Showing posts from category development.
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7 Billion: Reporting on Population and the Environment
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“It’s an issue – population – that is immensely diverse in its effects and repercussions, and it’s a great opportunity for reporting,” said Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting at a November 1 roundtable discussion at the Wilson Center. The session, reporting on population and the environment connections, also featured Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor at National Geographic; Kate Sheppard, environment reporter for Mother Jones; and Heather D’Agnes, foreign service environment officer at USAID.
“It’s an issue – population – that is immensely diverse in its effects and repercussions, and it’s a great opportunity for reporting,” said Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting at a November 1 roundtable discussion at the Wilson Center. The session, reporting on population and the environment connections, also featured Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor at National Geographic; Kate Sheppard, environment reporter for Mother Jones; and Heather D’Agnes, foreign service environment officer at USAID.The PBS NewsHour segment on “seven billion” featuring collaboration with the Pulitzer Center and National Geographic.
A Cumulative Discussion
“I ended up covering reproductive rights and health issues because I saw a need and a gap in coverage,” said Kate Sheppard. “I had been an environmental reporter for years…and so it sort of became this add-on beat for me.” But, she emphasized, they are actually very related issues.
“It’s a cumulative discussion,” said Dennis Dimick, speaking about National Geographic’s “7 Billion” series this year. “[Population] really hasn’t been addressed that much in media coverage over the past 30 years, in this country at least, and I think that the idea was that it wasn’t really just a discussion about the number seven billion, which is a convenient endline and easy way to get into something, but really to talk about the meaning of it, and the challenges and the opportunities that means for us as a civilization living on this planet.”
The series has had stories on ocean acidification, genetic diversity of food crops, the transition to a more urban world, as well as case studies from Brazil, Africa’s Rift Valley, and Bangladesh. “What we are trying to do in this series is really paint a broad picture to try to unpack all these issues and try to come at this question in sort of broad strokes,” Dimick said. “It’s sort of like we are orchestrating a symphony. Even though it’s a printed magazine, it’s a multimedia project – more than just words and more than just pictures.”
Collaborative Reporting
The Pulitzer Center, a non-profit journalism organization that seeks to fill gaps in coverage of important systemic issues, was able to commission pieces for PBS NewsHour that complemented the National Geographic series. This population collaboration launched the Center’s own initiative on population. “Our hope was that by having that platform, and the visibility of National Geographic and NewsHour, that it would bring attention to the rest of our work,” Sawyer said. The Pulitzer Center has gateways on water, food insecurity, climate change, fragile states, maternal health, women and children, HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, and Haiti, in addition to population.
Playing off a story that was already making world headlines, the Pulitzer Center supported reporting by freelance journalist Ellen Knickmeyer on the demographic dimensions of the Arab Spring, and particularly the role of young people. The stories explored youth’s frustration at high unemployment and lack of prospects, their roles in the revolutions, and their expectations for the future.
“Of course, we had the advantage that the world was interested in North Africa because of the amazing events that were taking place, but it was an opportunity to get them to look at the other dimension to it,” Sawyer said.
Based on a model developed to cover water and sanitation in West Africa, the Pulitzer Center also created a partnership with four African journalists to produce reporting on reproductive health that will be distributed in both international and African media outlets. “They have important things to say to American audiences, to international audiences,” Sawyer said. “And so we see this project as an opportunity to bring them into the international media discussion.” The journalists will be reporting from the upcoming International Conference on Family Planning in Dakar, Senegal, later this month.
Advocating Discussions
“It’s really a nuanced discussion, and that is why covering these topics, and looking at all the different aspects of it, is really important,” said USAID’s Heather D’Agnes. Furthermore, speaking as a development practitioner, she emphasized the importance of offering solutions, such as family planning, as part of an integrated development approach.
“In our journalism we don’t pretend not to have arguments, or ideas, or thoughts about the issues we are covering,” said Sheppard, speaking of Mother Jones. “I think that the value is that you tell the story well and you do solid reporting – that gives people a more informed perspective.” Especially with complicated issues, like population and the environment, “people find it more accessible if you have a perspective…they can associate better with a story if you walk them through the process you have gone through as a reporter.”
“What we are really trying to do is to advocate a discussion of issues that aren’t getting well-aired in other media,” said Dimick. Sometimes you need to find an interesting or counterintuitive framework, such as the National Geographic story about rural electrification and TV novelas in Brazil. It started as a story about the booming popularity of soap operas, but also created the opportunity to talk about gender equity, family planning, and other complex issues. While the magazine does not advocate a position, like the editorial page of a newspaper might, Dimick said, they do use case studies to guide readers through the range of risks, choices, and opportunities and to help them understand their implications.
