Showing posts from category environmental peacemaking.
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A Year for Cooperation, Not Conflict, Over Water
›February 12, 2013 // By Kate Diamond
You might think that conflict over water is inevitable as rising temperatures and changing climates are expected to constrain supplies in the coming decades at the same time that expanding consumption standards and growing populations are expected to boost demand. But you’d be wrong, according to the United Nations – and they’re launching the International Year for Water Cooperation this week to make that point.
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Kagondu Njagi, AlertNet
In Kenya, Water Stress Also Breeds Cooperation Between Competing Groups
›January 29, 2013 // By Wilson Center Staff
The original version of this article, by Kagondu Njagi, appeared on Thomson Reuters’ AlertNet.
By the time the violence had died down, more than 80 people lay dead and hundreds were left homeless.
Yet there was scarcely enough water – the resource the Maasai and Kikuyu tribes were fighting over – to wash away the blood that had stained this part of Kenya’s Rift Valley.
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Michael Kugelman, Global Times
Repairs Could Stifle South Asia’s Water War
›October 19, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on Global Times.
In recent weeks, militants in Pakistan have escalated their hostile rhetoric toward India. The subject of their ire is water. Hafiz Saeed, the head of militant Islamist group Jamaat-ud-Dawa, has warned that India plans “to make Pakistan barren” by preventing the waters of the Indus Basin from flowing downstream to Pakistan.
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Kirk Talbott, State of the Planet
Burma at a Crossroads for Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Governance
›June 18, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Kirk Talbott, appeared on the Columbia University Earth Institute’s State of the Planet blog.
After a half-century of authoritarian rule, armed conflict against millions of ethnic minorities, and natural resource plunder, Burma, also known as Myanmar, now stands at a crossroads. As conditions for peace coalesce and civil society begins to blossom, there is hope once more for Burma’s people.
Burma’s quasi-civilian government, led by reformist Thein Sein, has initiated a series of surprising political openings and continues to engage actively with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, now a member of parliament. Civil society and international relations are flourishing in contrast to conditions just one year ago. In May, the United States suspended economic sanctions and President Obama appointed a U.S. Ambassador for the first time in decades.
A new set of challenges emerge, however, around sharing the benefits and responsibilities of governing the country’s diverse wealth of natural resources. Nestled strategically between China and India, Burma has been isolated from the world’s attention since a coup in 1962. Its military government has consolidated a brutal grip on power through the sale of its rich timber, mineral, natural gas, and other resources, primarily to China and Thailand. This practice expanded after 1995, when the regime brokered a series of cease fire agreements with several ethnic armies along mountainous border areas. (For the first time in 60 years the Karen National Union joined almost all other major ethnic armies in agreeing to a cease fire, with the notable exception of the Kachin Independence Army.)
Oil and gas revenues fund the Tatmadaw, Burma’s half-million-strong army, one of Asia’s largest. Currently the huge offshore Shwe and Yadana natural gas reserves provide more than 90 percent of the nation’s foreign exchange. Chinese and Thai companies fund extensive pipeline, hydro-power, and transport networks as Burma becomes a potential regional economic corridor and natural resources production hub. China looms large in the geo-political equation investing over $12 billion in Burma in 2011.
Continue reading on State of the Planet.
Image Credit: Shwe gas line map, courtesy of Shwe Gas Movement. -
Environment, Natural Resource Guidelines for Peacekeepers Moves UN Closer to ‘Greening the Blue Helmets’
›May 30, 2012 // By Stuart KentUN peacekeepers not only operate in conflicts where land and natural resources are a component of the fighting but their own bases and operations can also impact the local environment. As well as documenting practical steps to minimize the footprint of field missions, a new report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reviews the relationship between natural resources and conflict and what it means for peacekeeping.
While there’s been talk about “greening” UN peacekeeping for years, the details about the economic, environmental, and mission benefits contained in Greening the Blue Helmets: Environment, Natural Resources and UN Peacekeeping Operations suggest that this talk is getting closer to reality.
As of December 2011, the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations was responsible for 121,591 personnel, 17,000 vehicles, and 257 aircraft across 16 different operations worldwide. These forces account for more than half of the entire UN system’s carbon emissions and can significantly strain the resources of fragile host communities, according to the report.
Building on the 2009 Environmental Policy for UN Field Missions, the UNEP report provides a dozen best practice examples from ongoing missions.
Field cases serve as evidence of how increasing water and energy efficiency, safely discarding solid and hazardous wastes, protecting cultural and historical sites, and ensuring a limited footprint after the closing down of camps, can save environmental and financial resources. These measures, the report claims, also reduce the risk of tension with host communities, such as occurred in Haiti when an outbreak of Cholera was traced to unsanitary water management practices at a UN camp.
