Showing posts from category environment.
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Managing Our Forests: Carbon, Climate Change, and Fire
›“We cannot manage our planet if we cannot manage our forests,” said William Sommers, a research professor with the Center for Climate and Society at George Mason University, during a recent event at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The event, which coincided with the International Year of Forests, was the fourth in a series co-sponsored by George Mason University and the Environmental Change and Security Program on “Managing the Planet.” Sandra Brown, director and chief scientist of the Ecosystems Services Unit at Winrock International and David Cleaves, climate change advisor to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, joined Sommers and moderator Thomas Lovejoy, professor at George Mason, to discuss the impact of climate change, carbon, and fire on the world’s forests. [Video Below]
Fire: A “Critical Element”
“Forests have evolved over Earth’s history,” said Sommers, with fire being a “constant shaper” of this evolution. Humans first used fire as a tool about 400,000 years ago, and around 10,000 years ago, we began using fire for agricultural purposes, which, Sommers said, can be considered the beginning of forest management.
The resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been an important consequence of this human intervention, Sommers said. CO2 emissions have an “exceptional persistence” in the atmosphere, which, explained Sommers, “commits us to irreversible warming over the next 1,000 years.”
In order to counteract these warming effects, a replacement for the “business-as-usual” approach is needed, Sommers said. If not, he warned, CO2 concentrations could reach a thousand parts per million by the end of the century: “It has been 30 to 100 million years since Earth experienced that level of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and Earth was extremely warm at that time.”
“Fire remains a critical element of the earth’s system and is highly sensitive to climate change,” said Sommers. The potential feedback relationship between fire and climate change was illustrated in dramatic fashion in the summer of 2010 with the outbreak of wildfires in Russia after the hottest summer temperatures on record.
Time is running short, Sommers warned, to answer the question of whether humans can anticipate and respond to climate change and manage forests in a sustainable manner.
Reducing Emissions & Improving Management
“Logging can be well-planned and well-designed or maybe not so well-planned,” said Brown as she spoke about her research on the logging industry in the tropics. Sustainable forest management in the tropics is still “a bit of the wild west” in some countries, though the situation is improving slightly, she said.
One way to improve management and reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be through the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) program of the United Nations. REDD+ can provide incentives, Brown said, for people to come up with useful innovations and improvements to forest management. But, she warned, “the longer we keep waiting, [the more] forests are diminishing.”
When a tree is felled, Brown said, there is a lot of collateral damage. An estimated one billion metric tons of CO2 are released every year from logging in the tropics of Africa and Latin America, she explained. One-half of these emissions are from the harvesting itself and the other half is from incidental damage and infrastructure, such as from the skid trails and haul roads needed to transport the logs out of the forest.
Therefore, it is important for all possible reduction steps to be taken, Brown said: “Where we have opportunities to produce goods with reducing emissions, we need to take those opportunities. We just can’t keep thinking, ‘That’s too small to worry about.’ If there’s what we call ‘low-hanging fruit,’ why not go for it?”
In order to reduce emissions and improve management, Brown suggested reducing avoidable waste by trimming more off of felled logs to increase volume, creating a management plan wherein felled logs are accurately mapped and skid trails are better planned, and using silvicultural treatments to speed the forest’s recovery.
Integrating Climate Change Into Risk Management
The job of the U.S. Forest Service has always been that of a “stress manager,” said Cleaves. Climate change is likely to ramp up existing stressors, such as drought and wildfires, which is why it is necessary for the Forest Service to integrate climate change adaptation techniques into the existing stress manager role. “We feel that there is no such thing as a separate climate change program,” he said.
Many difficult choices will have to be made to address climate change, Cleaves said: “We can’t afford the scale of the problem; we can’t afford to solve it all. We need to be able to prioritize.” These choices will have to be based on economic, social, and ecological values in order to “manage risks around the full sweep of the elements of sustainability,” he said.
The country’s forests are changing and we have already seen whole system change, Cleaves explained. For example, climate change has altered snow cover patterns leading to the decline of over half a million acres of yellow-cedar forest in Alaska.
Other threats facing U.S. forests include disease (such as white pine blister rust), increased variability of fires, increased housing growth near forested areas, and the possibility of forests turning from carbon sinks into carbon sources. That is to say, as forests are destroyed through fires, clearing, or disease, they release back into the environment the carbon they have absorbed.
