Last month, in an effort to prevent further deforestation of the Amazon, Brazil announced the creation of the Amazon Fund, which aims to make preserving the world’s largest tropical rain forest more lucrative than destroying it. Norway was the first country to contribute to the initiative, offering a pledge of $100 million. Officials project that the fund may receive up to $1 billion in its first year and may accrue as much as $21 billion by 2121.

By creating an endowment open to international investors, Brazil appears to have shed some of its usual suspicions of foreign encroachment on the Amazon and acknowledged that conservation efforts will only be sustainable with considerable outside support. Yet the funds will still be controlled by Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES)—which, according to BNDES environment director Eduardo de Mello, means “donors will have no say over the use of [the Amazon Fund’s] resources.” Within BNDES, a steering committee made up of federal and state officials will be in control of the funds. According to the proposal listed online by BNDES, the Amazon Fund will target the following areas: Brazilian sovereignty; infrastructure development; combating deforestation; indigenous rights; sustainable development; and government, business, and civil cooperation.

The Amazon Fund is guided by the Brazilian government’s Plano Amazônia Sustentável (PAS), or Sustainable Amazon Plan, which was issued in May 2008. Carlos Nobre, a senior climate scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, was one of the principal architects of this plan, and presented it to an American audience at a January 16, 2008, conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center. PAS offers a holistic vision for protecting the Amazon that goes beyond conservation efforts, calling for the creation of a new economic paradigm centered on sustainably “globalizing the development capacity of the Amazon and producing value-added goods and services.” Nobre told Reuters that while the Amazon Fund is a positive initial step, it nevertheless “just postpones deforestation…the final fix is to create a new economy that can give jobs to several million people.” This “paradigm shift,” he explained, requires the entrepreneurial capacity to “translate biodiversity wealth into economic wealth.”

Response to the Amazon Fund has been generally positive, albeit guarded. According to Paulo Gustavo Prado, environmental policy director of Conservation International’s (CI) Brazil program, the Fund is a helpful move in the fight to combat deforestation in the Amazon, but is still a work “under construction” (e-mail exchange with Alan Wright). For instance, it is possible that the resources will be used to fill “gaps in governance”—in other words, to fund additional enforcement actions against illegal logging in the Amazon—and therefore have little direct impact on Amazonian society as whole. He observed that the prospect for private-sector involvement seems limited by the fact that funders will have no influence over the use of funds, so the initiative is unlikely to draw money for carbon-offset projects. Prado remarked that by reducing the cost of conservation-related activities, it appears that the Amazon Fund will encourage the work of organizations such as CI. He also stressed CI’s commitment to see that the Fund will be made available to researchers and scientists, and that indigenous and local communities and state and municipal governments will be involved in the decision-making process.

It remains to be seen how other issues—such as the ambitious Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), lingering land rights issues, and Brazil’s commodity export boom—will affect the Amazon Fund’s overall efficacy.

By Brazil Institute Program Assistant Alan Wright and Brazil Institute Intern Matthew Layton.

Photo: Area deforested for agricultural use in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Courtesy of flickr user leoffreitas.

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In “The Climate Security Connection: What it Means for the Poor,” Joshua Busby (listen to ECSP podcast with Busby) discusses the security implications of climate change for the developing world. In this paper, written for “Development in the Balance: How Will the World’s Poor Cope With Climate Change?,” the fifth annual Brookings Blum Round Table, held earlier this month, Busby explains that “[d]eveloping countries are most vulnerable, partly as an accident of geography, but also because vulnerability is made worse by poverty, bad governance, and past conflict.”

Busby compares the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which pounded Burma in May 2008, to that of an armed attack, describing both as causing “widespread suffering, destruction of infrastructure, mobilization of the military, and the movement of refugees.” In fact, between 1991 and 2005, natural disasters led to as many deaths as armed conflict, as Busby notes. The subsequent political battles around outside efforts to deliver aid “gave people around the world a visual image of the potential future,” says Busby, and offered a glimpse of “the security risks when affected countries lack the capacity or will to respond.”

