Showing posts from category economics.
-
In Building Resilience for a Changing World, Reproductive Health Is Key
›April 20, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur
Change is a constant in human (and natural) history. But today, we have entered an era in which the pace, scale, and impact of change may surpass anything our species has previously confronted.
-
Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future
›“We’re in an urban century, there is no doubt,” said Peter H. Liotta, visiting scholar at the U.S. Military Academy West Point and co-author of The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future, during a March 20 event at the Wilson Center. Liotta’s book focuses on the geopolitical impacts of poorly managed urbanization on the most vulnerable as well as the security issues such urbanization might create. He was joined by Jaana Remes of the McKinsey Global Institute, who painted a more promising picture of a globally rising, economically prosperous urban middle class, and Stimson Center visiting fellow Peter Engelke, who grappled with the contradictions between these alternative urban realities. [Video Below]
“Urbanization is key to economic development, but it has been, is now, and will continue to be into the future beset by a very large shadow side, wherein the marginalized face grinding poverty, squalor, and despair,” explained Engelke.
Although Liotta and Remes laid out very different “maps of the future,” Engelke suggested three commonalities. First, they both highlight the “unprecedented scale and speed of global change.” Second, they acknowledge that “a global demographic shift is well underway, and has been for some time.” And third, they accept that we have yet to fully integrate cities into the physical and mental maps by which we navigate the world, he said. Despite the economic dynamism of cities, “we live in a world that, I submit, has not yet grasped this reality even in conceptual terms, much less political and policy ones.”
The City as a Source of Vulnerability
People come to megacities “because there’s a chance,” said Liotta. “It looks like a nightmare to us, but people come because they’re waiting for a future.” This chance, however, is often slim, according to Liotta.
The sheer scale of modern urbanization (approximately 200,000 people move every day from rural to urban areas) produces myriad sources of vulnerability for the poorest and most marginalized, said Liotta. “World population growth will occur in the poorest, youngest, and often heavily Muslim states, which lack education, capital, and employment. And for the first time in history the world will be primarily urbanized, with most megacities in the poor states where you don’t have policing, sanitation, and health care.”
This urban shift concentrates young populations presumed to be unstable, exacerbates the risk of disease and climate change, and increases the threat of declining resource availability and food production, Liotta said. In states where “the lights are out” – that is, where urbanization is not met with sufficient economic development – our new urban century may feature significant security challenges, he argued. “Every single security problem we have today, and in the future – whether it’s human security, environmental security, or national security – is [in] the places where the lights are out.”
In The Real Population Bomb, Liotta links these sorts of security issues to what he terms “entangled vulnerability scenarios,” such as scarcity of water for drinking and irrigation, outbreak and rapid spread of disease, or lack of sufficient warning systems for natural disasters or environmental impacts. These scenarios, he argues, deserve a greater showing next to the traditional focus on hard security “threats.”
Fertility rates are generally declining, which will eventually dissipate the youth bulges being experienced by many countries, but the challenge is how to “manage that glide path,” said Liotta. It is about “doing it well collectively, because we are not thinking collectively well about how to do this and places in the world are in serious trouble.”
The City as a Center of Growth
Jaana Remes presented both a broader scale of analysis and a more positive outlook. Urbanization is “the most powerful positive economic force in today’s environment,” she asserted, drawing on the McKinsey Global Institute report, Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities.
Compared to the historical experiences of the Western world, change in the most rapidly urbanizing of today’s developing states is occurring at “100 times the scale, in one tenth of the time,” said Remes. This change is fundamentally shifting the economic profiles of states such as India and China, which are projected to account for approximately one third of global GDP by 2050.
This growth in economic prominence can be accounted for by the rise of urban populations of middle class consumers not just in megacities, but also in the rapidly growing “middleweight” cities (from 200,000 to 10 million people) explained Remes. The path that these cities take will be “very significant for…how our world is going to look like in the next few decades,” she said. They are where “the lion’s share of global investment is going to be made.”
Engaging Global Urbanization
“That we are seeing cities rise in their profile is nothing new in history,” said Remes, “in fact you can argue that cities are actually some of the longest-lasting assets in the world.” Today, 600 urban centers generate more than 60 percent of global GDP; 400 of these are in emerging markets. So, “even though the scale of the change we expect to see is very dramatic, from the cities perspective, it is probably going to be more evolution than revolution.”
Taking advantage of this growth will require some significant global re-posturing. In terms of commercial diplomacy for instance, most nations continue to distribute their people more according to the “geopolitical power of the 20th century than the economic opportunity of the 21st,” said Remes. She points out, for example, that the city of Wuhan in China is expected to generate 10 times the GDP growth of Auckland, New Zealand, yet the number of foreign service officials stationed in each city is in the opposite proportion.
