Showing posts from category forests.
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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. -
Hotspots: Population Growth in Areas of High Biodiversity
›More than one-fifth of the world’s population lives in biodiversity hotspots – “areas that are particularly rich in biodiversity and endemic species,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, at the Wilson Center on February 29. And those populations are growing faster than the global average. Add to that the fact that “biodiversity continues to decline globally, despite increasing investments in conservation,” said David Lopez-Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the need for new approaches to conservation becomes evident. [Video Below]
Williams and Lopez-Carr were joined by Dr. Vik Mohan, director of the sexual and reproductive health program for Blue Ventures, a London-based conservation nongovernment organization that works with communities on the remote western coast of Madagascar.
To respond to the demands of the communities and to better protect biodiversity hotspots, the speakers argued that conservation efforts need to incorporate health and livelihood services directed at the growing populations living nearby.
A Complex Relationship
“The relationship between population and biodiversity loss or conservation is a pretty complex relationship,” said Williams.
He offered Latin America and the Caribbean as an example of the multiple factors that can affect how population and biodiversity interact. Population growth in the region has slowed, and agricultural expansion is driving habitat loss as the population ages and urbanizes and as increasing per capita GDP contributes to higher levels of consumption.
In the Indo-Pacific region, stretching from East Asia to Australia, high population growth coupled with economic growth has coincided with an increase in the exploitation of rare species for illegal trade, according to Williams. And in Africa, where the population is growing quickly but without comparable economic growth and amid high levels of instability, subsistence drives ecological exploitation.
Biodiversity and Family Planning in Madagascar
“People who live in the biodiversity hotspots are typically poorer, typically have poorer access to healthcare than their counterparts in the cities or in the world at large, and typically have poorer health than those counterparts,” said Mohan.
Blue Ventures has been working in Madagascar since 2003. The island is one of the most biodiverse areas in the world; 80 percent of its plant and animal life is endemic, meaning it exists there and nowhere else, said Mohan. At the same time, Madagascar is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest growing countries, with a population growth rate of 2.9 percent and an average total fertility rate of 4.6 children per woman.
Blue Ventures initially came to the country to improve conservation in the island’s coastal villages, where residents survive largely on subsistence fishing. But once there, the group quickly found that the population was “growing so rapidly that in spite of our best conservation efforts, the demand for those finite coastal resources [was] outstripping supply,” said Mohan.
“The number of people who are going out to catch fish to feed their to feed their families is going up exponentially, and those fisherman are having to work harder and harder to catch smaller fish that are farther and farther down the food web.”
Realizing that trend, Mohan said that “just by asking a few very basic questions, we unearthed a huge unmet need for healthcare and a huge unmet need for family planning in particular.”
In response, Mohan and his colleagues opened up a family planning clinic in Andavadoaka, one of the villages Blue Ventures serves. On the clinic’s first day, Mohan said, “20 percent of all women of reproductive age came asking for contraception.” Following that opening, they “rapidly found [that] this unmet need was mirrored in every single village along the coast that we worked in,” he said. Since then, modern contraceptive prevalence, initially about seven percent, has increased four-fold, while birth rates have fallen by about one-third. All in all, Mohan said, the population of the Velondriake region, where Blue Ventures operates, is five percent smaller now than it would have been without the group’s family planning services.
Rural Areas Driving Population Growth
Across the developing world, Lopez-Carr said that unmet need for family planning “remains significantly higher” in biodiversity hotspots. Given that high unmet need, especially in Africa, it is easy to infer that “conservation may be less sustainable…if it does not consider health,” he said.
In his ongoing research on population and biodiversity, Lopez-Carr looks at how fertility rates compare in and out of hotspot areas and between regional and local levels. At the country and province level, “high-value conservation areas do not have unusually high total fertility rates (TFRs),” he said. But at more localized levels, “in the most remote rural areas, TFRs remain high, and in many cases, in the most remote rural areas, the demand for family planning is still very low,” indicating that these areas are still in the early stages of their demographic transitions.
The fact that the sub-state picture can look so different from the state-level picture means that there is more work for researchers to do, said Lopez-Carr. “Where the fertility rates are highest is where we have the least data,” he said, and that has significant implications for understanding future population growth.
Looking at UN population projections, the world’s net population gains will be in its poorest cities, he said, but “virtually all this growth is going to be from migration, fueled by remaining high fertility in rural areas.” And “virtually all of that growth will be predicated upon the timing, magnitude, [and] pace of the fertility transition in rural areas.”
