Showing posts from category forests.
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The Yasuní-ITT Initiative Is a Practical Climate Solution That Must Be Embraced at Durban
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As the world turns to Durban, South Africa, for this year’s UN climate summit, new findings are turning up the heat on the urgency to address climate change. The reality though is that we no longer have the luxury of resting our hopes solely on an internationally binding climate agreement; we must begin to look more closely at supporting immediate and tangible solutions. By complementing a global top-down effort of continued international negotiations with bottom-up approaches, we increase our chances at mitigating the most damaging effects of climate change. One of the most innovative models of such a bottom-up approach is the Yasuní-ITT Initiative being undertaken by the Government of Ecuador and supported by the UN Development Programme’s Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office).
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Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems: Results From a Public-Private Partnership
›“A lot of people probably don’t think that an organization with a name like ‘World Wildlife Fund’ would have a program on population, health, and the environment,” said WWF’s Tom Dillon at the Wilson Center, but actually it is very natural. “Most of the people we work with are in rural areas, and they depend on their natural resources for their own livelihoods and for their own well-being. Of course, if you are in that situation, in order to be a steward of the environment, you’ve got to have the basics. You have got to have your own health.”
Dillon was joined by staff from WWF, as well as Scott Radloff, director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, and Conrad Person, director of corporate contributions at Johnson & Johnson, to talk about the results of a three-year partnership between USAID, WWF, and Johnson & Johnson. The joint effort, a formal Global Development Alliance, provided health and family planning services, clean water, and sanitation to communities in three of WWF’s priority conservation landscapes: The Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya, and the Terai Arch Landscape in Nepal.
By creating an innovative public-private partnership that linked health objectives, particularly related to family planning and maternal and child health, to environmental and conservation activities, “this alliance was ahead of its time,” said Radloff.
Human Health Linked to Environmental Health
The project had four objectives, said Terri Lukas, WWF’s population, health, and environment (PHE) program manager: improve family health; reduce barriers to family planning and reproductive health services; improve community management of natural resources and habitat conservation; and document and promote successful approaches.
“Human health cannot be separated from environmental health anywhere,” Lukas said, “but most especially when we are working with very poor people who live very close to nature.”
Projects Provide Integrated Services
The Salonga National Park in the DRC is home to many endangered species, including the bonobo, one of the four great apes. Local communities are very isolated, and lack access to safe drinking water and sustainable livelihoods, as well as basic health and family planning services, according to Lukas. The PHE project was able to train 135 voluntary community health workers in family planning and maternal and child health care, including 55 women. One year after the training, health workers were distributing contraception to more than 300 new users per month, Lukas said.
The alliance has also integrated health and family planning services into conservation programs in Kenya’s Kiunga Marine National Reserve, in part, “to demonstrate to the people that we care about them as well as the environment, and also to show them the synergies that exist between the health issue and the environment issue,” said WWF Program Coordinator Bahati Mburah. The region has been suffering through a year-and-a-half-long drought, and has one of the highest population growth rates in east Africa, placing considerable pressure on natural resources.
“We talk to [the fisher folk] about health and family planning, and how they are related to the management of fisheries,” said Mburah. With improved transportation and mobile outreach services provided by the project, 97 percent of women are now able to access family planning services within two hours of their home, she said.
The third site is in the Terai region along the southern border of Nepal. In this lowland region, the alliance is attempting to safeguard and restore forest areas in order to allow wildlife to move and breed more freely, while at the same time improving the health and economic prospects of the people. By linking these goals, support for conservation efforts increased from 59 percent to 94 percent of households, with 85 percent attributing positive attitude changes to increased access to health services and safe drinking water, according to Bhaskar Bhattarai, project coordinator for WWF-Nepal.
Documenting and Promoting Successful Approaches
Cara Honzak, WWF’s senior technical advisor on population, health, and environment, said the global objective of the alliance was to document and promote successful PHE approaches. Comprehensive baseline and endline surveys provided critical evidence that integrated PHE programming increases family planning use in remote areas, improves conservation buy-in within communities, and leads to increased participation of women in community leadership and decision-making.
“We have played a key role in producing some of the evidence that has been used throughout Washington [D.C.], especially to provide information to government bodies that are making decisions about bringing more money into family planning, health, and particularly in the environmental sector,” said Honzak.