Event ResourcesVideo Credit: “World’s Population Teeters on the Edge of 7 Billion — Now What?,” courtesy of PBS NewsHour; “7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine,” courtesy of National Geographic. -
Jill Shankleman for the U.S. Institute of Peace
Lifting the Veil: What Can We Learn From EITI Reports?
›November 22, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Jill Shankleman, appeared on the United States Institute of Peace’s International Network for Economics and Conflict blog.
The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), launched in 2002, now has 35 participating countries that have committed to publish annual, independently verified reports on all mining, oil, and gas payments made by companies to governments and all revenues received by governments from these extractive industry companies. The EITI is based on the premise that making public reliable information about extractive industry payments will make corruption and theft of “resource rents” more difficult and will enable informed debate amongst citizens and politicians about how to use resource wealth. While initially some governments could object to joining on the grounds that EITI was “a bad boys’ club,” Norway is now a fully engaged member; the United States has just announced that it will participate; and Australia stated it will pilot-test the system.
The participants in EITI also include Liberia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire, which, as post-conflict states, depend more than most on effective management of their resource wealth to establish the foundations for sustained economic growth. Citizens, journalists, and government officials in all the EITI countries now have access to some information on what extractive industry companies are paying to the government and what the government is receiving.
However, examination of country EITI reports reveals several shortcomings in reporting. What do the reports tell us beyond the headline numbers (i.e., total revenues and the size of any discrepancy between what companies report paying and what governments report receiving)? What do they tell us about revenue trends or about the significance of these revenues in total government receipts? How many countries have a pattern similar to Tanzania whereby the largest contribution documented in their first report was through companies collecting payroll taxes on behalf of the government? What is the value of “social investments,” training levies, or research and development contributions made by extractive industry companies? Where, and to what extent, do oil, gas and mining companies make payments to local governments?
Continue reading on the International Network for Economics and Conflict blog.
Jill Shankleman is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and former senior social and environmental specialist at the World Bank.
Video Credit: “Transparency Counts,” courtesy of vimeo user EITI International. -
George Washington University’s PISA Helps Share Rural Vietnamese Climate Adaptation Strategies
›“Climate change is not a topic of debate in Vietnam, it’s a real challenge to future prosperity and security,” says George Washington University’s Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia (PISA) program in this video about their climate adaptation and mitigation work in Nam Dinh province. “[Vietnam’s] population density (265 people/square kilometer), its long coastline (3,444 km), its two major rivers (the Red and Mekong) – all help make it one of the 10 countries considered most vulnerable to climate change,” the narrator says.
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Book Review: ‘Plundered Nations? Successes and Failures in Natural Resource Extraction’
›The principal argument of Plundered Nations? Successes and Failures in Natural Resource Extraction is highlighted by the question mark in the title. In many resource rich countries, natural assets have not led to development. The book advances the hypothesis that “for the depletion of natural assets to be converted into sustained development, a series of decisions has got to be got sufficiently right” (p. 1). That series of decisions is examined in detail through case studies on Cameroon, Chile, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, and Zambia, produced by a diverse group of academic and practicing economists under the auspices of the Center for the Study of African Economies and the Oxford Center for the Economics of Resource Rich Countries (OxCarre).
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Watch: Geoff Dabelko on Climate Adaptation and Peacebuilding at SXSW
›November 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe problems of climate adaptation, poverty alleviation, and peacebuilding are common to many parts of the world. Yet the efforts to address them are often pursued separately or with little coordination. Capturing the co-benefits of building institutional capacity critical to all three areas is an idea that will likely receive little attention at next year’s Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil, says ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
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In Colombia, Rural Communities Face Uphill Battle for Land Rights
›November 14, 2011 // By Kayly Ober“The only risk is wanting to stay,” beams a Colombian tourism ad, eager to forget decades of brutal internal conflict; however, the risk of violence remains for many rural communities, particularly as the traditional fight over drugs turns to other high-value goods: natural resource rights.
La Toma: Small Town, Big Threats
In the vacuum left by Colombia’s war on drugs, re-armed paramilitary groups remain a threat to many rural civilians. Organized groups hold footholds, particularly in the northeast and west, where they’ve traditionally hidden and exploited weak governance. Over the past five years, their presence has increased while their aims have changed.
A recent PBS documentary, The War We Are Living (watch below), profiles the struggles of two Afro-Colombian women, Francia Marquez and Clemencia Carabali, in the tiny town of La Toma confronting the paramilitary group Las Aguilas Negras, La Nueva Generacion. The Afro-Colombian communities the women represent – long persecuted for their mixed heritage – are traditional artisanal miners, but the Aguilas Negras claim that these communities impede economic growth by refusing to deal with multinationals interested in mining gold on a more industrial scale in their town.
