Showing posts from category environment.
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Population and Sustainability in an Unequal World
›August 13, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur
June’s Rio + 20 Conference on Sustainable Development left environmentalists little to cheer about. Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, called the meeting “a failure of epic proportions.” And Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin said the conference “may produce one lasting legacy: convincing people it’s not worth holding global summits.”
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Three UN Millennium Development Targets Reached and a Review of the Human Drivers of Climate Change
›“It is plausible that key transitions in human evolutionary history have been driven in large part by climate change,” write Eugene A. Rosa and Thomas Dietz in “Human Drivers of National Greenhouse-Gas Emissions,” a literature review published by Nature Climate Change. “Changes in climate will doubtless be a key force in the future evolution of social systems, including all aspects of social, economic, and political life, while impinging on the health and well-being of the individuals who populate them.” Rosa and Dietz cite numerous studies to argue that nearly every facet of society will be affected by climate change. “The critical point,” they write, “is that population, affluence, technology, and all other drivers act not alone or additively but in a multiplicative fashion.” For example, rapid population growth can lead to an increase in urbanization, which generates “substantial demand for goods and services that can induce emissions in distant places.” They conclude that huge changes must be made in technology and consumption in order to combat the effects of climate change that are being caused by a growing population and an increasingly affluent world.
The United Nations’ 2012 Millennium Development Goals Report, released last month in New York City, announces that three of the eight major human development goals have been reached ahead of their 2015 targets. The Millennium Development Goals, set at a conference in 2000, were established to “uphold the principles of human dignity, equality, and equity at a global level.” The 2012 report indicates that the number of people living in extreme poverty has been halved since 1990; the proportion of people in the world without sustainable access to safe drinking water has also been halved; and more than 200 million slum dwellers have “gained access to either improved water sources, improved sanitation facilities, or durable or less crowded housing.” At the report launch, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that “these results represent a tremendous reduction in human suffering and are a clear validation of the approach embodied in the MDGs, but they are not a reason to relax.” Goals that have yet to be achieved include universal primary education; gender equality; reduced child mortality and improved maternal health; reducing rates of diseases such as HIV and malaria; and creating a global partnership for development.
Keenan Dillard is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. -
Is This What Climate Change Feels Like? Geoff Dabelko on ‘CONTEXT’
›“I think that the conditions that we’re experience now are ones that track with what we expect to see more of; so dry places getting drier, wet places getting wetter, and more extremes in terms of variability of the weather,” said ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in the latest installment of CONTEXT, a weekly Wilson Center interview series. While it’s difficult to link the current drought – or any one weather or climate event – directly to man-made climate change, Dabelko said that “the warming trends that we’re seeing and anticipating with climate change suggests that this is a preview of what may be to come.”
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Emmanuel Karagiannis: Mediterranean Oil and Gas Discoveries Could Change Regional Alignments, Global Energy Equation
›“The discovery of gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean comes at a time when world demand for energy is growing rapidly and many are questioning the reliability of supplies from North Africa and the Middle East,” said Emmanuel Karagiannis, assistant professor of Russian and post-Soviet politics at the University of Macedonia, in an interview at the Wilson Center.The newly-discovered fields contain about 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas reserves, 25 trillion of which are located within Israeli territorial waters. “That’s twice the reserves Libya has,” according to Karagiannis. The remaining fields have been claimed by the Republic of Cyprus, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon.
Europe currently depends on Russia for most of its gas supplies, so the new fields could provide an “important alternative source for European economies,” said Karagiannis.
The discovery also has the potential to increase stability in the region by serving as an incentive for nations to work together. “For example, Israel and Cyprus have come closer to each other in many respects, including military cooperation,” Karagiannis said. Greece and Israel have also strengthened their relationship, in part due to the historical relationship between Cyprus and Greece but also because the latter could serve as an energy hub to transport gas throughout Europe, he said. “In effect Israel, Greece, and Cyprus could form a new axis of stability in the region.”