“After two decades in the field, and working in this area, I wasn’t expecting many surprises. I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Lukas said. “These three years have changed almost everything about the way I now view health development…I have long called myself a conservationist, but now I say to my international health colleagues: we are all conservationists, and if we aren’t, we should be.”
Event Resources- Bhaskar Bhattarai presentation
- Cara Honzak presentation
- Terri Lukas presentation
- Bahati Mburah presentation
- Photo gallery
- Video
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Seven Ways Seven Billion People Affect the Planet
›October 31, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoSeven billion people now live on earth, only a dozen years after global population hit six billion. But the seven billion milestone is not about sheer numbers: Demographic trends will significantly impact the planet’s resources and peoples’ security.
Growing populations stress dwindling natural resource supplies while high levels of consumption in both developed countries and emerging economies drive up carbon emissions and deplete the planet’s resources. And neglected “youth bulges” could bolster extremism in fragile states like Somalia and destabilize nascent democracies like Egypt.
Here are seven ways seven billion people affect the planet, according to recent research:
Security: Nearly 90 percent of countries with very young and youthful populations had undemocratic governments at the end of the 20th century. Eighty percent of all new civil conflicts between 1970 and 2007 occurred in countries where at least 60 percent of the population is under age 30, says demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. According to research by demographer Richard Cincotta, these countries may achieve democracy, but are less likely to sustain it.- Richard Cincotta: Tunisia Predicted: Demography and the Probability of Liberal Democracy in the Greater Middle East
- Elizabeth Leahy Madsen: Demographic Security 101
Water: By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries with water scarcity, and fully two-thirds will be living in conditions of water stress. People are using groundwater faster than it can be naturally replenished, putting us in danger of “peak water,” says MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Peter Gleick. “We cannot talk about water without also understanding the enormously important role of population dynamics and population growth.”- Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions
Forests: The growing demand for energy has helped devastate tropical forests, as more than two billion people depend on wood for cooking and heating, particularly in developing countries. Projects in Indonesia, Nepal, and Uganda are fighting deforestation by providing alternative energy and incomes along with health and family planning services.- Indonesia: Health in Harmony
- Nepal: Forests for the Future
- Uganda: Sharing the Forest
Future Growth: By 2050, the UN says global population could range anywhere from 8 billion to 11 billion – and where it ends up depends in large part on the status of women in developing countries. “Even if fertility rates remain constant at current levels (which is unlikely), developing regions would grow from 5.7 billion in 2010 to 9.7 billion in 2050, but the total population of developed countries would remain essentially unchanged,” writes Madsen.- Elizabeth Leahy Madsen: How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here? [Part One] [Part Two]
There are no quick solutions to these seven problems. But meeting the unmet need for contraception of more than 200 million women is an effective and inexpensive way to start.
Sources: Population Action International, UN, World Health Organization.
Image Credit: Used with permission courtesy of Scott Woods, The University of Western Ontario. -
How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here? [Part Two]
›October 26, 2011 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThe world’s women will determine whether the global population in 2050 is as low as 8 billion or as high as 11 billion through their choices (or lack thereof) about the number and timing of their children. Women in developing regions of the world will have the greatest effect on these potential population trajectories. Even if fertility rates remain constant at current levels (which is unlikely), developing regions would grow from 5.7 billion in 2010 to 9.7 billion in 2050, but the total population of developed countries would remain essentially unchanged.The UN estimates that the seven billionth person alive today will be born on October 31. Demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen explains how we got to that number, its significance, and where our demographic path might take us from here. Read part one here.
The world’s women will determine whether the global population in 2050 is as low as 8 billion or as high as 11 billion through their choices (or lack thereof) about the number and timing of their children. Women in developing regions of the world will have the greatest effect on these potential population trajectories. Even if fertility rates remain constant at current levels (which is unlikely), developing regions would grow from 5.7 billion in 2010 to 9.7 billion in 2050, but the total population of developed countries would remain essentially unchanged.
The way that people decide the timing and number of their children is not easily distilled into a simple formula with a single solution. Still, some basic and important facts are known. In the developing world, where more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives, women in rural areas, those who have little or no education, and those who are poor, have larger families. As demographers have shown in modeling the determinants of fertility, women tend to seek contraception once they are confident that their children will survive to adulthood and when socioeconomic development increases the “costs” of having children, for example by motivating parents to send them to school rather than to work.