Policymakers looking to adapt should also look more closely at opportunities to re-develop existing, or “brownfield,” infrastructure. The challenge of accommodating the tremendous pace of urbanization may be great, she said, but “we have not yet seen one piece of infrastructure where you can’t make substantial improvements.”
Summing up the need to work on what he argued has been a shortfall in policy engagement, Engelke concluded that, “we are indeed quite a ways from acknowledging the enormous challenges, but also the opportunities, that global urbanization presents to us.”
Event ResourcesSources: UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
Georgina Mace on Planetary Stewardship in a Globalized Age: Risks, Obstacles, and Opportunities
›April 18, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“The goal, ultimately, is just to manage our world better,” to have an “integrated system for the environment that is driven by what local communities want and need,” said Professor Georgina Mace, director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London. Mace spoke to ECSP on the sidelines of the 2012 Planet Under Pressure conference.
The environmental challenges of humanity are “really twofold,” she said. First, “human societies have grown up at what we now call the local scale…traditionally using the area in which they live.” Communities have always exerted pressures on their local environment but population growth “means those pressures on local landscapes are much greater than they use to be,” said Mace. “We can’t do everything all in the same place,” without the needs of different groups sometimes conflicting.
Second, “there are connections between societies that are sometimes good but quite often they’re damaging.” For example, the increasingly globalized nature of how we utilize natural resources means that “overuse by one community may affect local people in ways that they have no way of responding to.”
Taking apart the first of these challenges, Mace explained that “the population growth issue is really a population growth and demographic change [issue].” In places with mature age structures, such as North America, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, “the concern is about the number of old people dependent on a reducing number of producers in their society,” while in many poorer regions of the globe the concern is about the “many young people who still have to go through their reproductive years.”
This latter case “looks a horrible problem from the environment point of view,” said Mace, because the areas growing fastest are areas that are “already overused in many ways.” If countries “don’t worry too much about international migration [and] we’re able to accommodate that,” this “demographic divide” could actually be helpful, as countries with growing populations could provide a young, energetic workforce to those that are aging.
Mace made policy recommendations on different scales, from the local to the planetary. At the local level she encouraged making sure that climate interventions “are actually in concert with what’s going on in the environment.” “Let’s take advantage of ecological resilience, biological adaptation – all the things that nature has provided us with that give us mechanisms for coping,” she said.
On a broader scale, she recommended intervening to counteract the “damaging drivers of environmental change,” by using geoengineering and better land use planning, “which is essentially gardening the planet.”
“Both of those offer solutions that are actually incredibly efficient. They also have costs, risks, and obstacles to do with governance, to do with different people being winners and losers, and to do with the fact that we tend to organize our world around nation states and these solutions mostly transcend international boundaries.”
“That’s a major obstacle,” Mace said, but in the end we need “to have a fully integrated planning system that is not top down but has an overall strategy that seeks to optimize all the things that people want and allows a way for local communities to connect.”
“I think that’s the big challenge for us – how to get there.” -
Yemen: Revisiting Demography After the Arab Spring
›April 17, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy Madsen
Along with other countries where the Arab Spring caught hold, Yemen has been gripped by major upheaval over the past year. Although President Ali Abdullah Saleh finally ceded power in February after his administration’s violent reprisals failed to deter protesters, the country remains at a crossroads. As its political future continues to evolve, the new government must also address a range of deep-seated economic and social challenges. In addition to claiming more than 2,000 lives, the crisis has undermined Yemenis’ livelihoods and even their access to food. A recent World Food Program survey found that more than one-fifth of Yemen’s population is living in conditions of “severe food insecurity” – double the rate measured three years ago – and another fifth is facing moderate difficulty in feeding themselves and their families.
-
Neil Adger: Embrace Community Identities To Improve Climate Adaptation
›April 16, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“On an individual basis, people care about things in their back garden and they also care about global icons of climate change…cultural heritage and natural heritage are two really important things that tie people to place and where the impacts of climate change are really going to be felt,” said Neil Adger, professor of environmental economics at the University of East Anglia and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Speaking at the Wilson Center, Adger explained that if policymakers don’t think seriously about the cultural dimensions of climate change adaptation they risk implementing measures that significantly, and negatively, impact people’s sense of community and identity.
“For more than a decade we have been looking at the economic costs, and the infrastructure, and the things that policymakers really focus on whenever they think about the impacts of climate change,” said Adger. In doing so “we realized that that doesn’t necessary motivate people in terms of what they believe the impacts of climate change are.”
