Showing posts from category flooding.
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Tracking This Year’s Extreme Weather
›“Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events seemed to have become the norm rather than the exception,” writes Kelly Levin for the World Resources Institute (WRI). Indeed, records have been broken around the world as countries experience unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, or other types of severe weather. And people are starting to take notice. A number of recent stories try to make sense of this wild weather and what, if anything, it has to do with climate change.
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Center for American Progress Takes on Climate Change, Migration, and Why They Matter to U.S. National Security
›July 19, 2012 // By Kayly OberIn early 2012, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century. Although generally in line with climate-migration pieces before it (“It is difficult to fully understand the detailed causes of migration and economic and political instability, but the growing evidence of links between climate change, migration, and conflict raise plenty of reasons for concern”), the report strays from the usual by focusing on U.S. national security interests and four particular sub-regions of concern.
Northwest Africa
The first region examined – and the one perhaps most on the radar of security analysts at the moment – is Northwest Africa. Here the already-tenuous political stability left in the wake of the Arab Spring will most certainly be exacerbated by climate change, authors Michael Werz and Laura Conley write. “Northwest Africa is crisscrossed with climate, migration, and security challenges…rising coastal sea level, desertification, drought, and the numerous other potential effects of climate change have the potential to increase the numbers of migrants.” All of these factors combine to create what Werz and Conley define as an “arc of tension,” that will strengthen organizations that thrive on chaos, like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which has already taken advantage of the regional power vacuum left by Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster.
CAP investigates this arc of tension more fully in a more focused, separate brief on Northwest Africa, drilling down on Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco. They find that these countries already grapple with a complex set of issues, including population pressures, drought, land degradation, large-scale migration, and natural resource conflicts. Climate change exacerbates all of these. Particularly worrying is the threat it poses to traditional pastoral and agricultural livelihoods, which could translate into “increasing numbers of disenfranchised youth, who security experts believe are more easily recruited to assist [terrorist groups] in return for money and food.”But environmental pressures and related conflict are not new in these areas, so how do we parse out the slow-onset climate change factors from the usual variety? That question is left unanswered and remains an open – and hotly debated – problem for researchers. The multi-faceted nature of migration, in particular, makes it hard to define the exact causes of movement.
On a larger scale, flagging the environment as the principal reason for migration has its problems, especially under the umbrella of “refugee” status. According to respected migration experts, using the term “refugee” in the case of environmental or climate scenarios is incorrect, since the environment is often simply one “push” factor, while economic opportunities make for a heavier “pull.” Furthermore, applying the term refugee in this case, they say, is misleading and undermines true political refugees.
CAP uses the less polarizing term “climate migrants” in their paper, saying “no universally accepted concepts, much less legal categories, exist to describe or define climate migrants. There is agreement, however, that factors such as drought, flooding, severe weather, and environmental degradation can cause human mobility in large numbers that are certain to increase in the near future.”
South Asia
In a case like Bangladesh and India, the second sub-region to be examined, the international community is preoccupied with rising sea levels, which is considered a more concrete example of climate change affecting migration. Ultimately, as CAP notes, it’s also a security issue:In December 2008 the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., ran an exercise that explored the impact of a flood that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring India. The result: the exercise predicted a new wave of migration would touch off religious conflicts, encourage the spread of contagious diseases, and cause vast damage to infrastructure.
While true that India is “not in a position to absorb climate-induced pressures,” as Werz and Conley write, it’s not quite true that “foreign climate migrants” would be necessarily be an immediate problem, as they suggest.
India has a history of taking in Bangladeshi migration, with an estimated 10 to 20 million illegal Bangladeshis currently living in India, according to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, an Indian think tank. Traditionally, Bangladeshis have migrated for a myriad of socioeconomic reasons, but most alluring are land availability and a stronger Indian economy. In any case, Bangladesh-India migration would not be new phenomenon.
The environment has also been a part of the equation, but in the case of large-scale sea level rise, its effect on migration can be a bit more nuanced. As the International Food Policy Research Institute noted in its study “Environmental Migrants: A Myth?,” Bangladeshis often have “risk-sharing and informal lending arrangements” to deal with idiosyncratic shocks, which include flooding. Instead, crop failure actually has the strongest effect on mobility. This suggests that it’s not just sea level rise that observers worried about environmentally-driven migration need to track in Bangladesh, but also drought and rain-induced flooding.