One of the most direct reasons for past declines in fertility rates was the rapid expansion of family planning and reproductive health programs, supported by country governments and international donors, that enabled women and men to more effectively choose the size of their families. But today, about 215 million women across the developing world would like to delay or avoid pregnancy but are using ineffective contraception or none at all. Funding programs to meet the family planning needs of these women, which would cost about $3.6 billion annually, would both empower them and help fertility rates continue to decline.
Beyond Access: Gender Inequality Inhibits Contraceptive Use
While increasing support for family planning programs tops the list of demographers’ recommended policies, ensuring that contraceptives are available and accessible will not alone achieve the fertility declines projected in most of the UN’s range of possibilities. Many women who are having or planning to have large families know about family planning and where to find it, but are choosing not to use contraception for cultural reasons that are often deeply engrained.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest global fertility rate, only 16 percent of married/partnered women of reproductive age are using effective contraception. In comparison, between 62 and 75 percent of their peers in Ireland, the United States, and Uruguay – countries whose fertility rates are almost exactly at replacement level – are using it.
Logically, sub-Saharan Africa needs similar levels of contraceptive use to bring its average fertility rate towards replacement level as the UN projects, so the region’s average prevalence rate for modern contraception would need to rise by at least 10 percentage points in each of the next four decades. However, contraceptive use in the region has grown by only 0.5 percentage points or less over the past 30 years.
What is inhibiting the use of contraception? Demographic and health surveys find in Nigeria, for example, that 10 percent of married women are using an effective contraceptive method, while twice as many have an unmet need for family planning. This low use of family planning demonstrates high potential for change in the country’s demographic future, which, as the most populous in Africa, will greatly influence global and regional trends. Yet among women who do not intend to use contraception, 39 percent report that they or their family members are opposed to family planning, and another 16 percent fear side effects or have other health-related concerns. If Nigeria’s fertility rate remains unchanged, the country will be home to 500 million people by 2050.
In Pakistan, where 24 percent of births are unintended, surveys show similar barriers. Ninety-six percent of married women know about effective contraceptive methods, but only 22 percent are using one. More than one-quarter of women who do not plan to use contraceptives report that their fertility is “up to God” and 23 percent report that they or their family members are opposed to family planning. Pakistan’s population would more than double from 174 million to 379 million by 2050 if current fertility trends hold constant.
Peak Planet? Population Growth and Consumption Strain Environmental Resources
Because Nigeria, Pakistan, and other countries’ demographic trajectories may not follow the path laid out in population projections, we can’t take a world of nine billion for granted. While human ingenuity and technological advancements have improved standards of living in many countries, scientists caution that the combination of rising human numbers and growing consumption has serious environmental implications. Already, the quantity and quality of fresh water supplies are under strain, and forests in many developing countries are being rapidly depleted.
Population projections are much more than wonkish speculation – they foreshadow the serious problems that lie ahead if health, environment, and development policies aren’t strengthened. If the UN projections of our demographic future are to bear any semblance of reality, we must move beyond the status quo. While improving physical access to family planning should remain a top priority, meeting unmet need will also require addressing the deep-seated challenges of women’s education and empowerment.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and former senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Bongaarts and Sinding (2009), Bongaarts (2006), Futures Institute, Guttmacher Institute and UN Population Fund, Measure DHS, O’Neill, Dalton, Fuchs, Jiang, Shonali Pachauri, and Katarina Zigova (2010), UN Population Division, Washington Post.
Photo Credit: “Afghan Internally Displaced Persons,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Robert Draper, National Geographic
People and Wildlife Compete in East Africa’s Albertine Rift
›The original version of this article, by Robert Draper, appeared on National Geographic.
The mwami remembers when he was a king of sorts. His judgment was sovereign, his power unassailable. Since 1954 he, like his father and grandfather before him, has been the head of the Bashali chiefdom in the Masisi District, an undulating pastoral region in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Though his name is Sylvestre Bashali Mokoto, the other chiefs address him as simply doyen – seniormost. For much of his adult life, the mwami received newcomers to his district. They brought him livestock or other gifts. He in turn parceled out land as he saw fit.