The economic consequences of natural disasters can also be crippling. In absolute terms, the developed world suffers larger financial losses, but as a share of GDP, the damage to developing countries is far greater. Additionally, though the death toll of natural disasters continues to fall, the total number of affected people is on the rise, which means that many more people are relying on government services to regain their footing in the wake of natural disasters.

These consequences have long-term security implications for a world in which natural disasters are becoming more frequent and severe. “Post-disaster environments are going to be dangerous moments,” Busby predicts, “when mishandled or inadequate disaster response can give way to the kinds of lingering grievances that can motivate people to take up arms.” To prevent this, he advocates an international focus on adaptation and risk-reduction strategies, and cautions against narrowly focusing on the causal relationship linking climate change to violent conflict. By doing so, policymakers and practitioners overlook what Busby says is the more likely outcome, in which large-scale disasters sap government resources by creating humanitarian emergencies that require military mobilization in response. In “Gathering Storm – the humanitarian impact of climate change,” the UN’s Integrated Regional News Networks (IRIN) explores how climate change has altered the face of global humanitarian crises.

Offering a sharp critique of the reactive strategy of many governments, Busby suggests that a modest investment in prevention would be more efficient and more effective. A joint assessment by the World Bank and the U.S. Geological Survey, for example, found that a $40 billion investment in natural-disaster prevention could have prevented $280 billion in damages worldwide during the 1990s. The reactive approach also threatens to politicize the carefully guarded neutrality of aid workers and organizations; engender international friction where inadequate government response leads to international intervention; and sap government resources through costly responses to humanitarian crises.

Busby envisions a system where “the poor bear less of the brunt of half-hearted and partial reactive measures” in response to climate change. Noting Paul Collier’s finding in The Bottom Billion that past conflict is an accurate predictor of future poverty, Busby argues that reducing the potential for violence in post-disaster situations will improve development prospects for countries worldwide. An enlightened approach, emphasizing prevention over reaction, will not only insulate vulnerable regions from the immediate dangers of natural disasters, but will also protect them from more indirect, long-term threats to their prosperity and security.

Photo: Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were mobilized in response to the May 12th earthquake. As climate change makes natural disasters more frequent and more severe, this will likely become an increasingly common sight. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Alex and Jerry.

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Climate change, increasing population, and overuse of land, fisheries, and water supplies threaten to undermine development in Uganda, writes Pius Sawa for the Africa Science News Service. Olive Sentumbwe Mugisa, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) population and health advisor in Uganda, warns that Uganda’s economic growth is not keeping pace with its population growth, which is among the fastest in Africa, due to a fertility rate of 6.7 children per woman.

Native Ugandan Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka spoke about the interconnectedness of population, health, and environment issues in Uganda in two events at the Wilson Center in May of this year. Kalema-Zikusoka is the founder and director of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), which works to conserve the habitat of the endangered mountain gorilla by strengthening community health services and providing communities with information about the benefits of family planning.

Kalema-Zikusoka is also the author of an upcoming issue of Focus, the Environmental Change and Security Program’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. Her piece describes CTPH’s work in and around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, where it has found great success in addressing health, conservation, family planning, and livelihood issues in an integrated fashion.

Photo: Woman and children in southern Uganda. Courtesy of flickr user youngrobv.

“African elites have long had the perception that rapid population growth was not an issue because of the vastness of Africa, abundance of resources, relatively low population densities and, more recently, the threat of HIV/AIDS,” but as rapid population growth becomes a more urgent problem across the continent, that view is increasingly falling out of favor, said World Bank lead demographer John May in a recent interview with the African Press Organization. As governments work to improve their population programs, the World Bank is adopting “new demography” principles that examine age structures, dependency ratios, human capital investments, and the demographic dividend to craft cross-sectoral approaches to population policy.