For over seven years, the Aguilas Negras have sent frequent death threats and have indiscriminately killed residents, throwing their bodies over the main bridge in town. At the height of tensions in 2010, they murdered eight gold miners to incite fear. Community leaders know that violence and intimidation by the paramilitary group is part of their plan to scare and displace residents, but they refuse to give in: “The community of La Toma will have to be dragged out dead. Otherwise we’re not going to leave,” admits community leader Francia Marquez to PBS.
La Toma’s predicament is further complicated by corruption and general disinterest from Bogota. Laws that explicitly require the consent of Afro-Colombian communities to mine their land have not always been followed. In 2010, the Department of the Interior and the Institute of Geology and Minerals awarded a contract, without consultation, to Hector Sarria to extract gold around La Toma and ordered 1,300 families to leave their ancestral lands. Tension exploded between the local government and residents.
The community – spurred in part by Marquez and Carabali – geared into action; residents called community meetings, marched on the town, and set up road blocks. As a result, the eviction order was suspended multiple times, and in December 2010, La Toma officially won their case with Colombia’s Constitutional Court. Hector Sarria’s mining license as well as up to 30 other illegal mining permits were suspended permanently. But, as disillusioned residents are quick to point out, the decision could change at any time.
“Wayuu Gold”
Much like the people of La Toma, the indigenous Wayuu people who make their home in northeast Colombia have also found themselves the target of paramilitary wrath. Wayuu ancestral land is rich in coal and salt, and their main port, Bahia Portete, is ideally situated for drug trafficking, making them an enticing target. In 2004, armed men ravaged the village for nearly 12 hours, killing 12, accounting for 30 disappearances, and displacing thousands. Even now, seven years later, those brave enough to lobby for peace face threats.
Now, other natural resource pressures have emerged. In 2011, growing towns nearby started siphoning water from Wayuu lands, and climate change is expected to exacerbate the situation. A 2007 IPCC report wrote that “under severe dry conditions, inappropriate agricultural practices (deforestation, soil erosion, and excessive use of agrochemicals) will deteriorate surface and groundwater quantity and quality,” particularly in the Magdalena river basin where the Wayuu live. Glacial melt will also stress water supplies in other parts of Colombia. The threat is very real for indigenous peoples like the Wayuu, who call water “Wayuu gold.”
“Without water, we have no future,” says Griselda Polanco, a Wayuu woman, in a video produced by UN Women.
The basic right to water has always been a contentious issue for indigenous peoples in Latin America – perhaps most famously in Cochabomba, Bolivia – and Colombia is no different: most recently 10,000 protestors took to the streets in Bogota to lobby for the right to water.
Post-Conflict Land Tenure Tensions
Perhaps the Wayuu and people of La Toma’s best hope is in a new Victims’ Law, ratified in June 2011, but in the short term, tensions look set to increase as Colombia works to implement it. The law will offer financial compensation to victims or surviving close relatives. It also aims to restore the rights of millions of people forced off their land, including many Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples.
But “some armed groups – which still occupy much of the stolen land – have already tried to undermine the process,” reports the BBC. “There are fears that they will respond violently to attempts by the rightful owners or the state to repossess the land.”
Rhodri Williams of TerraNullius, a blog that focuses on housing, land, and property rights in conflict, disaster, and displacement contexts, wrote in an email to New Security Beat that there are many hurdles in the way of the law being successful, including ecological changes that have already occurred:Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the fact that many usurped indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories have been fundamentally transformed through mono-culture cultivation. Previously mixed ecosystems are now palm oil deserts and no one seems to have a sense of how restitution could meaningfully proceed under these circumstances. Compensation or alternative land are the most readily feasible options, but this flies in the face of the particular bond that indigenous peoples typically have with their own homeland. Such bonds are not only economic, in the sense that indigenous livelihoods may be adapted to the particular ecosystem they inhabit, but also spiritual, with land forming a significant element of collective identity. Colombia has recognized these links in their constitution, which sets out special protections for indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, but has failed to apply these rules in practice. For many groups, it may now be too late.
As National Geographic explorer Wade Davis said at the Wilson Center in April, climate change can represent as much a psychological and spiritual problem for indigenous people as a technical problem. Unfortunately, as land-use issues such as those faced by Afro-Columbian communities, the Wayuu, and many other indigenous groups around the world demonstrate, there is a legal dimension to be overcome as well.