Today the chief sits on a dirty couch in a squalid hovel in Goma, a Congolese city several hours south of Masisi. His domain is now the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for more than a decade yet has largely eluded the world’s attention. Eastern Congo has been overtaken by thousands of Tutsi and Hutu and Hunde fighting over what they claim is their lawful property, by militias aiming to acquire land by force, by cattlemen searching for less cluttered pastures, by hordes of refugees from all over this fertile and dangerously overpopulated region of East Africa seeking somewhere, anywhere, to eke out a living. Some years ago a member of a rebel army seized the mwami’s 200-acre estate, forcing him, humiliated and fearing for his safety, to retreat to this shack in Goma.
The city is a hornet’s nest. As recently as two decades ago Goma’s population was perhaps 50,000. Now it is at least 20 times that number. Armed males in uniform stalk its raggedy, unlit streets with no one to answer to. Streaming out of the outlying forests and into the city market is a 24/7 procession of people ferrying immense sacks of charcoal on bicycles or wooden, scooter-like chukudus. North of the city limits seethes Nyiragongo volcano, which last erupted in 2002, when its lava roared through town and wiped out Goma’s commercial district. At the city’s southern edge lies the silver cauldron of Lake Kivu – so choked with carbon dioxide and methane that some scientists predict a gas eruption in the lake could one day kill everyone in and around Goma.
The mwami, like so many far less privileged people, has run out of options. His stare is one of regal aloofness. Yet despite his cuff links and trimmed gray beard, he is not a chief here in Goma. He is only Sylvestre Mokoto, a man swept into the hornet’s nest, with no land left for him to parcel out. As his guest, a journalist from the West, I have brought no gifts, only demeaning questions. “Yes, of course my power has been affected greatly,” the mwami snaps at me. “When others back up their claims with guns, there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading on National Geographic.
Photo Credit: “Aerial View of Goma,” courtesy of UN Photo/Marie Frechon. -
Watch: Scott Wallace on the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes and the Intersection Between Human Rights and Conservation
›October 19, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the far west of the Amazon, some of the last uncontacted indigenous tribes on Earth live untouched by modern society. Scott Wallace, frequent contributor to National Geographic and former public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, spoke to New Security Beat about his new book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes, which chronicles his harrowing trip through the Javari Valley Indigenous Land. Wallace accompanies former sertanista (“agent of contact”)-turned-native rights advocate Sydney Possuelo as he attempts to map and protect the territory of the flecheiros, or Arrow People, named for the poison-tipped arrows they use.
The Brazilian government and activists are trying to protect the areas where these native groups live and allow them to choose for themselves if they want contact. “It’s not that hard to find us,” Wallace said. For the moment, however, “it’s clear that they do not want that contact.”
By protecting these people, the government is also protecting thousands, if not millions, of acres of virgin rainforest, said Wallace, creating a mutually beneficial intersection between human rights and environmental conservation.
“The assumption is that there is now a global village, everyone’s connected…no one of us is separated from anyone else on the planet by more than six degrees of separation,” said Wallace. But that assumption breaks down in the face of these people who live in complete isolation from the rest of the world.
We have to decide whether to leave them alone and let them live their lives or try to make lasting contact, said Wallace. Contact would open up the tribe’s land and resources to development but come at great risk to their society, their lives (due to vulnerability to disease), and the Amazonian ecosystem, as the example of India’s Adavasi tribes demonstrates. -
Health and Harmony: Population, Health, and Environment in Indonesia
›Borneo’s Gunung Palung National Park is a microcosm of both the island’s ecological wealth and vulnerability. More than half of the park is undisturbed forest; the remainder, however, “is being torn down day after day” at an alarming rate, said Health in Harmony’s Nichol Simpson at an event on integrated approaches to population, health, and environment (PHE) programs in Indonesia. Alene Gelbard of the Public Health Institute’s Company-Community Partnerships for Health Indonesia (CCPHI) program joined Simpson on September 29 at the Wilson Center. Both speakers emphasized that no matter what issue a group works on, engaging local communities is essential for success.
The Destructive Cycle: Poor Health, Poor Environment
For Simpson, “the intersection between human and environmental health” is at the heart of Health in Harmony’s work. Health in Harmony opened Clinic ASRI in 2007, aiming to provide improved healthcare to villagers throughout Gunung Palung National Park while ending their dependence on illegal logging as a means of financial survival.