Drawing from work on adaption in Australian agriculture, Adger explained that culture can be a barrier to effective adaptation where governments and policymakers fail to engage communities on a cultural basis.
More detailed information is needed to identify what people care about, how people construct perceptions of climate risk, and the best ways to engage people locally.
This is not easy, however. “I think the difficulty of looking at the cultural impacts of climate change is that they are very place specific,” Adger said.
But there is a significant payoff from the investment. “The cultural embedded-ness of our relationship with climate is also potentially a huge motivation for action and for change,” he said. This motivation can extend beyond adaptation to actually encourage people to decarbonize the economy, to mitigate the potential for negative climate change impacts in the first place, and to act as “citizens rather than as consumers.” -
A New Land Security Agenda to Enable Sustainable, Equitable Development
›The recent news that overseas investors have acquired over 10 percent of Australia’s farmland and 9 percent of water entitlements in its agriculture sector has struck a political chord in the country. Large grain-producing nations like Brazil and Argentina have passed laws to restrict the foreign ownership of land. In other global grain hubs, like Ukraine and Russia, compromised harvests due to droughts could result in export restrictions. In a globalized economy, the combination of scarcity, market and population pressures, and weather volatility will make fertile land an increasingly precious resource.
A shift is underway in global financial markets, where global investors perceive that owning what grows on the land – or better still, owning the land itself – may be a hedge against the risks of more volatile financial markets. A surge in farmland investments is expected to grow over the next decade is due to a number of combined pressures: a growing global demand for commodities, rising commodity prices, ecological limits, and the fact that farmland is a “real asset” that offers diversification to the portfolios of investors at a time of market volatility.
The need to increase food production against the backdrop of resource limits, social vulnerability, and population growth, puts the question of land at the center of a new security agenda.
In sub-Saharan Africa large-scale acquisitions of land that neglect local livelihoods and resource scarcity, commonly referred to as “land grabs,” put the region’s future in the balance. Not all land investments have negative consequences, but given the lower levels of land tenure by communities and the fragility of human security in sub-Saharan Africa, regulating land investments with foresight is an urgent issue. Population growth and climate change underpin this agenda. A worse-than-average drought, exacerbated by climate change, may be all that is needed in certain places to realize the political, humanitarian, and ecological risks that are slowly building momentum.
From Land Grabs to Land Stewardship
Progress now depends on moving from a land grabs debate to land stewardship solutions. This shift, which the Earth Security Initiative summarized in a report published this month, The Land Security Agenda: How Investor Risks in Farmland Create Opportunities for Sustainability, requires an improved understanding by investors and political leaders of three priorities: managing land degradation, protecting human rights by focusing on food security and land ownership, and keeping economies within ecological – especially water – limits.
The agenda we have developed discusses why these issues form part of a new risk management agenda for investors as well as for countries seeking to attract foreign capital, whose economic competitiveness and political stability may be compromised by these trends. But managing these risks, we argue, will require making human rights and ecological limits a central feature of a new investment paradigm.
A range of international investors is already searching for solutions to engage practically with this debate. Among those with whom we have engaged throughout the study are individual investment funds, people seeking change within the financial sector, and investor networks such as the UN-backed Principles of Responsible Investment. Recently, governments, international organizations and civil society groups have also agreed on a set of voluntary guidelines for land governance under the auspices of the Committee on World Food Security. These developments are positive steps, but their voluntary nature remains problematic. The focus must now be placed on operationalizing their recommendations to ensure real accountability and creating political incentives in host countries to regulate their land to ensure long-term and equitable prosperity.
A Call to Action
In The Land Security Agenda we call on investors to turn their attention to their land and commodities portfolios, as well as the investments currently under due diligence, and begin to ask how soil resilience, the prosperity of local people, and freshwater limits are being considered. We recommend beginning to assess the risks of countries according to how well their governments are managing these issues.
We similarly call on heads of state in countries seeking to attract large investments in land to become more aware that these risks may undermine their country’s wealth, their stability, and economic competitiveness. Political leadership is needed to champion and enforce regulations that will encourage investments and modernization while protecting a country’s social and natural capital.
Some of the recommendations we have developed, which would help set the tone for investors and governments to move from voluntary principles to action, include:- Define land security parameters: Establish a set of verifiable measures that allows stakeholders to distinguish those land investments that advance equitable and sustainable prosperity from those that do not. Based on these criteria, which we suggest must consider people, water, and soil, it is possible to advance their integration into three important areas of the investment cycle: the identification of investment opportunities that build positive value, the due diligence process, and the performance reviews of fund managers.