Current demographic trends, the result of reduced infant and child mortality and slowly falling fertility rates, will double the population of Africa by 2036 if left unaddressed, said May. The security implications of this population growth are readily apparent. Rapid population growth has been identified as a factor in increasing resource scarcity and can help lead to conflict. In Sudan, for example, the pressures of overgrazing, desertification, ongoing drought, and escalating competition between pastoralist and agriculturalist communities have contributed to violence. Kenya presents a similar scenario: Rapid and uneven population growth led to land scarcity in the late 1980s, exacerbating latent political and ethnic tensions. The violent conflict that erupted between 1991 and 1993 was fueled in part by natural resource scarcity. More recently, insecure land tenure, shaky property rights, and competition over natural resources have triggered violence across East Africa. Population pressures also play a part, and some argue that demographically-induced land scarcity was at the heart of violence in Kenya earlier this year.

May lamented that far less attention has been paid to population than to humanitarian crises, good governance, and climate change—despite compelling evidence that population growth is likely to negatively impact the chances for peace. Sexual and reproductive health, for example, form 20 percent of the global disease burden, and there is compelling evidence that good reproductive health leads to poverty reduction. He reminds us that demographic issues are inextricably tied to larger development issues, and must be addressed together.

Some countries have successfully reduced fertility rates, May noted. In the 1960s, the Tunisian government introduced a program to reduce fertility rates through increased education for girls, government provision of family planning services, and legal reforms to increase the economic status of rural women and girls. Today, the country boasts a replacement-level fertility rate. Efforts to improve gender equity are highly effective in reducing unsustainable population growth: “It could be argued that the population issue in sub-Saharan Africa is in essence a gender issue,” said May, who argued that “[e]conomic and social development is of course the best contraceptive.”

“The task ahead is huge and difficult, however some concrete results have already been obtained,” said May. He offered a simple suggestion to governments wondering how to craft population policies: “let people, especially women, decide for themselves and…provide them with the means to exert their choices.”

India’s Punjab region faces a host of troubles: In the last 10 years, 100,000 of India’s desperate farmers—many of them Punjabi—have been driven to suicide by their inability to repay loans; half a century of heavy fertilizer use in Punjab has led to soaring cancer rates; water tables in the region sink as much as 100 feet per year, the result of decades of rice production in a naturally dry area; overwatering has brought salts to the soil’s surface, making large tracts of land unusable; and by some accounts, 40 percent of Punjab’s youth and nearly half of its agricultural workforce are addicted to heroin. In a series of reports from Punjab published in Slate magazine, Mira Kamdar argues that the economic, security, and environmental problems facing India can ultimately be traced back some 40 years to the policies of the Green Revolution. The drive to feed India’s rapidly growing population put enormous pressure on Punjab’s land and left consideration for sustainability on the back burner, according to Kamdar, who argues that these issues now threaten to paralyze India’s agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution alleviated the chronic famines that historically plagued India. Hybrid seed varieties, extensive irrigation schemes, and the heavy-handed use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides transformed Punjab into an agricultural powerhouse. It comprises only 1.5 percent of India’s territory, but it produces 60 percent of the country’s wheat and 45 percent of its rice. Yet Kamdar wonders whether India will be able to “feed a growing population in the face of environmental collapse and growing political instability fueled by scarcity.”

With little hope for economic stability, Punjab’s youth are increasingly turning to the drug trade for income, and Punjab’s impoverished citizens, many of whom feel exploited and left behind by the Indian government, are attractive recruits for separatist groups. “Conditions affecting the livelihood of the majority of people in poor countries [or regions] are at the heart of the internal violence” so often found there, according to a report from the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO).

Due to the effects of climate change, the 400 million additional people projected to live in India by 2080 may have to make do with a nearly 40 percent decline in agricultural production during the same period, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Current policies will do little to alleviate the pressures colliding in Punjab. The government—as well as the World Bank, international agriculture corporations, and Indian companies—favors privately funded, large-scale industrial operations. Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s minister of finance, is focused on developing India’s agricultural capacity, and is not terribly concerned with the consequences for the environment, security, or human health. Small-scale farming is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Many countries face the challenge of feeding a growing population with diminishing output, and find doing so in an ecologically responsible manner difficult. Ultimately, though, the case of India shows that increasing output at such dramatic cost to human and environmental health is unsustainable, as it quickly creates complex and intractable problems of its own.