The area’s inhabitants were all too easily trapped in what Simpson called “the destructive cycle.” When faced by an unexpected medical emergency, families would go into debt to pay their medical bills. Health in Harmony found that of 232 local households surveyed, 13 percent had recently experienced a major medical emergency, at an average cost of $360. Most households in the area only hold around $260 in emergency savings, so to make up the difference, about a third turned to illegal logging to pay down their debt.
By deforesting the park, illegal logging worsens the health of nearby communities. For example, Simpson said that Clinic ASRI has seen a rise in cases of malaria and tuberculosis in the surrounding communities, in part because deforestation has increased the level of mosquito activity. The link between human and environmental health is clear, said Simpson: the people ASRI serves are “living it every day. They know the cause of this. And…they want it to stop.”
Protecting Natural Resources By Improving Health
The Health in Harmony clinic located in Sukadana, a small village sandwiched between Borneo’s coast and Gunung Palung Park, helps break the destructive cycle by treating patients regardless of their ability to pay. If patients do not have cash, they can barter for their care. In one case, a girl named Yani came to ASRI after her family incurred $500 over two months of visiting hospitals and traditional healers, none of whom could treat her condition. ASRI diagnosed and treated Yani for scabies. In exchange, her mother signed a pledge to protect Gunung Palung from logging and made the clinic a floor mat to cover the $1.50 bill.
By providing affordable, high-quality healthcare that is contingent upon pledging to protect the environment, Clinic ASRI improves human and environmental health in one fell swoop, said Simpson. “Because the infant mortality rate has decreased and you’re not overcompensating,” said Simpson, families can choose to have fewer children, using free birth control provided by ASRI.
“When you have fewer and healthier children, you’re investing in your education,” said Simpson. “When you’re investing in your education, you’re investing in your country and your community. This is the virtuous cycle. I didn’t invent it, but we are proving it in Sukadana.”
The communities around the clinic have embraced ASRI’s work, partnering with them to expand their services to address additional community needs, like training farmers in more productive organic methods and providing mated pairs of goats for widows, who pay ASRI back with kid goats and manure for fertilizer.
All but one of the 23 villages that ASRI services have been consistently free of illegal logging, according to monitors who visit them on a regular basis. “We’re proving the theory that we can protect natural resources by improving health,” Simpson said.
“Health Is Key to Sustainable Development”
Gelbard took a step back to talk about CCPHI’s experience establishing multi-sector partnerships among NGOs and corporations by building trust and enabling dialogue between the communities.
With corporate responsibility becoming more popular, “everyone’s talking about partnerships these days, and everybody’s partnering with everyone,” said Gelbard. “I don’t care what they call it – I care what they’re doing” and what results they achieve, she said. A successful partnership involves “all partners doing something more than just giving money.”
Gelbard said the 2004 tsunami reinforced the notion of corporate responsibility for a lot of companies operating in Indonesia. They saw that unless they branched out beyond their own walls and “did things to help strengthen communities,” efforts at corporate responsibility simply “would not benefit them in the long-run,” she said.
Through CCPHI, companies and NGOs have partnered on a wide range of efforts, including improving access to and funding for reproductive health services, improving sanitation by increasing access to water, and combating human trafficking by empowering girls and women.
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals will require increasing access to health care in a manner that reflects the needs of communities, she said. At its core, CCPHI’s work and the partnerships it facilitates are “based on the knowledge that health is key to sustainable development,” said Gelbard.
Event Resources
Sources: Alam Sehat Lestari, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Company-Community Partnerships for Health Indonesia, ExxonMobil, The Guardian, Health in Harmony, National Geographic, PBS News Hour, Public Health Institute, Republic of Indonesia Ministry of Forestry, United Nations, World Wildlife Fund
Photo Credit: Used with permission courtesy of ASRI and Nikki See, Under-told Stories. -
Watch: Dennis Taenzler on Four Key Steps for REDD+ to Avoid Becoming a Source of Conflict
›The UN Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) provides financial incentives to developing countries to conserve their forests and invest in low-carbon pathways to sustainable development. However, it may also be a potential new source of conflict, says Dennis Taenzler, a senior project manager at adelphi in Berlin, who works on climate and energy policies as well as peace and conflict issues.
