A Climate of Conflict. -
VIDEO: Geoff Dabelko on the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Conference (Day Two)
›June 24, 2009 // By Wilson Center StaffThe second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
In this short video, Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and chair of the panel, notes that in the last 10 years, researchers and practitioners have moved from a nearly exclusive focus on the connections between environmental scarcity or abundance and conflict to a wider set of questions about environment’s roles all along the conflict continuum—including prevention, active conflict, conflict termination, and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. This wider agenda includes questions of cooperation and peacebuilding around environmental interdependence. Jensen’s UNEP post-conflict office directly engages these multiple environment-conflict connections, and he shared both practical lessons learned and concrete UN points of entry.
Dabelko also comments that human security, enunciated most prominently in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report, has raised the profile of a wider set of vulnerabilities than those coming directly from the end of a gun. This more inclusive agenda brings livelihoods, human rights, and social and cultural values more squarely into the analysis of insecurity. -
Strategic Thinking on Climate, Conflict, and Adaptation
›June 24, 2009 // By Rachel Weisshaar“I don’t know of an armed conflict that has got a single cause,” said International Alert Secretary General Dan Smith at an event sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 10, 2009. “Our argument is simply that climate change adds another major variable into that mix.” Smith was joined by Shruti Mehrotra, a senior consultant to International Alert on climate change, for a nuanced discussion of climate change’s potential impacts on global stability.
The Netherlands and Bangladesh: Capacity Matters
Both the Netherlands and Bangladesh are low-lying coastal countries vulnerable to sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Yet the Netherlands is “a wealthy country with stable government that’s transparent and accountable to the people,” said Smith. “A country like Bangladesh which is poor, which has got democracy but it’s a very iffy democracy—it’s really still in a state of transition—and which does not itself have the resources to handle those problems” could experience “great social pressure as a consequence of climate change,” he said.
Cascading Impacts: Water, Food, Livelihoods
Four hundred million people depend on the glacier-fed Ganges-Brahmaputra river system for water, food, and industry, said Smith. “A very large number of people’s livelihoods are going to be affected if water management in the Ganges-Brahmaputra area is not adequate to the task” of adapting to changing precipitation patterns and melting glaciers.
Seventy percent of Peruvians depend on glacial runoff for their water needs, according to Smith. But the Andean glaciers will essentially melt and disappear by 2015, meaning that an initial excess of water will be followed by a terrible deficit, said Smith. The impacts on Peruvian society will largely depend on how well the government, the private sector, and civil society mobilize to manage their water supply.
Scarce Resources: Migration and Conflict
Scarcer resources may lead to mass migration and conflict, said Smith, but he urged the audience to be wary of the “factoids and guesstimates being thrown around about how many people will migrate under the pressure of climate change.”
People sometimes move to avoid conflict, but “very often, unwittingly, they become the vector of conflict themselves,” said Smith. Most climate-induced migration is likely to be within a country or within a region, so “a lot of that migration is going to be people moving from areas which are no longer viable to areas which are barely viable—indeed, where their arrival threatens the viability of the area into which they’re moving,” he said.
According to International Alert’s report A climate of conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, there are 46 countries that will be at high risk of violent conflict due to the intersecting impacts of climate change and economic, political, and social problems.
Envisioning Adaptation
No matter what happens at the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, people will need to adapt to the changes already underway in the climate system. But if adaptation is seen as a purely technical process, it will fail, said Smith. It is a cultural process that will only work if people have the chance to express their opinions and misgivings—and then buy into it.“Most of development discourse is not being taken into account in these environmental negotiations,” said Mehrotra. Most climate negotiators are climate scientists or diplomats, not development practitioners. But in low-income countries, climate change will primarily be a development issue. “There is a potential that huge amounts of money will be put into this [adaptation], using a way of thinking about development from the 1970s,” warned Mehrotra.
Photos: Dan Smith and Shruti Mehrotra. Courtesy of David Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center. -
Managing Environmental Conflict in Latin America: Resolution Rests on Inclusion, Communication, Development
›June 23, 2009 // By Brian KleinPublic policies governing natural-resource extraction in Latin America “are often seen as arbitrary” and illegitimate by communities, said Mara Hernández, director of the Centro de Colaboración Cívica, A.C. – México, at the Wilson Center on June 3, 2009. Pablo Lumerman, director of Argentina’s Fundación Cambio Democrático, and Carlos Salazar, director of Socios Perú: Centro de Colaboración Cívica, joined Hernández to share methods of resolving environmental disputes. The event was co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Latin American Program and held in conjunction with Partners for Democratic Change.
The Balance of Power
Fashioning effective and equitable natural-resource policies requires the participation of all the relevant stakeholders, especially community members who are directly affected, Hernández contended. Consensus building must supplant unilateral decision-making by individual authorities, such as local or national governments.
For example, Fundación Cambio Democrático has successfully constructed a “Platform of Dialogue for Responsible Mining Development,” with the Argentinian government as an early and essential partner. The effort is an outgrowth of the organization’s Extractive Industries Program, which examines conflict over mining in Argentina.
Similarly, Salazar and Socios Perú have tried to ensure that the Peruvian government and companies operating in Peru build relationships with local communities from the moment they are interested in communities’ land, not just once a concession is secured.
When a conflict broke out in the Upper Sea of Cortez in 2005 between fishers and environmentalists over protection of the vaquita marina, a rare porpoise, Centro de Colaboración Cívica convened representatives from the community, NGOs, and corporations. The diverse stakeholders formed an organization called Alto Golfo Sustentable (“Sustainable Upper Gulf”), which successfully lobbied the Mexican government for better protection of the vaquita, improved monitoring of illegal fishing, and sounder management of marine resources.