Technologies recommended include better waste management systems, improved water systems, energy efficient buildings, and green energy capacities. However, some improvements can be made by simply encouraging behavioral changes; the UN mission in Timor-Leste reduced energy consumption by 15 percent over 12 months using a “CarLog” system to encourage fuel efficiency. With a 2009 global fuel bill of $638 million, even a 15 percent margin relates to a significant figure (much like the logic behind similar efficiency efforts within the U.S. military).
However, uncertain mission lengths are a major barrier to the adoption of more efficient technologies. Despite UN operations lasting an average of seven years and evidence indicating that capital investments could be recovered within one to five years in some cases, year-to-year mandates complicate long-term planning.
Natural Resource Nexus
Conceptually, the nexus of natural resources, conflict, and peacebuilding must be a central concern of peacekeeping operations, asserts the report.
In Africa alone, 13 operations have been conducted in response to conflicts associated with natural resources, at a cost of around $32 billion. Exploitation of natural resources such as diamonds, timber, and oil has financed and fueled conflicts in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia. Communal tensions over access to scarce land and water resources are also considered an exacerbating influence on conflict dynamics in much of Sudan and now South Sudan, according to the report.
Addressing this nexus can also provide opportunities to reduce and redress conflict. In Darfur, firewood collection is a dangerous task for women and girls. By making “firewood patrols” a regular feature of the UN forces’ protection, the prevalence of sexual violence has been limited.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is cited in the report for its efforts to hire ex-combatant and vulnerable populations to aid in the reforestation of extensively degraded pistachio woodlands from 2003 to 2009.
“Natural resources can provide opportunities for emergency employment and…sustainable livelihoods for former combatants,” write the authors.
Countries recovering from episodes of violence tend to have a low capacity to effectively and equitably manage a natural resource base that itself may have been degraded by conflict. Recent attention, however, is being paid to the peacebuilding potential of managing shared resources.
According to the report, “while only 54 percent of peace agreements reached between 1989 and 2004 contained provisions on natural resources, all of the major agreements concluded between 2005 and 2010 included such provisions.” This includes the renovation of land tenure systems, management of valuable extractive industries, and reallocation of resource rents.
Preventing Predatory Extraction
As peace begins to take hold, “access to land may be a key determining factor affecting the successful reintegration of a former combatant into a community.”
According to interview data from Northern Uganda, 93 percent of male LRA ex-combatants were unable to access land after demobilization. Often due to the death of an elder relative, sale of land by a family member, or land grabs by other members of the community.
While shared resources can build trust between communities, spoiler groups that use aggressive means to secure resource rents in the aftermath of conflict can endanger a fragile peace. The report identifies a role here for peacekeeping forces – and in particular for their civilian contingent – to identify these potential risks and opportunities for action.
In particular, the report recommends a higher level of clarity about the relationship between peacekeeping forces and so called “expert panels” – groups of civilian specialists called upon by the Security Council to provide advice on an official basis about natural resources in the aftermath of conflict.
The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, was given a direct mandate in 2008 to work with the DRC expert panel and to “use its monitoring and inspection capacities to curtail the provision of support to illegal armed groups derived from illicit trade in natural resources.”
UNEP Program Officer Matti Lehtonen, in an email interview, called the panels a “tremendous asset that is not yet used up to its full potential.” However, he noted, “expert panels and peacekeeping missions are different tools with different objectives so there is also a need to maintain a degree of independence.”
The report identifies a set of key recommendations for the UN moving forward:- Ensure that pre-deployment and in-mission training includes instruction on environment and natural resource management
- Aid and encourage disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs to look closely at emergency employment and sustainable livelihoods related to natural resources and the environment
- Support and encourage civil affairs personnel to seek ways to capitalize on peacebuilding opportunities around natural resources and the environment
- Systematically inform the Security Council of linkages between natural resources and conflict in states where the Council may be considering action
- Where natural resources have fueled or financed conflict, provide peacekeepers with a more systemic mandate to act on these issues
- Effectively implement best practices identified in the 2009 environmental policy
Photo Credit: UN peacekeepers in Côte d’Ivoire distribute water during a 2007 mission, courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
Richard Matthew: Responsive Peacebuilding Includes the Environment and Natural Resources
›April 30, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“After 20 years of peacebuilding experimentation, one of the good signs is that the countries receiving this [peacebuilding] attention…more and more are shaping the process,” said Professor Richard Matthew, director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine.
Peacebuilding is shifting, he said, from internationals going in with pre-existing conceptions of “what you need for stability and development, what will make you attractive to investors, what will make your people secure,” to instead sitting down and talking with stakeholders about “what types of capacity do you need, and how can we support you in acquiring those.”