- Build better country risk profiles: If the population of a given country is dependent on agriculture for livelihoods, shouldn’t issues like soil erosion, water availability and lack of recognition for people’s land rights increase that country’s sovereign risk? We think so and now seek to develop a “land security index” to help investors and host country governments assimilate these trends into their decisions as well as increase the advocacy capacity of local civil society.
- Advance the formal recognition of land rights on a large scale: The universal call for the prior and informed consent of communities must be supported, but will be of little practical value if communities do not hold the legal rights to their land or are not well informed about their rights and the commercial opportunities available to them. Civil society groups working to advance good governance, land titling, and capacity building – many of whom we have spoken to during this study – are in a position to help create a “land security partnership” that builds technical and political momentum for the formal recognition of land rights on a large scale, as well as the resourcing and oversight that government agencies will require to implement them.
Alejandro Litovsky is the founder and director of the Earth Security Initiative and lead author of the report. The Land Security Agenda can be downloaded here.
Sources: DGC Asset Management, Land Commodities Asset Management, Telegraph.
Image Credit: Cover of the The Land Security Agenda. -
One Country, Two Stories: Marc Sommers on Rwandan Youth’s Struggle for Adulthood
›Almost an entire generation of Rwandans is confronting the prospect that they are going to be failed adults, said Marc Sommers, a fellow with Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.
-
Demography, Climate in the Spotlight at Planet Under Pressure
›March 27, 2012 // By Kayly OberLondon’s 2012 Planet Under Pressure conference, on all things global change – including climate, population, global risks, and food security – kicked off with a bang on March 26 and ECSP was there to cover it. We’ll be here throughout the week following all of the most pertinent population, health, and security events – we invite you to visit our booth if you happen to be in London, join the conversation on Twitter (#Planet2012), and/or watch the livestream.
During the opening plenaries, UK Scientific Advisor and all-around environmental all-star Sir John Beddington was the first to introduce population into the discussion.
Speaking on “The Planet in 2050” panel, Beddington immediately noted that really 2050 is too far out and instead we should focus on the next two decades. Within these 20 years the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change will be determined by the extent and manner of urbanization and demographic changes, particularly in Africa.
“How are we going to generate an infrastructure to feed 500 million Africans in the next 13 years?” Beddington asked.
Beddington’s talk could be considered a rejoinder to his famous “perfect storm” analogy, outlined in The Guardian in 2009:Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50 percent more food. At the same time, we will need 50 percent more energy, and 30 percent more freshwater.
In a later session, “Securing Global Biodiversity,” Simon Stuart, chair of the species survival commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), expanded on this “perfect storm” analogy.
There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected. You can’t think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together.
He agreed that the global challenge of our day hinged on how human needs add pressures to the natural environment. Rising demand for energy, food, and freshwater not only influences climate change but also exerts unprecedented pressure on soil quality and biodiversity.
But although we’re impeded by major challenges, including “unsustainable economic models,” a lack of public support, and a massive need for investment in conservation, we have made some strides, Stuart said. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s strategic plan for biodiversity, established in 2010, sets 20 targets for biodiversity conservation by 2020. Stuart believes this is the beginning of acknowledging the urgency of addressing the threat to biodiversity.
Tim Coulson, professor of population biology at Imperial College London, compared the efficiency of either reducing fertility rates or per capita consumption to determine the best way to reduce humanity’s impact on the planet.
Coulson ran two simple simulations using India and the United States as case studies. In one model, he changed fertility rates by one percent per year for 50 years. In the other, he decreased per capita consumption by one percent per year for 50 years. What he found in both cases was that decreasing per capita consumption achieved the most rapid change in human impact on the environment. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that a longer-term course of action of declining fertility rates was needed to keep impact stable.
Readers beware, however – this type of experiment is an incredibly simplified exercise in the intersection of people and the environment. A more varied set of scenarios would produce more useful results. As Beddington mentioned, populations in sub-Saharan Africa have both the highest growth rates and the most direct impact on the environment due to their higher reliance on natural resources for livelihoods.
And, perhaps most importantly, as one commentator noted, these scenarios do not take into account cost factors. For instance, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through more energy efficient buildings and transport, the United States would need to invest $1.1 trillion through 2030. Alternatively, the cost to provide for the 215 million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy but are not using an effective means of contraception is estimated at $3.6 billion. Using the “wedge” climate model, meeting unmet family planning needs would be equivalent to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions saved by converting entirely to electric vehicles – at a fraction (about five percent) of the cost.
Stay tuned for more updates from ECSP at the Planet Under Pressure Conference. We’ll also be posting pictures from the conference to our Facebook and Flickr pages.
Video Credit: “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure Conference.