Transparency and Communication“Lack of clear and on-time information to the communities” has been a primary driver of conflict around extractive industries, said Salazar. Stakeholders will often disseminate their own information, Lumerman cautioned, with each accusing the other of bias.
A neutral, third-party information provider can mitigate disagreement. For example, in order “to develop a system of information of public access…for all the stakeholders,” Fundación Cambio Democrático is creating a mining conflict map of Argentina, said Lumerman.
Cultural Sensitivity and Sustainable Development
Natural-resource extraction should be closely linked to the sustainable development of communities. Salazar emphasized that projects with a clear plan for “development, fighting against poverty, improving their way of life” are more likely to be met with approval. Lumerman cited the Cerro Vanguardia mining project as an example of a successful partnership that included local development into its long-term plan.
Top Photo: Heavy metal mine at La Oroya, Peru, one of the world’s most polluted places. Courtesy Flickr user Matthew Burpee.
Photos of Mara Hernández, Pablo Lumerman, and Carlos Salazar courtesy Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Conflict, Cooperation, and Kabbalah: Lessons for Environmental Negotiations
›June 10, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff
Often during tough negotiations, an “ah-ha” moment transforms the parties’ thinking and enables them to move forward. Recognizing that such moments are also common to many spiritual traditions, Oregon State University Geography Professor Aaron Wolf decided to study several world religions for insights that could be applied to disputes over water resources, and to negotiation processes in general. Although Western cultures tend to view spirituality as a purely private matter—a legacy of the Enlightenment—in a June 3 invitation-only meeting at the Wilson Center, Wolf argued that much of the rest of the world understands spirituality as integrated with all parts of life.
According to Wolf, spiritual traditions can illuminate two aspects of water negotiations:
1. Understanding Conflict- Could addressing the ethical aspect of negotiations supplement the more common focuses on economic development, ecosystem protection, or environmental security, which have shown only partial success?
- How does personal faith impact decision-making; can universal values be more explicitly invoked to facilitate negotiations?
- How does global water management address the spiritual needs of stakeholders?
2. Process Techniques
- Might spiritual transformation have tools or approaches that could improve the difficult dynamics of international environmental negotiations?
- How could the tools of personal transformation—such as guided imagery, prayer, ceremony, silence, and transformative listening—aid the mediation process and/or group dynamics?
Wolf drew parallels between Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual), the criteria for water allocations (based on rights, needs, interests, and equity), and the four stages of negotiations (adversarial, reflexive, integrative, and action).
By Comparative Urban Studies Project Program Assistant Lauren Herzer.
Wolf argued that, while semantics may vary, certain concepts’ universality makes them an effective means of communicating across cultures. For instance, the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah highlights the importance of bringing justice (din) and mercy (chesed) together in a partnership that promotes compassion (rachamim): that is, being partly rooted in one’s own needs while having the ability to recognize and care for the needs of others.
This concept of compassion has an important role in Islam, as well. The Arabic word for reconciliation, musalaha, means that hostilities are ended, honor is re-established, and peace (sulha) is restored in the community. Wolf also stressed the concept of tarrahdin—resolving a conflict without humiliating either party—as key to a sustainable negotiation and peace.
But how to apply these spiritual concepts to real-life negotiations? Wolf suggests that mediators employ transformative listening skills and help parties move from a stance based on rights or needs to one based on interests or equity. Wolf also suggests that instead of being seated across from one another, which is the most adversarial arrangement, parties should be seated side by side, in a manner more reflective of prayer than argument. Another effective technique is structuring introductions so that personal narratives are shared, helping create connections between individuals.
Although the union of spiritual and rational processes is a somewhat foreign concept in the West, Wolf hopes that reaching across cultural divides will lead to the more effective resolution of environmental and other disputes. - Could addressing the ethical aspect of negotiations supplement the more common focuses on economic development, ecosystem protection, or environmental security, which have shown only partial success?
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Weekly Reading
›The International Institute for Sustainable Development has released two reports on climate change and security: Rising Temperatures, Rising Tensions: Climate change and the risk of violent conflict in the Middle East and Climate Change and Security in Africa.
In “The Changing Face of Israel,” a Foreign Policy web exclusive, Richard Cincotta and Eric Kaufmann explain how Israel’s demographics are influencing the country’s politics.
CNN’s Inside Africa reports on a bill in the U.S. Congress that seeks to quell the violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by forcing American companies to disclose the sources of their minerals.
Population Action International’s Kathleen Mogelgaard reports from international climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany, on how climate change disproportionately affects women and the poor.
A Christian Science Monitor op-ed on global demographic trends cites Wilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker.
On Grist, Earth Policy Institute Founder Lester Brown explores the massive migration that would be precipitated by even partial melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
The prevalence of armed conflict in areas of high biodiversity is alarming, though not entirely surprising. According to “
“I don’t know of an armed conflict that has got a single cause,” said International Alert Secretary General Dan Smith at an 
“Most of development discourse is not being taken into account in these environmental negotiations,” said Mehrotra. Most climate negotiators are climate scientists or diplomats, not development practitioners. But in low-income countries, climate change will primarily be a development issue. “There is a potential that huge amounts of money will be put into this [adaptation], using a way of thinking about development from the 1970s,” warned Mehrotra.
Public policies governing natural-resource extraction in Latin America “are often seen as arbitrary” and illegitimate by communities, said Mara Hernández, director of the 
“Lack of clear and on-time information to the communities” has been a primary driver of conflict around extractive industries, said Salazar. Stakeholders will often disseminate their own information, Lumerman cautioned, with each accusing the other of bias.