The Andes
The third region, the Andes of South America, also suffers from a slightly myopic security lens. Here, it’s all about melting glaciers and snowcaps. Retreating glaciers would spell disaster for countries which rely heavily on seasonal melt for agriculture and hydroelectric power. Most vulnerable are those with weak governance systems and infrastructure like Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. For reference, hydropower supplies a whopping 80 percent of Peru’s electricity. However, there are more subtle impacts that could portend bigger trouble for the region.
Regional security experts concede that higher temperatures are already affecting crop production in rural Colombia, harming the ability to consolidate the security gains made by Plan Colombia over the last decade, for example. And a recent report from EUROCLIMA, the European Union’s program on climate change in Latin America, paints an even bleaker picture for agricultural production in the face of desertification and drought:Natural ecosystems, agriculture, water resources, and human health in Latin America have been impacted by unusual extreme weather events reported in the past years. For example, droughts related to El Niño impacts on the flows of the Colombia Andean region basins (particularly in the Cauca river basin), are causing a 30 percent reduction in the mean flow, with a maximum of 80 percent loss in some tributaries. Consequently, soil moisture, and vegetation activity are strongly reduced.
Perhaps more worrying is the impact on the biodiversity in the region. Considering that Latin America represents 16 percent of the world’s surface but 40 percent of its biodiversity this could have serious implications for the biomedical field and others. In a recent Nature study, scientists discovered that in situations where glacial coverage is reduced to the point where it only covers 30 to 50 percent of the drainage basin, several species begin to disappear. They calculated that the entire melting of the glaciers in these areas would result in a huge loss of biodiversity, where between 11 and 38 percent of animal and plant species could go extinct, including many of endemic species that can be found only in these areas.
China and the Third Pole
Finally, China is now in its fourth decade of ever-growing internal migration, some of it driven in recent years by environmental change. Today, across its vast territory, China continues to experience the full spectrum of climate change-related consequences that have the potential to drive migration. CAP finds that the consequences of climate change and continued internal migration in China include “water stress; increased droughts, flooding, or other severe events; increased coastal erosion and saltwater inundation; glacial melt in the Himalayas that could affect hundreds of millions; and shifting agricultural zones” – all of which will affect food supplies and the country’s seemingly relentless pace of development. Still, the most unique factor of migration in China is the power of the central government to be the main “push factor,” as in the case of the Three Gorges Dam.
Agreeing to Agree
Though they might sacrifice some nuance in the regional breakdowns, the core of CAP’s argument for why climate migration matters to U.S. national security is solid. The United States has a “vested interest in helping ensure that areas with weak or absent governance structures – where poverty, environmental degradation, and grievances over central governments and energy production coincide – do not become future recruiting grounds for extremists,” write Werz and Conley. “The possible impacts of climate-related migration in such fragile situations could be destabilizing.” Invest in people rather than just military might; invest in poverty reduction, economic development, and alternative livelihoods.Jon Barnett on migration as adaptation
In the context of climate change, this means accepting that migration is a form of adaptation. As Jon Barnett notes in an interview with ECSP:In some circumstances it might be appropriate to [invest in traditional adaptation projects like] 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.
This requires higher-level thinking by states to concede that migration will happen and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Migration bolsters origin communities through remittances and education and technology sharing. But this thinking has yet to permeate policymaking, with obvious political reasons. Until then, states that are committed to preventing migration are actually cutting off important community responses.
Ultimately, what we consider adaptation and development needs to evolve. By investing in an integrated, multi-sector development approach, we can prevent violent responses to migration at the source rather than relying on reactionary and military solutions. Or, as CAP’s Michael Werz and Laura Conley put it more boldly, “our security can no longer be guaranteed by military strength or economic clout alone, but only by our ability to compel collective action.”
Photo credit: “Villagers going to the local market in Bogoro walk past a Bangladeshi patrol unit of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) as the country prepares for the second round of elections. 12/Oct/2006. UN Photo/Martine Perret,” courtesy of United Nations Photo Flickr.
Sources: Center for American Progress, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, Inter-American Development Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute, Nature, The World Bank.
Video Credit: “The Nexus of Climate Change, Migration and Security,” courtesy of the Center for American Progress. Image: “The Arc of Tension,” courtesy of the Center for American Progress. -
Bringing Environment and Climate to the 2012 Population Association of America Annual Meeting
›June 5, 2012 // By Sandeep BathalaOver 2,100 participants attended the 2012 Population Association of America (PAA) annual meeting in San Francisco this May. PAA was established in 1930 to research issues related to human population. This year, for the first time, the meeting featured a notable contingent of demographers, sociologists, and public health professionals working on environmental connections.
