Showing posts from category energy.
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Eelke Kraak, ChinaDialogue
Central Asia’s Dam Debacle
›March 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Eelke Kraak, appeared on ChinaDialogue.
The Toktogul Dam in Kyrgyzstan is an imposing structure. The dam guards the largest and only multi-annual water reservoir in central Asia. The cascade of five hydroelectric stations downstream produces 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s power. Cotton fields thousands of kilometers away in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan depend on the release of water from this dam.
The Toktogul is literally and figuratively the “valve” of the Syr Darya River. But by relying on large-scale engineering projects to control the river, these countries have ignored the fundamentally political nature of water management.
The significance of the Toktogul dam goes beyond its economic benefits. It was the center piece of the Soviet Union’s efforts to conquer nature in its drive to modernize central Asia. When it became fully operational in the late 1980s, the project to control the region’s rivers seemed complete.
But the costs have been high. The Aral Sea, the terminal lake of the main sources of water in central Asia, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, has shrunk to almost nothing. Many areas surrounding what is left of the lake are heavily polluted. Moreover, the now independent Syr Darya riparian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan – disagree on how the Toktogul should be operated.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.
Syr Darya River Floodplain, Kazakhstan, courtesy of NASA and the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. -
Integration, Communication Across Sectors a Must, Say Speakers at 2012 NCSE Environment and Security Conference (Updated)
›February 23, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP staff were among the more than 1,000 attendees discussing non-traditional security issues at the 12th National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment last month at the Ronald Reagan Building. Our own Geoff Dabelko spoke on the opening plenary (above) and we collected other excerpts below, though they’re only a small slice of the conference. Find our full coverage by following the NCSE tag, see the full agenda on environmentalsecurity.org, and follow the conversation on Twitter (#NCSEconf).
Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health
At the conference’s lead-off plenary, Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), Rosamond Naylor (Director, Stanford’s Center on Food Security and Environment), and our ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko highlighted the challenges and opportunities of addressing the diverse yet interconnected issues of climate, energy, food, water, and health.
“We need to embrace diversity regardless of the complexity,” said Dabelko, and “abandon our stereotypes and get out of our stovepipes.” Government agencies, academics, and NGOs must be open to using different tools and work together to capture synergies. “If we know everyone in the room, we are not getting out enough,” he said.
“We have to be concerned with every level – national, state, tribal, regional, down to the individual,” said Gerstein. DHS recognizes that climate change affects all of its efforts, and has established three main areas of focus: Arctic impacts; severe weather; and critical infrastructure and key resources.
For Coca-Cola, “managing the complex relationship among [food, water, and energy] is going to be the challenge of the 21st century, said Seabright, who noted that the business community is “seeing a steady increase in the internalization of these issues into business,” including as part of companies’ competitive advantages and strategies.
Similarly, we must offer opportunities and not just threats, said Dabelko, such as exploring climate adaptation’s potential as a tool for peacebuilding rather than simply focusing on climate’s links to conflict. We need to “find ways to define and measure success that embrace the connections among climate, water, and energy, and does not try to pretend they aren’t connected in the real world,” he said.
Communicating Across Sectors: Difficult But Necessary
Next, Sherri Goodman (Executive Director, CNA Military Advisory Board), Nancy Sutley (Chair, White House Council on Environmental Quality), Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (Climate and Energy Security Envoy, UK Ministry of Defence), and Susan Avery (Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) called on governments, militaries, and institutions to move away from traditional, vertically segmented responsibilities to address today’s environmental and security challenges.
“We live in an interdependent, connected world,” Morisetti said, but communicating that is a challenge. Militaries are likely to have new, broader missions, including conflict prevention, he said, which makes communications all the more important.
Science is moving from reductive to integrated outlooks to better address larger, systems-wide challenges, said Avery, but communicating results of this research to the public, and across and between disciplines, is difficult.
Confronting these communication and education challenges, particularly the difficulties of conveying the probability of various risks, is a key focus of the Council on Environmental Quality, said Sutley. “We confront the challenge of risk communication every day and it’s not limited to climate change,” she said.Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Climate and Conflict
The common argument is that climate change will lead to scarcity – less arable land, water, rain, etc. – and scarcity will lead to conflict, said Kate Marvel (Lawrence Livermore National Lab). But the link between scarcity and conflict is not that clear. It’s “very important to treat models as tools, not as magic balls,” she said. Developing better diagnostics to test models will help researchers and observers sort out which ones are best.