“Turkey can also play a significant part in the business of transporting energy resources to Europe,” Karagiannis said, but Syria and Lebanon, the two other countries that lie adjacent to the newly discovered gas reserves, are less likely to benefit in the near future from the find, given their current political circumstances. “It’s very difficult to imagine their participation in the regional energy projects,” he said. Lebanon has tried and failed to sell offshore exploratory licenses twice due to its lack of a state petroleum administration, while the current uprising against President Bashar al-Assad is preventing any progress in Syria.
In part as a result of these political challenges, the gas fields also have the potential to generate conflict in the region. There will be a divide between “haves and have-nots,” explained Karagiannis. According to a report by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, “piping Israeli gas to the RoC [Republic of Cyprus] and then onto Turkey, which could be the gateway to the European market, is unlikely due to current tensions between Ankara, the RoC, and Tel Aviv.” Since the discovery of the fields, “Turkey has already issued military threats against Cyprus in order to stop the gas exploration process that is currently taking place in the Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zone,” Karagiannis said. The Israeli government issued a response to the threat, stating that they are committed to protecting energy infrastructure in the region.
The first new natural gas field in the region is expected to begin full-scale production this year, with two additional fields coming on-line over the next six years.
Keenan Dillard is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Sources: Institute for National Strategic Studies, Noble Energy Inc., Turkish Weekly, U.S. Geological Survey. -
From Youth Bulge to Food and Family Planning, Los Angeles Times’ ‘Beyond 7 Billion’ Series Synthesizes Population Challenges
›Over the next 40 years, the world is set to add 2.3 billion people. Millions more will join the middle class, pushing consumption upwards and further straining the world’s natural resources. Variables like climate change and political instability will exacerbate that strain and complicate efforts to bolster peaceful and stable development. Los Angeles Times correspondent Kenneth Weiss and photographer Rick Loomis examine these numerous and interconnected challenges in a five-part series on population growth and consumption dynamics.
Speaking to demographic and health experts (including a number of New Security Beat regulars, like Richard Cincotta, Jon Foley, and Dr. Joan Castro), Weiss provides a thorough, astute, and compelling assessment of population dynamics in a rapidly changing world. The series starts with a basic introduction to population, climate, and consumption dynamics and progresses through to discuss political demography, global food security, and detailed looks at two important case studies, China and the Philippines.
Part One: A Population Primer
Population growth alone poses a number of challenges as cities become more crowded and demand for basic resources like water and food outpaces supply. Climate change and the unpredictable and sometimes extreme weather that is its hallmark “will make all of these challenges more daunting,” writes Weiss. And “population will rise most rapidly in places least able to handle it.” Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, already expected to bear the brunt of climate change with rising sea levels, shorter growing seasons, and increasingly variable weather patterns, will also have to support the bulk of the world’s population growth by mid-century. Populations in Europe, North America, and East Asia are expected to stay stable or decline in numbers.
The magnitude of growth in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, however, is uncertain. What happens from here “hinges on the cumulative decisions of hundreds of millions of young people around the globe,” Weiss writes. And yet, “population growth has all but vanished from public discourse.” Family planning in particular remains hamstrung by “erratic funding and unpredictable crosscurrents.” The result, he writes, is that even “under the best conditions, it’s hard to get contraceptives into the hands of impoverished women who want them.”
Part Two: The Arc of Instability
Drawing on work from demographer Richard Cincotta, George Mason University’s Jack Goldstone, Population Action International, and others, part two of Weiss’ series examines youth bulges and the so-called “arc of instability,” stretching across the disproportionately youthful countries of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
When a large youth population is mixed with other societal conditions, like “religious and ethnic friction, political rivalries, economic disparities, or food shortages,” youth can be “the kindling” for a spark that ignites simmering tensions, writes Weiss. Afghanistan is a case in point, where unemployed young men are often turning to the Taliban not out of extremist fervor, but out of a desperate need to support themselves and their families. “It’s too hard to employ this many people and too easy to recruit them into violence,” Cincotta told Weiss.
And Afghanistan is just the beginning, according to Goldstone. “We are literally going to see one billion young people come into the populations in the arc of instability over the next two decades,” he said. “We can’t fight them. We have to figure a better way to help them.”