I followed as many of the environment-population discussions on newly published or prospective research papers as possible (about 20 in total). I found four papers particularly noteworthy for the connections made to women, family planning, and climate change adaptation.
Samuel Codjoe of the University of Ghana spoke about adaptation to climate extremes in the Afram Plains during one of the population, health, and environment (PHE) panels organized by Population Action International. Although developed nations are historically the major contributors of greenhouse gases due to comparatively high levels of consumptions, developing countries are the most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change – in part because of continued population growth. As a result, adaptation strategies in countries like Ghana are particularly important; and given women’s often-outsized role in water and natural resource issues, a focus on gender-specific adaptation even more so.
Codjoe presented an analysis of preferred adaptation strategies to flood and drought, broken down by gender and three common occupations – farming, fishing, and charcoal production). He said he hopes his assessment – part of a collaborative research effort with Lucy K.A. Adzoyi-Atidoh of Lincoln University – will aid in the selection and implementation of successful adaptation options for communities and households in the future.
“Understanding differences in the priorities that women place on adaptation may prove to be important in the effectiveness of climate change adaptation – and the sustainability of communities,” he said.
David López-Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, speaking on behalf of a group of researchers with World Wildlife Fund, teased out the gender dynamic further when he presented on ways to help the conservation sector determine next steps for existing PHE projects. Practitioners from seven of the eight PHE projects currently implemented by conservation organizations (defined by having been involved for at least three years in bringing family planning to local communities) recently said the links to women’s empowerment were among the most important aspects of successful projects.
López-Carr therefore emphasized the need for additional research on how PHE projects can support and empower women, both economically and socially. He also noted, like Codjoe, the potential impact women often have on the management of their community’s natural resources, saying this was another area where research on the empowering effect of PHE programs can provide further backing for integrated programs.
Karen Hardee of Futures Group spoke about how the experiences of integrated PHE projects, despite most not being designed to respond to climate change specifically, have lessons to offer climate change efforts. Her work was done in partnership with the Population Reference Bureau, Population Action International, and U.S. Agency for International Development. She concluded that community-based adaptation approaches should consider population dynamics in vulnerability assessments. Meeting unmet need for family planning, she said, can assist communities adapting to climate change by building resilience. And as result, “PHE approaches should be able to qualify for funding under community-based adaptation programs.”
Shah Md. Atiqul Haq of the City University of Hong Kong presented research he conducted in Bangladesh that found that women tended to feel that a large family size was not advantageous during floods. This, he said, was indicative of their increased understanding of vulnerability and an endorsement of providing knowledge and access to family planning services as part of climate change adaptation strategies.
The inclusion of more environment, and particularly PHE, related presentations at this year’s conference was good to see – perhaps a sign that demography is becoming a more complex and comprehensive field, with a focus more on population structure and its interactions with other issues, rather than a singular fascination with growth.
In particular, panelists showed that the nexus between demography, gender equity, and climate change continues to grow in importance, both in the research and practitioner communities.
Photo Credit: Tribal women and children in Kerala state, India, courtesy of flickr user Eileen Delhi. -
Michael Kugelman, AfPak Channel
Pakistan’s Climate Change Challenge
›May 11, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffLast month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan’s environmental insecurity.
Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as “the world’s highest waste dump.” Much of this waste-generated from soldiers’ food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan’s chief water source.
Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan’s environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan’s United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan’s land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh’s environment minister said that millions of people across the province face “acute environmental threats.”
Continue reading on the AfPak Channel.
Sources: Daily Times, Dawn.com, Environment News Service, The Express Tribune, The New York Times, Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan.
Photo Credit: “Surveying damage in Pakistan,” courtesy of the U.S. Army.
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Richard Cronin, World Politics Review
China and the Geopolitics of the Mekong River Basin
›April 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Richard Cronin, appeared in World Politics Review.
Two decades after the Paris Peace Accord that ended the proxy war in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin has re-emerged as a region of global significance. The rapid infrastructure-led integration of a region some call “Asia’s last frontier” has created tensions between and among China and its five southern neighbors – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Both expanded regional cooperation as well as increased competition for access to the rich resources of the once war-torn region have created serious environmental degradation while endangering food security and other dimensions of human security and even regional stability.