Risk must be integrated into the decision-making process of the agency, and to this end the Forest Service has created the National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change. But in order to meet these climate change challenges, Cleaves said, “we have to get moving.”
Sources: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, USA Today.
Photo Credit: “Michigan,” courtesy of flickr user The U.S. Army. -
Watch ‘Dialogue’ TV on Integrating Development, Population, Health, and the Environment
›Last week on the Wilson Center’s Dialogue radio and television program, host John Milewski spoke with Geoff Dabelko, director of ECSP, Roger-Mark De Souza, vice president for research and director of the Climate Program for Population Action International, and George Strunden, vice president of Africa programs for the Jane Goodall Institute. They discussed the challenge of integrating population, health, and environmental programs (PHE) to address a broad range of livelihood, development, and stability issues. [Video Below]
“Many times that we tackle development or poverty and human well-being challenges…we do it in an individual sector – the health sector, or agriculture sector, or looking at issues of water scarcity – and it makes sense in many respects to take those individual focuses,” said Dabelko. “But of course people living in these challenges, they’re living in them together…so both in terms of understanding the challenges…and then in responding to those challenges, we have to find ways to meet those challenges together.”
De Souza noted that the drive for integrated development stems from the communities being served, not necessarily from outside aid groups. “We’ve seen that there’s a greater impact because there’s longer sustainability for those efforts that have an integrated approach,” he said. “There’s a greater understanding and a greater appreciation of the value that [PHE] projects bring.”
Strunden said that the Goodall Institute has found similar success in tying health efforts with the environment in places where previously conservation work alone had been unsuccessful.
The panelists also discussed the role of population in broader global challenges, including energy, water, and food scarcities, and women’s rights.
Dialogue is a co-production of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and MHz Networks. The show is also available throughout the United States on MHz Networks, via broadcast and cable affiliates, as well as via DirecTV and WorldTV (G19) satellite.
Find out where to watch Dialogue where you live via MHz Networks. You can send questions or comments on the program to dialogue@wilsoncenter.org. -
The U.S. Government’s Response to Disasters: Myth, Mistakes, and Recovery
›“Major crises and disasters have massively changed over the last generation,” said Dr. Frederick Burkle, senior public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and senior fellow and scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “We have to start a new narrative of what we need to do to address [them].”
To discuss the emerging and persistent challenges of disaster prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery, Burkle was joined by Paul Born, co-founder and director of the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement; Leonard Doyle, Haiti country spokesperson at the International Organization for Migration; Arif Hasan, adviser at the Orangi Pilot Project and founder and chairman at the Urban Resource Centre; and Dr. Eliane Ubalijoro, adjunct professor at McGill University and member of the Presidential Advisory Council for Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
“Retrieving the Wisdom of Those in Need”
Unfortunately, disaster responses often fail to “listen and gain a corner on the obvious,” said Born, discussing the need for community engagement and healing in times of disaster and conflict.
After Hurricane Katrina, for example, the formal disaster response failed to use hundreds of available buses to evacuate people, leaving thousands of people stranded in the floods. “If people were engaged, had a role to play, knew what to do, were part of a team, would this have made a difference? Would those buses have been deployed to help people?” asked Born.
Effective disaster response must utilize “the assets, the skills, and the knowledge that are present,” concluded Born. For example, when the systems in place by the Philippine government in the village of Talba failed to give proper warning to evacuate from a volcanic eruption, “it was a parallel warning system, developed by the community, that warned people, on time, to vacate the area and avoid any loss of life,” said Born. Community preparedness and engagement led to better utilization of available humanitarian assets and mitigated what could have been a much more severe disaster.
The Changing Nature of Humanitarian Emergencies
Increasingly, humanitarian crises are the result of unconventional warfare, causing major challenges for the humanitarian community, said Burkle. Rather than refugees, “what we are beginning to see today is an unprecedented number of internally displaced people.”
Many of the displaced migrate to urban settings, contributing to rapid urbanization which is straining water, sanitation, and public health infrastructure. In these settings, he said, there is sometimes only one latrine for every 200 people, new and infectious diseases are rampant, and high rates of violence and rape are common, putting women particularly at risk.