Kaitlin Shilling (Stanford University) called on the environmental security community to move beyond simple causal pathways towards finding solutions. After all, rolling back climate change is not an option at this point, she said; to find solutions, therefore, we need more detailed analysis of the pathways to violence.
The most common types of climate-conflict correlations are not likely to directly involve the state, said Cullen Hendrix (College of William and Mary). Traditional inter-state wars (think “water wars”) or even civil wars are much less likely than threats to human security (e.g., post-elections violence in Kenya) and community security (e.g., tribal raiding in South Sudan). For this reason, the biggest breakthroughs in understanding climate and conflict links will likely come from better interactions between social and physical scientists, he said.
Because the many unique factors leading to conflict vary from place to place, a better way to assess climate-conflict risk might be mapping human vulnerability to climate change rather than predicting conflict risk in a given place, said Justin Mankin (Stanford University). While human reactions are very difficult to predict, vulnerability is easier to quantify.
Yu Hongyuan (Shanghai Institute for International Studies) compared the concerns of U.S. and Chinese officials on climate change. Polling results, he said, show Chinese officials are most concerned with maintaining access to resources, while American policymakers focus on climate change’s effects on global governance and how it will impact responses to natural disasters, new conflicts, and humanitarian crises. Given the centrality of these two countries to international climate negotiations, Yu said he hoped the “same issues, different values” gulf might be bridged by better understanding each side’s priorities.
Schuyler Null, Lauren Herzer, and Meaghan Parker contributed to this article.
Video Credit: Lyle Birkey/NCSE; photo credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
‘Dialogue TV’ With Sharon Burke, Neil Morisetti, and Geoff Dabelko: Climate, Energy, and the Military
›We are entering “an emerging security environment” where “what constitutes a ‘threat’ and what constitutes a ‘challenge’” requires a broader understanding of security than has often been the norm, according to Sharon Burke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs. Burke was joined by the UK’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti and ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko on a new installment of Dialogue TV. They debated what climate change and energy security mean for the world’s militaries.
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Ethan Goffman, SSPP Blog
Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission
›January 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ethan Goffman, appeared on the Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy blog.
In a time of polarized politics in the United States, over the environment and just about everything else, an overlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national security apparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environment and Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. With the early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in an increase in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic, those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage in speculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t really occurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action against potential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.
The concern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept of security from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands as food and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the military has already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energy security, economic security, environmental security, and national security are all inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,” explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.
One obvious linkage is the connection of our oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict in politically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in the Middle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is a matter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. The Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries, underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan, the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependent on large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algal jet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for more icebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resource exploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.
Continue reading on the SSPP blog.
Photo Credit: Sherri Goodman and Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Jon Barnett: Climate Adaptation Not Just Building Infrastructure, But Expanding Options
›“I think it’s appropriate to think about [climate change] adaptation or investments in adaptation as investments to open up the range of choices available to people to deal with an uncertain future,” said Jon Barnett, associate professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. “In some circumstances it might be appropriate to build infrastructure and hard options where we’re very certain about the nature of the risk…but in other cases, expanding the range of choices and freedoms and opportunities that people have to deal with climate change in the future is perhaps the better strategy.”
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Managing the Planet: The Road to Rio+20
›“We still see people thinking about the environment as if it is something apart. The idea of a synergy, a balance of development still, I think, eludes us both in theoretical, but especially in practical terms. And that is what Rio+20 is about,” said Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, under-secretary for environment, energy, science, and technology at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Rio+20 conference next year, marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. It will be an opportunity to generate new answers to the question of how to collectively develop in a more sustainable and balanced way, said Figueiredo. Jacob Scherr, director of strategy and advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Richenda Van Leeuwen, senior director for energy and climate at the UN Foundation, and Thomas Lovejoy, biodiversity chair at the Heinz Center for Science and professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, joined the ambassador at the Wilson Center on November 16 for a discussion about preparations for the upcoming conference. The event was part of the Managing the Planet seminar series, coordinated jointly by George Mason University and the Wilson Center.
Sustainable Development Goals
Rio+20 should reaffirm the sustainable development vision of the first Earth Summit, said Scherr, “of our ability to deal with all of these issues at once: to move forward on economics, and dealing with poverty, of being equitable, and protecting and preserving the environment for future generations.”