China’s seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials and tropical commodities has made it a fast-growing market for several Mekong countries and an increasingly important regional investor. Economic integration has been boosted by a multibillion dollar network of all-weather roads, bridges, dams, and power lines largely financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is linking the countries of the Lower Mekong to each other and to China. To date, the ADB’s Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperative development program has primarily benefited large population centers outside the basin proper in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the same infrastructure that speeds the flow of people and goods to urban centers also facilitates the environmentally unsustainable exploitation of the forests, minerals, water resources, and fisheries that are still the primary source of food and livelihoods to millions of the Mekong’s poorest inhabitants.
No aspect of China’s fast-growing role and influence in the Mekong region is more evident and more problematic than its drive to harness the huge hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong through the construction of a massive cascade of eight large- to mega-sized dams on the mainstream of the river in Yunnan Province. The recently completed Xiaowan dam, the fourth in the series, will mainly be used to send electricity to the factories and cities of Guangdong Province, its coastal export manufacturing base some 1,400 kilometers away. China’s Yunnan cascade will have enough operational storage capacity to augment the dry season flow at the border with Myanmar and Laos by 40-70 percent, both to maintain maximum electricity output and facilitate navigation on the river downstream as far as northern Laos for boats of up to 500 tons.
Continue reading in World Politics Review.
Photo Credit: “Xiaowan Dam Site,” courtesy of International Rivers. -
Loaded Dice and Human Health: Measuring the Impacts of Climate Change
›In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “Insights From Past Millennia Into Climatic Impacts on Human Health and Survival,” Anthony McMichael compares scientific literature that reconstructs past climates with epidemiological research and comes away with more than a dozen examples of the influence of climate on human health and survival. “Risks to health [as a result of climatic change] are neither widely nor fully recognized,” McMichael writes, but “weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement” have led to human suffering across the centuries. Some of the literature reviewed, for instance, links the Younger Dryas (a several centuries long period of cooling) to hunger in the Nile Valley between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, climatic shifts that expanded the range of disease carrying rats and fleas to the “Black Death” during the mid-1400s, and unusually strong El Niño events to a series of late Victorian-era droughts during the late-1800s.“Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice,” a working paper from James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy recently submitted to PNAS, uses surface air temperature analysis from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to examine the impact of global warming on the frequency of extreme weather events. Using measurements from 1951 to 1980 as a baseline, the study finds, first, that the planet has warmed by around half of a degree Celsius since the reference period, and second, that the global area affected by “extreme anomalies” (exceeding three standard deviations from the mean climate) has increased by a factor greater than 10. Affecting approximately 10 percent of global land surface in the last several years, these anomalies, such as the droughts and heat waves observed in Texas in 2011, Moscow in 2010, and France in 2003, “almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of the global warming,” according to the authors.
The study uses this new evidence about the impact of climate change to update the concept of climate change as a “loading of the climate dice.” Where, the “climate of 1951-1980 [is represented] by colored dice with two sides red for ‘hot,’ two side blue for ‘cold,’ and two sides white for near average temperature,” and the dice themselves represent the chance of observing variations on mean temperature. Under this metaphor, today’s climate is best approximated by a dice with four sides red, one blue, and one white, according to the study.
As for the future, the data suggest that with just one full degree of warming, anomalies three deviations beyond the mean will be the norm, and five deviations beyond the mean will become more likely (the latest IPCC projections suggest between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius are likely). In essence, the red side of the die are not only multiplying, but becoming much more extreme. To put this into scale, the Moscow 2010 heat wave, an event that exceeded the three deviations mark, coincided with a doubling of the death rate in the Russian capital. -
New UNEP Climate Report Says Women Face “Disproportionately High Risks”
›December 8, 2011 // By Brenda ZuluA new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Women at the Frontline of Climate Change: Gender Risks and Hopes, released at COP-17, says that women, particularly those living in mountainous regions in developing countries, “face disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from climate change, as well as associated risks such as human trafficking.”
Droughts, floods, and mudslides are affecting a growing number of people worldwide, in part because of climate change, but also because population growth is highest in some of the most vulnerable areas of the world. For example, in the 10 years from 1998-2008, floods affected one billion people in Asia, but only four million people in Europe.