Part Three: Feeding a Growing Population
As the world’s population continues to grow, and as more families join the middle class, world food production will have to double by mid-century in order to meet future demand. “What that actually means,” says World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay, an agriculture specialist, “is that in the next 40 years we need to produce as much food as we have in the last 8,000.”Jon Foley on how to feed nine billion and keep the planet
Weiss presents the Horn of Africa and Punjab as microcosms of the problems facing global food production in the 21st century. Desertification and urbanization are eating away at potential cropland, while harmful farming techniques leech essential nutrients from soil, rendering it useless for future use. Insufficient infrastructure means that food spoils as it’s shipped from where it’s produced to where it’s needed, while extreme and widespread poverty means that those most in need can’t afford enough to feed their families.
Stuck between growing demand and restricted supply, the University of Minnesota’s Jonathan Foley said the challenge of the century is straightforward: “How will we feed nine billion people without destroying the planet?”
Part Four: Population and Consumption in China
China has “a greater collective appetite – and a greater ecological impact – than any other country,” writes Weiss, making it a prime example of “how rising consumption and even modest rates of population growth magnify each other’s impact on the planet.”
The country’s one-child policy slowed population growth rapidly, cutting fertility almost in half in less than a decade. Over time, a large working-age cohort with few dependents emerged, and helped China reap a demographic dividend. The resulting economic prosperity has come at a cost, however, as rising incomes and increasing consumption, spread across 1.3 billion people, have wreaked havoc on the country’s environment on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world.
Because of that scale, what happens in China will have global repercussions. Climate scientists “say that in order to avoid a potentially catastrophic rise in global temperatures, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions must be cut in half by 2050,” Weiss writes. “For that to happen, China’s emissions would have to peak by 2020” – 15 years earlier than official government projections. The government remains opposed to further limits on emissions, arguing that such limits would “cripple” economic growth – an unfair impediment considering that developed countries were able to “pollute their way to prosperity, their argument goes.”
Part Five: Family Planning in the Philippines
Weiss ends the series with an in-depth look at family planning in the Philippines – a country at the forefront of the global debate over access to contraception. Lawmakers in the 80-percent-Catholic country have steadfastly refused to fund family planning services, while support from the international community all but vanished when USAID, “the major donor of contraceptives to the Philippines,” said in 2008 that it would end its contraceptive program.
Today, half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended. Lawmakers are considering a “reproductive health bill…call[ing] for public education about contraceptives and government subsidies to make them available to everyone,” but a powerful opposition, including Church leadership, has stalled the bill for 14 years, Weiss writes.Joan Castro on population-environment programing in the Philippines
Public officials, including the former Manila mayor who ended the city’s contraceptive program 12 years ago, portray unbridled population growth as an economic asset, saying that “when you have more people, you have a bigger labor force.” For the millions of Filipinos who live in poverty, however, the lack of affordable family planning services leaves them with little control over family size and puts the Philippines on track to grow from 96.4 million people today to 154.9 million by mid-century. At that rate, the Philippines would be Asia’s third fastest growing country, behind Timor Leste and Afghanistan.
Not everything in the series is dire – there are side columns highlighting population, health, and environment programming in Uganda, Iran’s successful family planning program, and Dr. Joan Castro’s family planning and marine conservation work in the Philippines. But Weiss is not naïve about the challenges ahead. Under any of the United Nation’s population projections, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity,” he writes. “Water, food, and arable land will be more scarce, cities more crowded, and hunger more widespread.”
“Even under optimistic assumptions, the toll on people and the planet will be severe.”
But while the population challenges facing the world are many, Weiss, like many before him, makes one argument clear: providing family planning services to the 222 million women who want to control the number of children they have but cannot would go a long way towards minimizing future strain.
Be sure to check out the photo and video features accompanying the “Beyond 7 Billion” series on the feature site.
Note: The sentence beginning with “When a large youth population…” was corrected.
Sources: Los Angeles Times, UN Population Division.