Figueiredo said he sees the concept of a “green economy” as an “instrument to promote sustainable development and eradicate poverty. And in that sense, it seems clear that we will not find one green economy as such, but probably as many green economies as countries in the world, because each country will find its way of using that kind of tool.”
One proposal for the conference, supported by Brazil, is to devise a set of sustainable development goals, which would “embrace the Millennium Development Goals and instill a certain sustainability viewpoint to all of them,” Ambassador Figueiredo said. Furthermore, they would be global in nature, rather than geared towards developing countries, providing a vision for collective development.
“The Millennium Development Goals were good in some ways [but] they were fairly weak on the environmental side,” said Thomas Lovejoy. “This is a chance to actually improve on that, to really bring these elements together.”
Action and Accountability
Through “sustainable development dialogues,” Brazil is working to provide a new mechanism for civil society input at the conference. According to Figueiredo, Brazil hopes to “create a bridge between those who understand the issues, those who have a deep knowledge of the issues, and those who have the power again to do something about it.”
“We have been talking about these issues for 40 years, what we really need is a meeting that, as the Secretary General recently said, is a conference about implementation…to really start moving us down the path towards a sustainable future,” said Scherr.
“You might argue that everything that happened 20 years ago was an absolute failure, but of course it was not, because an awful lot has happened in the interim, it’s just that it hasn’t happened on a big enough scale or fast enough,” Lovejoy said.
“What gives me a lot of reason for hope going into Rio+20 is there are a lot of very practical, very pragmatic efforts involved,” he said.
Richenda Van Leeuwen pointed to the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative as a potential agenda to follow. The initiative has three objectives: ensuring universal access to modern energy services; doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency; and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.
“We are using Rio, and the seminal opportunity that it represents, as a mechanism to be able to bring these new commitments together…to show that there is an opportunity for concrete actions,” Van Leeuwen said.
A robust accountability framework is vital to that effort, Van Leeuwen said. “It’s easy to make a pledge at a pledging conference, but really what we are looking at is a whole new way of doing business, a whole new action agenda,” she said. “So we are very optimistic and very excited about the opportunity for Rio, but Rio not as an end really, but as a beginning and as an opportunity to be a springboard to get much further global action.”
Photo credit: “Brazil!,” courtesy of Flickr user sparktography.
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IRP Editors Cover Rwanda’s Population, Health, and Environment Challenges
›The original version of this article appeared on the International Reporting Project website.
The International Reporting Project (IRP) and 12 senior editors and producers from across the United States traveled to Rwanda this year to learn about issues affecting Rwanda and other countries in Africa and to help them improve their news organizations’ international coverage. Some of the editors focused on Rwanda’s extensive population, health, and environmental challenges:
Nicholas Aster, founder and publisher of San Francisco’s Triple Pundit, covered sustainable development in Kigali, coffee’s empowerment potential, and eco-tourism sites like Volcanoes National Park. Aster also became interested in Rwanda’s efforts to avert disaster by corralling Lake Kivu’s CO2 reserves into a power supply. At the close of his trip, Aster reflected on Rwanda’s sustainability goals in a photo essay.
Tom Paulson, host and reporter for KPLU’s Humanosphere, discovered the positive side of aid and development in Rwanda, including girls’ education initiatives and coffee farming improvements. Moreoever, Paulson documented the Gatekeepers’ trip to Volcanoes National Park, including a visit from a mountain gorilla who became a little too friendly. Paulson has also posted several questions the Gatekeepers asked President Paul Kagame when they met with him, including his policies on restricting free speech, curbing population growth, and preventing another genocide. At the close of the trip, Paulson composed a photo slideshow that shows a growing, vibrant Rwanda, and he also outlined 10 reasons why the complex and sometimes contradictory country can’t be described in a sound-bite.
Sue Horton, op-ed and Sunday Opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, began chronicling her trip with a survey of Rwanda’s history on genocide, governance, and gorillas. On the road to meet Rwanda’s famed gorillas, Horton noted Rwanda’s strengths and challenges: its ambitious vision for the future encourages a growth in infrastructure and the country has showed impressive gains in healthcare provision and access, but Kigali is relocating residents who don’t fit the image.
The deputy managing editor of Global Post, Andrew Meldrum, also found a note of optimism in witnessing how far Rwanda has come since the genocide, particularly after hearing the testimonies of the genocide’s youngest victims: children born of sexual violence during the genocide. And his Global Post colleague Jon Rosen delves into the country’s population growth and the government’s approach to family planning.