Sources: BBC News, Colombia Reports, International Displacement Monitoring Centre, PBS, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, UN Women. The War We Are Living, part of the PBS series Women, War, and Peace, was instrumental to the framing of this piece.
Image and Video Credit: “Countryside Near Manizales, Colombia,” courtesy of flickr user philipbouchard; The War We Are Living video, courtesy of PBS. -
Jotham Musinguzi on Investing in Family Planning for Development in Uganda
›“What we are seeing is not adequate, but we think we are seeing very good positive movement, and we want to build on that,” said Jotham Musinguzi, director of the African regional office for Partners in Population and Development (PPD) in Kampala, Uganda. Musinguzi is a public health physician by training who previously advised the government of Uganda on population and reproductive health issues. “We think that [the government] is now on a firm foundation to continue investing properly in family planning,” he said.
Family Planning for Development
Uganda’s high population growth rate (the country has a total fertility rate of 6.4 children per woman, according to the UN) presents a number of challenges, said Musinguzi, exerting pressure on education and health systems, as well as on basic infrastructure, particularly for housing and transportation. Additionally, high levels of poverty and unemployment can become a source of instability.
Policymakers in Uganda are beginning to recognize the urgency of the issue, however, particularly in regards to young people, said Musinguzi. “They don’t have access to jobs, they don’t have the skills, and therefore the challenges of poverty eradication become even more important.”
Nonetheless, the country’s contraceptive prevalence rate is low, at 24 percent, with 41 percent of married women expressing an unmet need for family planning services, according to the 2006 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) for Uganda. Low levels of investment and lack of government involvement remain the primary obstacles, according to Musinguzi, in addition to socio-cultural and religious barriers.
Uganda historically depended primarily on donor finance, rather than government funding, to support family planning and reproductive health services, Musinguzi said. However, over the past two years, the Ugandan government has increased investment due to concerted efforts by PPD, as well as USAID, the UN Population Fund, and civil society groups. “Our point was that if the government does not fund family planning, then they are going to find that achievement of the Millennium Development Goals…is going to be very challenging,” he said.
“I think the low investment in family planning in Uganda is a thing of the past, and we are now looking forward to really better investment in this field,” Musinguzi said. “I am sure we are going to witness quite a big change [in the 2011 DHS] in terms of access as a result of the proper social investment that the government is trying to do now.”
South-South Collaboration
“I have a keen and strong interest in South-South collaboration in the field of reproductive health, family planning, population, and development,” Musinguzi said. Countries in the South have experience linking programming on population and development, and may face similar challenges, he said. For instance, Bangladesh and Vietnam had successful family planning programs that helped blunt rapid population growth rates.
“Countries, like Uganda, and others which haven’t gotten there yet, could learn from these other countries,” said Musinguzi, by sharing best practices and lesson learned, and replicating applicable solutions.
PPD also has a regional project reaching out to policymakers to increase commitment and accountability for family planning and reproductive health services. For instance, parliamentarians may not realize that they can play a significant role, but they have a unique function in providing government and budget oversight, Musinguzi said. Furthermore, they can create legal and administrative frameworks that prioritize family planning programs.
“We continue to make the case for more investment in family planning and reproductive health, but also making sure we hold leaders accountable, to show more commitment, and make sure they improve on the welfare of the people that they represent,” Musinguzi concluded.
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.
Sources: MEASURE DHS, UN Population Division. -
Twin Challenges: Population and Climate Change in 2050
›With global population reaching 7 billion, a lot of attention has been paid to the question of how to sustainably support so many people, much less the 9 billion expected by 2050, or the 10 billion possible by 2100. Add in the environmental variability projected from climate change and the outlook for supporting bigger and bigger populations gets even more problematic. Two new maps – one by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), the other by McGill University PhD candidate Jason Samson – show how the world might change over the next 40 years in the face of these twin challenges.
Nine Billion in 2050
PRB’s map, built using their DataFinder tool, shows the world in 2050 in terms individual country growth rates between now and then. Japan, Russia, and countries in Eastern Europe are set to grow more slowly than anywhere else, and some of that group will actually shrink by 10 to 20 percent of their current size. Western, Central, and Eastern Africa will be home to the highest increases. Niger’s 2050 population is expected to be 340 percent its 2011 size – the largest growth of any country.
The map is based on country-level data pulled from a number of sources: the UN Population Division’s latest “World Population Prospects,” the UN Statistics Division’s “Demographic Yearbook 2008,” the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database, and PRB’s own estimates. It’s unclear what numbers come from which sources, though it is clear that PRB’s 2050 estimates span the UN’s range of medium, high, and constant-fertility variants. In spite of these variations, none of PRB’s estimates come anywhere near the UN Population Division’s low variant estimates.