According to UNEP, women often bear the brunt of such disasters: “In parts of Asia and Africa, where the majority of the agricultural workforce are female, the impacts of such disasters have a major impact on women’s income, food security, and health,” as they are responsible for about 65 percent of household food production in Asia and 75 percent in Africa. In addition, they are often more likely than men to lose their lives during natural disasters.
UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a press release that “women often play a stronger role than men in the management of ecosystem services and food security. Hence, sustainable adaptation must focus on gender and the role of women if it is to become successful.”
“Women’s voices, responsibilities, and knowledge on the environment and the challenges they face will need to be made a central part of governments’ adaptive responses to a rapidly changing climate,” he added.
Investing in low-carbon, resource-efficient green technologies, water harvesting, and alternatives to firewood could strengthen climate change adaptation and improve women’s livelihoods, says UNEP.
“If Insufficient, Family Planning Funds Should Be Scaled Up”
UNEP spokesperson Nick Nuttall said in an interview that there are wide differences between how people consume natural resources, with North Americans and Europeans consuming far more than someone in a developing country. We should move toward more efficient use of natural resources, make the transition to a low-carbon economy, and scale up renewable energies, which can reduce demand for fossil fuels to meet economic growth and population increases, he said.
Asked whether climate change funds should therefore support family planning, Nuttall said the UN supports the right of couples and women to choose the size of their families and that many UN agencies and NGOs provide that support already.
But, he said, “there are funds available for family planning and, if insufficient, they should be scaled up to meet the demands and requests of developing countries. Given that this is an issue far wider than climate change, these existing funding streams should be where the financial support comes, rather than from a climate fund.”
Brenda Zulu is a member of Women’s Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the “From Durban” series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.
Sources: UNEP.
Image Credit: “Climate change vulnerability,” courtesy of Riccardo Pravettoni, UNEP/GRID-Arendal. -
African Women, Most Vulnerable to Climate Change, Are Agents of Change
›December 6, 2011 // By Brenda ZuluIt is the poorest people whose lives are most undermined by changes in the weather, said Chair of the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health Mary Robinson at a side event on “Healthy Women, Healthy Planet” during COP-17 in Durban, South Africa. “When farmers don’t know how to predict the seasons, when there is more flooding than there was, when there are longer periods of drought and then flash flooding,” she said, people need more resilience. “They have to be even stronger in being able to cope with the drought and flooding.”From Population Action International’s Weathering Change – Fatima’s Story.
“In the past, February and March were planting months, while June and July were harvest months in the first season,” explained Constance Okollet, chairperson of the Osukura United Women Network in eastern Uganda, in an interview. “The second season started in August and September as planting months, but now we don’t have any seasons anymore.”
Okollet said that since 2007, there have been floods in her area that have destroyed homes and fields and forced some to leave their homes. “I actually had to leave when the floods destroyed my house and when I went back there was nothing; and immediately after that there was a drought after planting,” she said.
“These days we gamble with agriculture, as we are not sure when to plant. What we see now is, if it is not torrential rains, then it is a storm. During the rainy season, you find a lot of winds. We never used to see them and now we have mudslides, which are occurring every year. With heavy rains it has been difficult for people to dry cassava and groundnuts. Last month, I lost two fields of groundnuts because the rain has been very heavy,” Okollet said. “In the community, we used to harvest heavily, but it is not the same anymore.”
African women are often particularly vulnerable to such environmental disruptions. Okollet pointed out that women walk long distances to look for water and feed children before they go to school. “Women always eat little and leave the rest for their children,” she said. “Children are sick and there is a lot of death in the village because of hunger and lack of food security.”
Water-borne diseases, such as cholera, erupt after floods contaminate the water, and getting health care can be difficult for women because the health center is very far away.
Okollet said that when all this was happening, she and her fellow network members thought that maybe God was punishing them. “We only knew what was happening when Oxfam talked to us about climate change,” she said.
The Osukura United Women Network has asked the Ugandan government for help supplying early-maturing crops that will adapt to the seasonal change. The group is working to sensitize their community to the importance of hygiene and sanitation as well as working with men in the community to build wells and latrines.
“We need women to be agents of change in their local communities,” said Robinson.
Brenda Zulu is a member of Women’s Edition for Population Reference Bureau and a freelance writer based in Zambia. Her reporting from the COP-17 meeting in Durban (see the “From Durban” series on New Security Beat) is part of a joint effort by the Aspen Institute, Population Action International, and the Wilson Center.
Video Credit: “Fatima’s Story – Weathering Change Extra,” courtesy of vimeo user Population Action International.