Video Credit: “The Challenge Ahead,” used with permission courtesy of the Los Angeles Times; Photo: “Dharavi,” used with permission courtesy of Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times; Jon Foley video: TEDx. -
Michael Kugelman, Sustainable Security
The Global Land Rush: Catalyst for Resource-Driven Conflict?
›July 31, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on SustainableSecurity.org.
On May 11, the UN approved new international rules to govern how land is acquired abroad. These Voluntary Guidelines (VGs), the outcome of several years of protracted negotiations, are a response to growing global concern that nations and private investors are seizing large swaths of overseas agricultural land owned or used by small farmers and local communities for food, medicinal, or livelihood purposes. FAO head Jose Graziano da Silva describes the VGs as “a starting point that will help improve the often dire situation of the hungry and poor.”
It’s hard to quibble with the intent of the guidelines. They call for, among other things, protecting the land rights of local communities; promoting gender equality in land title acquisition; and offering legal assistance during land disputes.
Unfortunately, however, any utility deriving from the VGs will be strictly normative. As their name states explicitly, they are purely optional. A toothless set of non-obligatory rules will prove no match for a strategy that is striking both for its scale and for the tremendous power of its executioners.
Oxfam estimates that nearly 230 million hectares of land (an area equivalent to the size of Western Europe) have been sold or leased since 2001 (with most of these transactions occurring since 2008). According to GRAIN, a global land rights NGO, more than two million hectares were subjected to transactions during the first four months of 2012 alone. One of the largest proposed deals – an attempt by South Korea’s Daewoo corporation to acquire 1.3 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar – failed back in 2009. Still, even larger investments are being planned today, including a Brazilian effort to acquire a whopping six million hectares of land in Mozambique to produce corn and soy (Mozambique offered a concession last year).
Continue reading on SustainableSecurity.org.
Sources: BBC, Food and Agriculture Organization, GRAIN, MercoPress, Oxfam, Reuters.
Photo Credit: “Garde armé,” courtesy of flickr user Planète à vendre. -
PBS ‘NewsHour’ Reports on Reasons for Optimism Amid Niger’s Cyclical Food Crises
›Set in the middle of the arid region between the Sahara desert and the equatorial savannas of Africa known as the Sahel, Niger is no stranger to drought. In recent years, however, droughts have hit more often, started earlier in the season, and lasted longer, creating a cycle of food insecurity that is becoming more difficult to break.
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Chaotic Climate Change and Adaptation in Fragile States
›In “Chaotic Climate Change and Security,” published in the June issue of International Political Sociology, Maximilian Mayer traces the transformation of climate change from a long-term problem to something that has taken on a new urgency in recent years. Understanding the non-linear nature of climate change – the “abrupt changes” that can come as environmental thresholds are crossed – has led to the securitization of the environment, writes Mayer. Unfortunately, the “doomsday rhetoric of scientists and campaigners about ‘tipping points’ has apparently failed to spur governments toward negotiating a meaningful agreement.” Climate change skepticism still exists, he points out, and even those who are convinced of the potential negative impacts of environmental change on state security have failed to reverse detrimental actions, choosing instead to focus on ameliorating the effects of change on their individual states. As a replacement for these failed frameworks, Mayer suggests that actor-network theory should be used as it better accounts for the interconnected nature of climate change.Katherine Houghton discusses the relationship between climate change and resilience in her article “Climate Change in Fragile States: Adaptation as Reinforcement of the Fabric of the State,” published in a collection of articles written by members of the United Nations University Summer Academy. Houghton writes that in fragile states, environmental issues can be “compounded by armed conflict and institutional failure,” which further destabilizes the country. She mentions cases in which the state lacks the authority to properly assist its citizens following natural disasters, like the flooding of the Indus Valley in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In these cases, failure of the government to meet citizens’ needs “fuels instability and fragility rather than fosters resilience.” Any action to reduce the effects of climate change on residents of vulnerable areas must thus begin with the state, she writes. “Without effective action to strengthen the state and thereby enable adaptation, climate-induced adverse effects and extreme events may lead to the further destabilization of already fragile states.”