Better understanding the demographic picture in rural areas is therefore critical – not just to improving health and preserving biodiversity in the world’s hotspots, but to honing down more accurate global population projections as well.
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: “Fisherman Carries Day’s Catch,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
More People, Less Biodiversity? The Complex Connections Between Population Dynamics and Species Loss
›March 8, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur“For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piece-meal.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799This much is clear: As human numbers have grown, the number of species with whom we share the planet has declined dramatically. While it took about 200,000 years for humanity to reach one billion people around 1800, world population has grown sevenfold since then, surpassing seven billion last year.
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Melanne Verveer and Others at Heinrich Böll Gender Equity and Sustainable Development Conference
›The Gender Equity and Sustainable Development conference, hosted last month by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, was a testament to the increasing importance of gender and sustainability within the international development community. Representatives from the U.S. government, UN, and countless international non-profits, aid organizations, and corporations demonstrated the vital need for collaboration and innovative action when working towards a more sustainable world.
The conference kicked off with an invigorating speech by the Honorable Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, who called on the international community to acknowledge the “vital role that women can and must play in sustainable development.”
“Putting a spotlight on the critical role of women in stopping climate change will help to harness the immense human capacity of women worldwide,” said Verveer. By advocating for consideration of gender at every level – from grassroots organizing to policymaking – the ambassador painted a picture of a new era of sustainable development.
Step One: Recognize the Problem
A series of four panels followed the keynote address and focused on the intersections between gender inequity, the economy, trade, food and agriculture, and climate change.
There was clear consensus among all the participants that worldwide consciousness of gender inequity can lead to vast improvements in the status of women while also opening the door for new, innovative approaches to sustainable development. The 16 panel members represented numerous groups, from Oxfam America to Gender Action to the Stockholm Environment Institute, and all spoke to the importance of working for larger structural changes while simultaneously shifting more economic, social, and political power into the hands of women by any means possible.
The panelists described a world in which women represent a tremendous, untapped resource for change. Although women only own approximately one percent of titled land worldwide, they own close to 33 percent of business in the developing world and spend two-thirds of consumer dollars worldwide, which they tend to invest in sectors like health and education that benefit the larger community. Verveer said that data also shows women are more likely to pass environmental legislation and that forestry projects involving women have a higher rate of success.
Humanizing Climate Change
The big question of the conference seemed to be: in a world where women are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change, why aren’t women given more of a voice in the process of creating a more sustainable world?
Marie Brill, a senior policy analyst at Action Aid USA, pointed to the production of biofuels as a poignant example of a sustainable development plan that has had unintended negative consequences for women around the world. In the developing world, women are primarily responsible for food provisioning, yet many social and legal restrictions prevent women from owning land. If women had better access to land ownership and food insecurity would decrease, she said, and crops yields could increase by as much as 20 to 30 percent.
Foreign ownership of large tracts of land, common in the production of biofuels, makes land title even more difficult for women to acquire or maintain. The industry has also led to price spikes for staple crops like corn, said Brill, meaning poor women are sometimes unable to feed their families.
While biofuels provide an alternative fuel source, their production has been managed in a way that ignores the gender-specific implications of the process. By maintaining an awareness of gender, we can ensure that women do not become victims as we move towards a more sustainable world, Brill said.
Liane Schalatek, the associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, suggested that a paradigm shift is needed regarding our approach to climate change.
Approaching climate change from a purely scientific and technological perspective is offensively simplistic, Schalatek said. “We need to humanize climate change and bring social equity into the discourse,” she said, emphasizing that “it is our obligation under international human rights objectives and vital to the success of sustainable development to take a rights-centered approach.”
Molly Shane was an intern for the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program.
Sources: Boston Consulting Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, USAID, U.S. State Department, Women Deliver.
Photo Credit: “Climate Risk and Resilience: Securing the Region’s Future,” courtesy of the Asian Development Bank. -
Eric Zuehlke, Population Reference Bureau
Democratic Republic of Congo and Madagascar Connect Family Planning With Environmental Health
›February 10, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffRemote rural communities in developing countries typically face the related challenges of extreme poverty, poor health, and environmental degradation. And population growth often exacerbates these challenges. In communities that face environmental challenges along with high fertility and high maternal and child mortality, health programs that include family planning can have great benefits for the health and well-being of women and families, with positive influences on the local environment. Meeting the reproductive health needs of women and ensuring environmental sustainability by connecting family planning with environment programs has proven to be a “win-win” strategy. Yet this connection has often been seen as controversial or irrelevant to environmental policymaking.