In addition to the Gatekeeper Editor Trips, the IRP offers individual Fellowships to U.S. reporters to travel overseas on five-week reporting trips. In 2009, IRP Fellow Perry Beeman discovered a Rwanda similar to that which the Gatekeepers encountered: a country that has made much progress, but still has many challenges ahead. Beeman, who also was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, created a multimedia series, “Renewal in Rwanda”, for The Des Moines Register; his reporting garnered him an Overseas Press Club citation for Best Reporting in 2010.
Rwandans, Beeman found, are dedicated to conservation. President Kagame is committed to the environment and is driven to develop clean, sustainable power and to convert from subsistence agriculture to a stronger, more diversified economy. But everyone has a hand in this effort, including schoolchildren who report on conservation in song, dance, and dramatic arts. Beeman also examined efforts to preserve the Gishwati Forest, including gorilla and chimpanzee preservation efforts from villagers to businessmen to researchers. Beeman emphasized the importance of immersing oneself in an environment in order to report on it, and he did so by, among other things, tracking wild chimpanzees in the forest.
For more information about IRP’s Fellowships and Gatekeeper Editor trips, visit their website at InternationalReportingProject.org.
Photo Credit: “The Broadsheet in Kyovu, Kigali,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday). -
Ambassador Melanne Verveer, U.S. Department of State
Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues on Durban and the Role of Women in Combating Climate Change
›December 23, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ambassador Melanne Verveer, appeared on the White House Council on Environmental Quality blog.
Last week I traveled to Durban, South Africa to participate in the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to highlight the critical and largely untapped potential of women to combat climate change. Studies have shown that it is often women who are on the frontlines of, and suffer disproportionately from, the impacts of climate change. This is certainly important. But we must remember that women are also a powerful force for finding solutions to climate change across the board, including in areas such as agriculture, sustainable forest management, and energy access.
Agriculture, which accounts for approximately 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is a sector that can be particularly sensitive to climate variability and change, is one key area where women can play a major role. A recent FAO report shows that women, in many places, are the main producers of the world’s staple crops, particularly in developing countries and regions likely to be adversely affected by climate change impacts. However, globally, only a small minority of women farmers have access to land tenure. This is a problem for many reasons – including that it limits women’s potential to combat climate change. Studies have shown that women with the right to property are significantly more capable of investing in climate-smart agricultural productivity; we have a lot of work to do to unlock women’s potential in this area.
Women also have untapped potential for increasing energy access, which directly relates to climate change. For example, nearly three billion people globally still rely on traditional cookstoves and open fires to prepare food for their families. In most instances, women are responsible for cooking – not to mention also spending many hours per week collecting fuel, which often puts women at risk of gender based violence. The resulting smoke exposure causes an estimated two million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Cookstoves also impact the climate through emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon. Engaging women is critical to tackling this problem. As we work to build a global market for clean cookstoves, integrating women into the cookstoves supply chain will help increase clean cookstove adoption rates while also creating new economic development opportunities. And as Secretary Clinton has noted, women create a multiplier effect in local communities because they disproportionately spend more of their earned income on food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling.
The United States recognizes the power of women’s potential in these areas and many others, and is investing in major initiatives including Feed the Future and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, where women’s role in generating transformative change is front and center.
I went to Durban to highlight the critical role of women in combating climate change. While there, I worked with U.S. negotiators on the Durban texts and participated in public engagement events. Our efforts to build on the gender equality and women’s empowerment language in the Cancun agreements are reflected in several crucial institutional developments, including language on gender balance related to the composition of the board of the new Green Climate Fund, the Standing Committee, and the Adaptation Committee. We also worked to reflect gender considerations in the mission of the Climate Technology Center and Network. USAID Assistant Administrator Eric Postel and I solicited input during a meeting with leading non-governmental organizations working on gender and climate issues, and I hosted a high-level side event at the U.S. Center focused on unlocking women’s potential to combat climate change. The level of enthusiasm among my fellow panelists and the audience at the event was inspirational.
We made progress in Durban, but we can’t stop here. To achieve the future we all seek, we must do more. As the late Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and ground-breaking advocate on women and the environment said, “We must not tire, we must not give up, we must persist.” The future of not only women, but our planet, depends on it.
Ambassador Melanne Verveer is U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.
Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The White House.
Photo Credit: “Melanne S. Verveer,” courtesy of the U.S. Embassy, Kabul.