“It is a lot more than population size – it’s really density of population,” said Burkle. In Mumbai, for example, there is an average of 30,000 people per square kilometer, but there are major areas of the city with over one million people per square kilometer.
“People moving to the cities are still remaining in extreme poverty,” said Burkle. While the majority of the poor once lived in low-income fragile states, recent population data indicates that 72 percent of the world’s poor now live in middle income countries like India, Indonesia, and China. “It’s a total reversal – we’ve spent almost 20 years crafting our foreign aid budgets and policy around this…we have to start a new narrative about what we are going to do.”
“The other issue that I don’t think we hear about, but certainly the young people in the audience will be dealing with on a daily basis, are the biodiversity crises,” said Burkle. “Of the 34 biodiverse areas, 23 have experienced prolonged conflict,” which has had major impacts on the availability of water, food, and energy in these regions, said Burkle.
Moving forward, “we have to change the humanitarian community; we have to have more accountability and more accreditation, leading to a blueprint for professionalizing the humanitarian field,” concluded Burkle.
Community and Communication in Haiti
A little over one year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, 680,000 people remain internally displaced, said Doyle. “About half the population has moved out of the camps, and there is some congratulations to be given to the humanitarian community for organizing that,” he said. “But, when you look at the statistics…only a tiny fraction of these people have reached what you would call durable solutions such as sustainable housing.”
“There is clearly a problem… why has more progress not taken place given the number of international organizations there and the generosity of the funding?” asked Doyle.
“People have a right to communicate and there is a benefit in that communication,” said Doyle. To help make this possible in the Haitian displacement camps, he and his colleagues at the International Organization of Migration (IOM) set up 140 suggestion boxes. The response was amazing, he said, and with the help of a local Haitian organization, IOM has begun broadcasting some of the over 5,000 letters received on a daily radio show.
“We need to help create respectful conversations in countries where we do so much hard work but see so much of it go nowhere,” said Doyle. Information from the letters has been compiled into reports detailing the major challenges faced by people including a lack of jobs, education, and housing. These letters are being used as a monitoring and accountability mechanism through which Haitians can tell NGOs and donors the successes and failures of projects being implemented in their communities. “Through this communication you can see what the community needs, rather than what the experts tell you the community needs,” he said.
Engaging Local Communities
“Regions are sometimes so badly devastated [after a disaster], that to rehabilitate their agriculture, transport, water supply systems, is a very daunting task,” said Hasan. His home country of Pakistan faced all of these challenges after heavy rains and subsequent flooding wiped out 3,000 villages and affected over 20 million people last year.
“Without a governance system, you cannot provide rehabilitation or relief,” Hasan said, citing an added challenge for disaster response in many developing countries. Often the needs of the people are not translated in to policy actions, he said, and “there is a big difference between what people want and what politicians want.”
Hasan offered some insights on how the development community can work with local communities to improve disaster response, pointing out that “pre-disaster situations determine the effectiveness of relief and rehabilitation.” Existing mechanisms to provide development assistance can be used to efficiently deliver goods and services in emergencies, he said. By fostering “true partnerships” international NGOs can help communities and governments should manage reconstruction and relief efforts after disasters using local materials, labor, and technologies, he said. Engaging communities in reconstruction “can be a really important healing process.”
Recovery and Resilience
“When you have a community that has been reduced to ashes, how can you retrieve hope so that transformation can happen?” asked Ubalijoro, stressing the importance of building community resilience after disasters. “We’ve been talking about disasters, but it’s important to remember how we learn to dream again together.”
Baskets of Hope is a project that aims to help Rwandan women recover from the genocide by providing training and jobs weaving baskets that are sold internationally. In addition to providing a source of income, the project also provides information about health and nutrition. With this multi-pronged approach, Baskets of Hope helps families to recover and move forward. “There’s an interesting relationship between weaving these baskets that are allowing these women to have economic empowerment and what it requires after a time of trauma to reweave the fabric of society,” said Ubalijoro.
Youth who have survived man-made or natural disasters are particularly vulnerable, said Ubalijoro. She and her colleagues work to link Rwandan youth with Holocaust survivors so that they can share their memories, pictures, and stories with one another. “Retrieving the wisdom from those who have gone through the unimaginable and having them share their experiences shows youth that even though they’ve lost everything, there are ways to move forward.”
Sources: Conservation International, Institute of Development Studies, International Organization for Migration, USAID.