Along with the shift towards more responsive peacebuilding has come an elevated interested in the environment and natural resources. For people living in the peacebuilding countries themselves, “there was never any doubt that water and forest and access to minerals and so on were critical to their future,” said Matthew, but Western and Northern countries often thought of it as a “second tier issue that you might get to once people were safe, and the government was functioning, and the economy was up and running again.”
Matthew co-authored the 2009 UNEP report, From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, which examined environmental factors all along the conflict continuum – from inception to peacebuilding. Successful peacebuilding, the report argues, requires that “environmental drivers are managed, that tensions are defused, and that natural assets are used sustainably to support stability and development in the long term.” -
‘Green Prophet’ Interviews Geoff Dabelko on Water Security in the Middle East
›April 18, 2012 // By Schuyler NullTafline Laylin, managing editor of the Green Prophet blog, recently interviewed ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the just-released U.S. intelligence assessment on global water security and what it says about the Middle East.
The conversation touched on regional water scarcity, Palestinian-Israeli water tensions, and the role of the international community.
“We put a lot of faith in the past helping us understand the future and it rests at the center of much of the way we analyze things,” said Dabelko. “But at the same time, we also, especially in the natural world, have established patterns of thresholds and tipping points and sudden changes.”
We’ve excerpted the first few questions below; read the full interview on Green Prophet:Green Prophet: So, for context, can you say a little bit about the National Intelligence report and why it was compiled?
Continue reading on Green Prophet.
Geoff Dabelko: The water and security assessment from the National Intelligence Council was done at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The National Intelligence Council has a strong history of looking at long term trends in the environmental, technological, demographic realms and working to understand how trends in these areas are and could be part of larger economic, political, and social dynamics that may pose national security issues for the United States.
Green Prophet: There were seven river basins of particular concern, of which four are located in the MENA region: the Euphrates, Jordan, Nile, and the Tigris. Why do you think these are of particular importance?
Geoff Dabelko: I do not explicitly know the criteria for their selection of the seven basins. But I think these four, like the other three, have some common characteristics. They are basins where the rivers are shared by two or more countries/territories that are heavily dependent on the waters; that have relations among the states that include uncertain, tense, or even overtly hostile relationships; that are now and/or likely to experience big growth in demand for the water resource based on both population growth and consumption growth, that at the same time there is concern that climate change will at least increase variability, timing, and or quantity of that water (both scarcity and abundance i.e. floods).
And then the report focuses on the institutional river basin arrangements and differentiates among their assessed capacities for addressing these current and future stresses. That diversity aside, it is fair to say that the transboundary water institutions remain a priority yet a challenge for addressing the multiple dimensions of the water relationship. I say “multiple” given all the different uses water performs in most of these settings (transport, irrigation, hydropower, culture, industrial, household, etc).
Photo Credit: “Umm Qais – Sunset,” courtesy of flickr user Magh. -
Geoff Dabelko On ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ Discussing Global Water Security
›April 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was recently a guest on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the just-released U.S. intelligence community assessment of world water security. He was joined by co-panelists retired Maj. Gen. Richard Engel (USAF) of the National Intelligence Council’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (a key figure in preparing the report), Jessica Troell of the International Water Program at the Environmental Law Institute, and Steve Fleischli of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Department of State-requested assessment (outlined in more detail, here and here) is a very positive contribution, said Dabelko. It “moves away from the arm-waving, headline-grabbing, water wars frame – the kind of sky-is-falling frame that is intuitively appealing and certainly appealing for politicians and headline writers, but doesn’t really reflect the reality.” He continued:What this report instead does, is recognize that there’s been an awful lot of cooperation around water even in the face of scarcity and that that cooperation in part helps us avoid conflicts, whether they’re violent or political, and that we should invest in those institutions that help us get to cooperation.
Visit the show’s program page to listen to the full segment, or read the transcript here.
It also suggests that it’s inadequate and incorrect to think of water as just a single-sector issue. The report is quite clear in connecting it to energy, connecting it to food, connecting it to health, economic development, agriculture obviously, and so that recognition [in] analysis sounds in some way straightforward, but unfortunately, when we organize our responses, we often respond in sector, and there’s not nearly enough communication and cooperation.
And finally, the report does say that the future may not look like the past, and so while we don’t have evidence of states fighting one another over water – and the judgment of the report is in the next 10 years, we won’t see that – it does hold out the prospect for as we go farther down the line, in terms of higher levels of consumption and higher levels of population, that we need to pay special attention because there’s some particular river basins in parts of the world where, as I said, the future may not look like the past and we have greater concerns for higher levels of conflict.
Sources/Image Credit: The Diane Rehm Show.