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The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes
›In the far west of the Brazilian Amazon reside some of the last indigenous tribes on Earth untouched by modern society. In 2002, writer and photographer Scott Wallace, on assignment for National Geographic magazine, undertook a three month journey through the Javari Valley Indigenous Land on an expedition to map and protect the territory of the flecheiros, or Arrow People, named for the poison-tipped arrows they use. Wallace turned the chronicles of his adventure into a book while in residence as a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center.
On November 21, Wallace returned to the Center to present his finished book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes.
Over the past 40 years, Brazil’s policies towards indigenous tribes have changed dramatically, said Wallace – from initially wanting to “civilize” tribes through contact, to a modern hands-off approach. He explained that globalization and demand for rubber in the twentieth century meant more contact with indigenous tribes and, ultimately, more upheaval. As a result, many tribes took up hostile attitudes towards outsiders and retreated as far into the wilderness as possible.
Today, the Brazilian Department of Isolated Indians is attempting to map out the extent of uncontacted peoples’ lands in order to better protect them from intrusion. Over the last eight years since the book was written, the official number of uncontacted tribes has increased from 17 to 26. Javari Valley alone hosts eight distinct ethnic groups, making it the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes in the world.
The leader of Wallace’s expedition, Sydney Possuelo, is an explorer who was formerly the head of the Department of Isolated Indians and once one of Brazil’s most famous sertanistas (“agents of contact”). Possuelo is now a champion of the vision that we should no longer contact tribes, said Wallace, but only “identify them and get legal protection for [their] lands and erect control posts to keep intruders out.”
Old Tensions, New Threats
Although Wallace holds up Brazil as one of the countries with the most enlightened policies for native Indians in the Americas, he said there is cause for concern as intrusions continue. As Wallace notes on his blog, isolated Indians are known to travel extensively by foot during the dry season, appearing along the riverbanks as they search for turtle eggs buried in nests along the sandy beaches of the western Amazon. Mounting pressure from logging crews, wildcat gold prospectors, and seismic teams exploring for oil and gas are flushing these isolated indigenes out of the forests.
During their trek to map the flecheiros, Wallace’s group ran into an illegal gold mining operation, and, although they managed to take the dredge to the local authorities, Wallace said he fears corruption may have stymied justice.
Rights-Based Conservation
On the positive side, Wallace pointed out that by protecting indigenous tribes, the government is also protecting tens of thousands of acres of virgin rainforest in what is a mutually beneficial intersection of conservation and human rights. “Indians are the rightful owners of the land and the most efficacious guardians of the rainforest,” he said.
While there are many obstacles threatening the survival of uncontacted tribes, Wallace said that the situation is not hopeless and that conservation through protecting indigenous-rights in Brazil is a good starting point. “When there is a commitment to do something and resources are made available,” he said, “what seems like inevitable development, like the overrunning of forests, can be stopped.”
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: “Brazil Amazon adventure,” courtesy of jonrawlinson. -
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. -
Susanna Murley for The Huffington Post
Compromise Is Hard: The Problems and Promise of REDD+
›December 6, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Susanna Murley, appeared on The Huffington Post.
In Durban this week delegates from around the world are examining the options to mitigate carbon emissions. What looks like the best chance for progress? REDD+ (for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, plus co-benefits – like conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks). REDD+ has been seen as a potentially powerful solution to solve both poverty and deforestation – in one fell swoop.
How does it work? Essentially, these programs would be funded by developed nations to help pay for community forestry projects in developing countries, if the communities can demonstrate – with verifiable data – that their efforts are saving forests that would have been destroyed or if they are planting trees that would permanently sequester carbon.
Will this work? Many other systems have tried and failed to reduce deforestation. In Indonesia, where an area of forest about the size of Nevada has been destroyed since 1990, activists have participated in demonstrations, legal actions, blockades and destruction of property to protest timber production. Many international NGOs have joined them in their campaigns against the forestry practices in Indonesia, releasing report after report on the “State of the Forest.” The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have attempted to regulate forestry as conditions of their loans. None of it worked, and Indonesia continues to see massive amounts of illegal logging and deforestation.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Sources: Center for International Forestry Research, Gellert (2010), MongaBay.com
Photo Credit: “Oil palm plantation,” courtesy of flickr user CIFOR (Ryan Woo).