Photo Credit: “Pakistan Floods” courtesy of flickr user IRIN Photos. -
Marissa Mommaerts, Aspen Institute
Aspen Institute: The Revolution We Need in Food Security and Population
›April 27, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe first months of this year brought the second global food price crisis in just three years, with soaring food prices against a backdrop of bad weather, poor harvests, and political turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East. This year will see another milestone: the planet’s population is set to surpass seven billion, with most of the population growth occurring in countries least equipped to meet rising demands on agriculture and the environment. As part of its 7 Billion: Conversations that Matter roundtable series, the Aspen Institute’s Global Health and Development Program brought together three experts to discuss “The Revolution We Need in Food Security and Population” on April 12.
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Population Growth and its Relation to Poverty, the Environment, and Human Rights
›“Population, Poverty, Environment, and Climate Dynamics in the Developing World,” in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, by Jason Bremner, David Lopez-Carr, Laurel Suter, and Jason Davis, attempts to illuminate and clarify the complex relationships between environmental degradation, population dynamics, and poverty. Population growth is a key driver for the degradation of ecosystem services which has a direct impact on livelihoods and human well-being, write the authors, especially for the poor. They argue that “population growth itself, however, remains an insufficient explanation of the relationship between population, ecosystems, and poverty.” While the field has a come a long way since its “original Malthusian roots,” they write, the relationships between these dynamics differ greatly depending on the area in question, and much work remains to be done on the less well-studied ecosystems.In “An End to Population Growth: Why Family Planning Is Key to a Sustainable Future” from the Solutions Journal, Robert Engelman reminds us that population projections are not set in stone and that the widespread belief that population has to reach nine billion before leveling off is wrong. Nor is coercive “population control” necessary, he writes: “Population growth rates and average family size worldwide have fallen by roughly half over the past four decades, as modern contraception has become more accessible and popular.” Unfortunately, there remains a large number of people around the world without access to family planning, the majority of whom live in developing countries. Engelman points out that while the number of people of reproductive age has steadily increased in these countries over the last decade, donor support has declined. He argues that research, courage, and creativity are needed to reverse this situation, but in a world where most of all pregnancies were intended, population growth would slow long before reaching nine billion. -
Rukia Seif, PHE Champion
Making Life Easier in Rural Tanzania
›This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.
Rukia Seif is a population, health, environment (PHE) peer educator who promotes simple economic, environmental, and health behaviors that make sense. In many ways, the Mkalamo village where Rukia lives is a typical rural Tanzanian agricultural village. In another important way it is very different. Mkalamo abuts the biodiversity rich Saadani National Park – the only wildlife park in Tanzania that borders the sea. Ironically, this park does not make life easier for people living in Mkalamo but more difficult. In the park, there is a ban on the cutting of wood, making it difficult to find enough to fuel villagers’ cooking stoves. Also, increasing numbers of the park’s wild animals often destroy the villagers’ precious crops.
As a PHE peer educator, Rukia talks with her fellow community members about simple things they can do to improve their lives. Her messages are clear:- By planning their families, women can ensure their own and their children’s health and can decide the optimal number of children that they can provide for.
- By using fuel efficient stoves, women can spend less time collecting fire wood, freeing up time for other chores or livelihood activities and reducing the amount of needed fuel, thus helping sustain the forests for future generations.
- By joining community-led savings and credit associations, women and men gain access to capital, allowing them to scale-up current livelihoods or diversify to new sources of income.
Rukia sets a good example of how doing these simple things can improve a family’s life and protect the environment. At age 36, she is a mother of three girls, ages 14, 12, and one and a half. Rukia and her husband, Seif Ramadhani, are taking measures to plan their family. Rukia used pills before they decided to have their last daughter. Now they are using condoms as a back-up while Rukia is breastfeeding the baby. Through her work, Rukia meets and talks to many people every day. She discusses family planning and if someone is interested, she refers them to community-based distributors and the dispensary for family planning services.
“I talk to my peers about planning their families so we have enough natural resources to meet the needs of the villagers who depend on these resources,” she said. “Also, when you plan your family, you will get more time to perform other activities.”