PRB’s map, echoing its 2011 World Population Data Sheet, shows a world where sub-Saharan Africa will bear the brunt of population growth. The average country in Africa in 2050 is projected to be slightly more than twice its 2011 size; the average European country is expected to barely break even. Africa is home to more countries whose populations are estimated to least double (34) or triple (4) than any other continent. Europe, meanwhile, is home to more countries whose populations will stagnate (8), or even shrink (19), than anywhere else. Interestingly, the Caribbean is a close second in terms of countries whose populations are projected to stay the same (seven to Europe’s eight), and Asia is second to Europe in terms of countries whose populations are projected to shrink (Georgia, Japan, Armenia, South Korea, and Taiwan).
More People, More Climate Change, More Vulnerability
Samson’s map takes on the same time period but projects where people will be most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Since his map takes into account population growth (measuring where people are most vulnerable, remember), unsurprisingly, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and central South America are covered in bright red dots, indicating high vulnerability. Conversely, North America, Europe, and much of Central Asia are in shades of blue.Samson built his index using four environmental predictors – annual mean temperature, mean temperature diurnal range, total annual precipitation, and precipitation seasonality – taken from WorldClim’s 2050 forecasts, and 2005 sub-national population data from Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network. In spite of the sub-national population data, Samson makes a point to justify his use of supranational climate data in order to best reflect “the scale at which climate conditions vary.” He writes that localized issues like urbanization and coastal flooding “are probably best investigated with targeted regional models rather than by attempting to modify global models to include all factors of potential regional importance.”
Samson’s research shows that, generally, people living in places that are already hot will be more vulnerable to climate change over time, while people in more temperate climates will feel a negligible impact. Though he projects the largest real temperature changes will happen in temperate climates like North America and Europe, the comparatively smaller changes in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and central South America are expected to have a greater impact because those regions are already very hot, their natural resources are stressed, and they are expected to bear the brunt of population growth over the next few decades.
These findings reflect a disparity between those responsible for climate change and those bearing the brunt of it, which, although not surprising, “has important implications for climate adaptation and mitigation policies,” said Sampson, discussing the map in a McGill press release.
Sub-National Data “Present a Very Different Picture”
Though they offer a useful approximate glimpse at what the world might look at in 2050, both of these maps fall prey to over-aggregation. By looking at national rather than sub-national data, we miss how nuanced population growth rates can be within a country. Stimson Center Demographer-in-Residence Richard Cincotta wrote in a recent New Security Beat post that “national level comparisons of total fertility rates tend to communicate the false impression of a world with demographically homogeneous states.” Sub-national data, including differences between urban and rural areas and minority-majority fertility rates, “present a very different picture.”
And that difference matters. When it comes to looking at how population interacts with other issues, like the environment, poverty, and conflict, the importance of a sub-national approach becomes evident. In its 2011 data sheet, PRB writes that “poverty has emerged as a serious global issue, particularly because the most rapid population growth is occurring in the world’s poorest countries and, within many countries, in the poorest states and provinces.”Edward Carr, an assistant geography professor at the University of South Carolina currently serving as a AAAS science fellow with USAID, argues that national-level data obscures our ability to understand food insecurity as well. The factors that drive insecurity “tend to be determined locally,” writes Carr in a post on his blog, and “you cannot aggregate [those factors] at the national level and get a meaningful understanding of food insecurity – and certainly not actionable information.”
The same is true when it comes to climate vulnerability. In a report from The Robert S. Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability Program, authors Joshua Busby, Todd Smith, and Kaiba White write that “research announcing that ‘Africa is vulnerable to climate change,’ or even ‘Ethiopia is vulnerable,’ without explaining which parts of Ethiopia are particularly vulnerable and why, is of limited value to the international policy community.”
“It is of even less use to Africans themselves, in helping them prioritize scarce resources,” add Busby et al.
Understanding the joint problems of climate change and population growth on a global level helps frame the challenges facing the world as it moves toward 8, 9, and possibly 10 billion. But knowing the ins and outs of how these issues interact on a local level will be a necessary step before policymakers and others can hope to craft meaningful responses that minimize our vulnerability to these challenges over the coming decades.
Sources: Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, Climate Change and African Political Stability Program at the Robert S. Strauss Center, McGill University, Population Reference Bureau, UN Population Division, UN Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau, University of South Carolina, WorldClim.
Image Credit: “2050 Population As a Multiple of 2011,” courtesy of PRB; CDVI map used with permission, courtesy of McGill University; Sub-national total fertility rates in Southern Africa, courtesy of MEASURE DHS, arranged by Schuyler Null.