Photo: Punjabi farmers transport fertilizer from a nearby village. Courtesy of Flickr user Aman Tur.

Fertility rates worldwide have been on the decline for many years, the result of a steady decrease in desired family size. But more often than not, fertility rates have not fallen as quickly as desired family size, as access to contraceptives has not kept pace with increasing demand. Consequently, more than 75 million pregnancies each year are unintended, finds “Fertility Regulation Behaviors and Their Costs: Contraception and Unintended Pregnancies in Africa and Eastern Europe & Central Asia,” a World Bank discussion paper surveying decades of research from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. One fifth of these pregnancies end in induced abortion, fully half of which are classified as unsafe, meaning they are not attended by a properly trained health care worker or in an environment that conforms to minimum medical standards.

The costs of unsafe abortion are tremendous, financially and in terms of human lives. Approximately 67,000 women die annually from complications resulting from unsafe abortion, leaving more than 200,000 children motherless. Sexual and reproductive health issues constitute 20 percent of the global disease burden, and produce additional “direct and indirect costs to the individual woman, the woman’s household, the country’s health system and society as a whole.”

In Africa, post-abortion care can consume up to half of obstetrics and gynecology department budgets. The cost of this care is often much higher than the patient’s monthly salary. The authors report that “comprehensive family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce unsafe abortion in Nigeria would cost only a quarter of what is being spent in direct costs to treat post-abortion complications.” This point is taken up by author Margaret E. Greene is the latest issue of FOCUS, ECSP’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. She writes that “[r]obust, compelling evidence linking good reproductive health to poverty reduction,” as is offered in the World Bank report, will “support efforts to include it in country-level poverty reduction strategies and in the allocation of international poverty reduction funding.”

This situation repeats itself across the globe. In Central Asia and Eastern Europe, induced abortion is “the principal method of birth control,” due to the expense of importing Western contraceptives, the medical community’s stigma against oral contraceptives, and the availability of abortion result. In Russia, government concerns about low fertility led the government to dismantle its sex-education curriculum and to carry out widespread layoffs in the government-controlled offices of contraceptive manufacturers.

Without exception, the case studies in this discussion paper find significant financial benefit to increasing modern contraceptive availability. Inadequate access is “an important barrier,” the authors write, discounting the argument that the contraceptives are there and people simply don’t use them. DHS surveys worldwide find that cost has prohibited contraceptive use for fewer than 2 percent of the estimated 137 million women with an unmet need. Women have decided, it seems, that the costs of childbearing far outweigh those of contraceptives.

“It is imperative,” the authors write, “that policies and programs address the need for contraception globally – for all population groups but with special emphasis on those who are most disadvantaged.” Community insurance schemes to reduce out-of-pocket payments can help accomplish this. Other ideas include increased subsidies for basic health services and adjusted user fee policies. The report also urges expanded and improved provision of contraceptive information and services, as well as improved training for health care providers. The problem is not a lack of good ideas and policies, but a lack of political will.

In the third installment of its series of reports addressing national security issues (see New Security Beat coverage of the first and second reports), the Center for American Progress offers a blistering critique of America’s foreign assistance approach, arguing that American foreign policy during the second half of the 20th century helped create some of today’s security concerns. For instance, the authors maintain that if the United States had used more foresight while dispensing $24 billion in aid to Pakistan over the last 25 years, “[w]e might not be talking today about the extremism taught in many madrassas, or debating the best course of action for defeating the Taliban.” The United States leads the world in humanitarian assistance, write authors Natalie Ondiak and Andrew Sweet, and they argue that the United States need not contribute more, only more wisely.

According to Ondiak and Sweet, one of the major problems is that the United States spends “more on treating the symptoms of a crisis…than on the development programs that support crisis prevention.” This failure to prevent crises has resulted in dramatically higher long-term costs for the United States, they say. Pakistan and Afghanistan provide particularly striking examples of the shortcomings in America’s foreign aid strategy.