An active member of the savings and credit association, where she also acts as the accountant, Rukia is living proof of this last statement. Through savings and loans, Rukia has diversified her income by buying a sewing machine and a fuel-efficient oven. Today, she generates income from cow and poultry husbandry, tailoring, bread-making, selling soft drinks, and constructing fuel-efficient stoves. With this increased income, Rukia and her husband have been able to put an iron sheet roof on their house and send their first-born daughter to secondary school – a great achievement in a country where only five percent of women stay in school beyond the primary level.
Rukia demonstrated her two fuel-efficient stoves: one is a metal oven that she uses for baking breads and cakes, the other is a simple mud stove that she uses for cooking. The mud stove, which costs less than $2 to build, is getting increasingly popular in the community. It saves fuel wood, prevents fires, produces less smoke (a serious health hazard), and cooks the food faster!
“I can even wear my best clothes and put on some lip shine when I use this stove, because it does not foul up the air,” Rukia explains with a laugh. Seeing the benefits of the fuel efficient stoves, she has inspired ten community-based distributors and five village leaders to join the team of individuals showcasing the fuel efficient technologies.
Rukia is a perfect example of practicing what one preaches. She is improving her own life, helping others learn to do the same, and protecting the very natural resources upon which almost everyone in Mkalamo depends.
This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project. A PDF version can be downloaded from the PHE Toolkit. PHE Champion profiles highlight people working on the ground to improve health and conservation in areas where biodiversity is critically endangered. -
Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace
›Download Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace from the Wilson Center.
How does globalization affect natural resource issues such as water on local, national, and international levels? Can our common dependence on these stressed resources be a force for bringing people together rather than dividing us? What lessons can we learn from sharing insights from communities at these very different levels of organization?
Pathways to Peace
In January 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fetzer Institute invited 22 scholars and practitioners to a two-day seminar to discuss these questions and the deep connection between caring for the environment and caring for community. Pathways to Peace: Defining Community in the Age of Globalization was the second seminar in a three-year initiative to combine scholarship, public policy, and local practice to articulate and support global conflict transformation and reconciliation in communities throughout the world. Examining the effect of environmental peacebuilding on communities, the discussion explored how governments, NGOs, the private sector, and other interested parties can generate positive outcomes while minimizing negative ones.
Participants from Canada, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States brought to the table a wide range of experience and expertise from diverse fields, including peacebuilding, community building, health care, economic development, conflict resolution, and foundation management. By convening leaders in environmental peacebuilding and community building, the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute drew on a wide range of experience and perspectives related to environment, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and research. The group used water access and peacebuilding case studies as a means to enter into dialogue about the challenges of global community engagement.
Shared Waters
In preparation for the seminar, geographer and renowned water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University contributed a paper, “The Enlightenment Rift and Peacebuilding: Rationality, Spirituality, and Shared Waters,” in which he laid out the complicated, sometimes conflictual, and often surprisingly collaborative aspects of negotiations over water resources. For Wolf, given water’s life-sustaining quality but limited quantity, it seems intuitive that “water should be the most conflictive of resources.” However, he maintains that “while press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, what has been more encouraging is that, throughout the world, water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues…there is a long, and in many ways deeper, history of water-related cooperation.”
On this foundation, Wolf illustrates four stages of water conflict: from adversarial, to reflective, to integrative, to action. Lessons from the “spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation” he says, “offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools, and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation.”
Seminar participants used Wolf’s paper as a starting point from which to write short papers based on their own expertise and experience. From Kenya to Nepal to Harlem, participants shared their perspectives on the challenges and promises of environmental issues, community building and organizing, and peacebuilding.
This report, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, draws from the rich dialogue of the seminar and seminar papers to share the broad range of experience and the insight of the participants. To learn more about these remarkable programs and the people working on natural resources, peacebuilding, and community development, see the complete list of papers on page 120, which can be downloaded from the Wilson Center. -
Integrating Development: A Livelihood Approach to Population, Health, and Environment Programs
›Rural communities in developing countries understand that high population growth rates, poor health, and environmental degradation are connected, said Population Action International’s Roger-Mark De Souza at a recent Wilson Center event. An integrated approach to development – one that combines population, health, and environment (PHE) programs – is a “cost-effective intervention that we can do very easily, that responds to community needs, that will have a huge impact that’s felt within a short period of time,” said De Souza. “This is how we live our lives, this makes sense to us – it’s completely logical,” community participants in PHE projects told him.