U.S. assistance to Pakistan has run hot and cold over the past 40 years, spiking early in the Cold War, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and rising to its highest level immediately following September 11, 2001. Ondiak and Sweet characterize the relationship as “consistently inconsistent.” Since 2001, Pakistan has been the recipient of $10.5 billion in assistance (excluding covert funds), but just 2 percent of this has been dedicated to development assistance. As a result, half of the population remains illiterate, job growth cannot keep pace with population growth, and extremist groups operating in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas have become increasingly attractive to the one-third of Pakistanis still living in poverty.

In a major foreign policy speech attended by several New Security Beat contributors, Senator Barack Obama noted that he is sponsoring a bill, along with Senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, to triple non-military aid to Pakistan for 10 years. “We must move beyond a purely military alliance built on convenience,” he said.

Closely linked with the fortunes of Pakistan is Afghanistan, a country Ondiak and Sweet describe as “a good illustration of what happens when our ‘aid reaction’ is driven by geopolitical interests shaped by the ebb and flow of foreign policy priorities.” U.S. assistance to Afghanistan dropped off sharply following its conflict with Russia during the 1980s, leaving the country struggling to rebuild itself after fully one-third of its citizens had left the country as refugees. This disengagement cost us “the opportunity to consolidate the gains borne of the end of occupation,” argue the authors, instead allowing Afghanistan to lapse into state failure. Today, Afghanistan is the poorest country outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Half of its citizens live in absolute poverty, 70 percent are illiterate, and life expectancy is 43 years.

Ondiak and Sweet call it a “tragic irony” that the lack of public support for peacetime capacity-building assistance leads to a much greater need for emergency aid down the road. “Turning the aid spigot on and off,” they write, “rarely yields long-term, sustainable results.” Their recommendation is simple: The United States must prioritize development and crisis prevention and provide long-term aid packages. This will only be possible if the mindsets of politicians, policymakers, and the public shift to recognize that “what is true in our own lives is true on the international stage—an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

An independent evaluation group recently reported that while the World Bank has been a vocal supporter of environmentally sustainable practices, it has not followed through on those pledges.

The report, Environmental Sustainability: An Evaluation of World Bank Group Support, states that “addressing environmental degradation and ensuring environmental sustainability are inextricably linked to the World Bank Group’s mandate to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives.” It urges greater coordination between the World Bank, IFC, and MIGA, as well as with external partners, and calls for improving assessments of the environmental impacts of World Bank interventions.

“It is clear now from the Amazon to India that if environmental sustainability is not raised as a priority, then all bets are off,” Vinod Thomas, the director general of the Independent Evaluation Group, told the New York Times. When pressed about the related issue of preventing the impact of natural disasters, Thomas told Revkin, “Even where disasters recur, the preventive side gets neglected, for political reasons. Reconstruction gets photos.”

At the Wilson Center launch of the new book Greening Aid, former World Bank advisor Robert Goodland said that “The World Bank Group…is de-greening itself,” criticizing a new Bank project:

The project manufactures cheeses in India, flies them to Japan to supply Pizza Hut. Project appraisal omitted any assessment of greenhouse gas emissions or climate risks; accountability is zero, in terms of respecting local religious taboos on holy cows. In this project the World Bank promotes the interests of the well-to-do, flying food away from those who need more to those that don’t. Despite soaring claims of fighting the global food crisis and climate change, the bank makes cows fly.

The authors of Greening Aid?: Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance found that absolute levels of dirty aid have remained relatively constant, while absolute levels of environmental aid have risen dramatically. But despite its absolute rise over the past several decades, environmental aid remains just 10 percent of total aid because neutral aid has increased significantly. Bilateral donors have greened the most, “a bit of a surprise,” said coauthor J. Timmons Roberts, given that so much emphasis has been placed on improving the practices of multilateral donors like the World Bank. The five bilateral donors with the highest per capita environmental aid from 1995-1999 were Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan.

As Revkin asked in his blog dotEarth, “As the world heads toward nine billion people, with most population growth in the poorest places, how can prosperity be spurred — by lenders or in other ways — without erasing the planet’s natural assets?”

Note: ECSP interns Sonia Schmanski and Daniel Gleick contributed to this post.