Showing posts from category environment.
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Developed World’s Dominance Declines with Age, Say Demographers
›February 5, 2009 // By Will Rogers
“The whole world is aging, and the developed countries are leading the way,” said Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at a January 27, 2009, Wilson Center discussion of his latest report, The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. Demography is as close as social science comes to predicting the future, Howe explained, presenting the geopolitical consequences of demographic trends over the next 50 years. Howe and co-author Richard Jackson, also of CSIS, were joined by Jennifer Sciubba of Rhodes College, who urged them and other demographers to explore how population trends interact with additional variables, such as environmental degradation, economic recession, and conflict.
Danger: Demographic Decline Approaching
“Populations in most developed countries will not only age, but stagnate or decline,” due to falling fertility and rising longevity, said Howe. Without “sizable immigration,” he warned, the populations of countries like the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan will decline. As developed countries’ populations shrink, they will lose military might, savings and investment, entrepreneurship, and cultural influence. “Voltaire once said that God is on the side of biggest battalions,” Howe reminded the audience.
Developing Toward Greater Peace
Jackson explained that the developing world is in the midst of the “demographic transition”—the drops in mortality and fertility that generally accompany economic and social development. Since 1970, the developing world’s overall fertility rate has declined from 5.1 to 2.9 children per woman, and its overall population growth rate has dropped from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent per year, according to Jackson. Additionally, the median age has risen from 20 to 26 years old, “a cause for hope and optimism about the future,” Jackson argued, as countries with more balanced population age structures tend to be more democratic, prosperous, and peaceful than countries with extremely young ones.
But despite the long-term possibility of a world transitioning toward greater peace and prosperity, the developing world will still experience near-term shocks. The timing and pace of the demographic transition varies widely by country and region, with some countries transitioning too fast or too far, said Jackson. These trends could push developing countries toward social collapse by acting “as a kind of multiplier on all the stresses of development,” explained Jackson—for instance, causing China “to lurch even more toward neo-authoritarianism.”
Crisis of the 2020s
Global demographic trends will converge in the 2020s to make that decade “very challenging,” said Howe. The developed world will undergo hyper-aging, population decline, and flattening GDP growth, along with rising pension and health care costs, Jackson noted. The Muslim world will experience a decade of temporary youth bulges, as the large generation that was born between 1990 and 2000 has children. The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe will implode, and Russia’s geopolitical strength and influence will wane. Meanwhile, China will experience a decade of “premature aging”; due to its one-child policy, it will become “gray” before it achieves the per capita GDP of most aging countries.
Demography and Public Policy
Sciubba praised the report’s comprehensive, policy-friendly approach to demography, but urged the authors to remain true to the nuances of their topic, even in their conclusions and recommendations. “Policymakers like to know what we don’t know and what we do know. And with population aging and national security, often there’s a lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know,” she said. “Going into the future, we need more of an emphasis on places where policymakers can make a difference,” said Sciubba. “Opportunities matter just as much as challenges.”Photos: Neil Howe, Richard Jackson, and Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.
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Human Health Dependent on Biodiversity, Argue Scientists
›January 29, 2009 // By Rachel Weisshaar
“There’s such a fundamental misunderstanding that most people have about the environment—that it exists outside of us,” said Harvard Medical School’s Eric Chivian at the January 14, 2009, launch of Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, which he co-edited. This disconnect “is really at the heart of the global environmental crisis, and it’s the reason we wrote this book.” Chivian was joined by the Natural Capital Project’s Michael Wright and the Heinz Center’s Thomas Lovejoy, who called Sustaining Life “a remarkable achievement,” for a discussion of the myriad ways in which biodiversity benefits human health—and how its loss endangers us.
Proof Positive: Biodiversity Supports Health
The most exotic—and unlikely—species can yield valuable discoveries, Lovejoy explained. For example, slime molds on the banks of the Zambezi River repel their enemies with chemicals that can treat cancers resistant to Taxol, one of the main chemotherapy drugs—which is itself derived from the needles and bark of the Pacific yew tree. Chivian offered another remarkable example: The best new pain medication, which is 1,000 times more powerful than morphine, is derived from the toxins of marine cone snails.
Of Polar Bears and Parasites
Polar bears—which new research suggests are likely to be extinct in the wild by 2100 due to the melting of the Arctic ice sheet—may help cure several devastating diseases. Polar bears “den,” or near-hibernate, for five to nine months of each year, yet substances in their blood prevent them from losing bone mass during that time. “Osteoporosis is an enormous public health problem; it kills some 70,000 people in the United States every year, costs the U.S. economy $18 billion dollars a year,” explained Chivian.
When they den, polar bears go for months without eating, drinking, defecating, or urinating. Studying this phenomenon may provide humans with alternatives to dialysis or kidney transplants. Finally, while polar bears are extremely obese, they do not develop Type II diabetes. In contrast, 16 million Americans—6 percent of the population—have obesity-related Type II diabetes, costing the United States $91 billion a year. “Again, polar bears may hold the secret for treating this very difficult and lethal disease,” said Chivian.
Not only can certain species help us treat human diseases, but the loss of biodiversity can increase the prevalence of others. For instance, Lyme disease is more common in degraded environments with low vertebrate diversity. In these environments, the disease spreads more quickly because the white-footed mouse—the best vector for Lyme disease—has fewer predators and competitors for food.
Better Safe Than Sorry
By providing dozens of concrete examples of how we depend on and benefit from the environment, Sustaining Life is “a wonderful rebuttal to people who call conservationists treehuggers,” said Wright. Yet he reminded the audience that the path from species to valuable product is serendipitous and unpredictable. Therefore, he argued, we should endeavor to protect all species in order to save those that may most benefit human health.
Chivian, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the medical dimensions of nuclear war, argued that it is difficult for the public to grasp the threats posed by climate change: “The level of complexity and abstraction is really an order of magnitude—or many times more than that—greater than it is about nuclear weapons…and therefore, it’s even more essential for physicians and public health professionals to describe and discuss these global environmental changes in human-health terms.”
Photo: Eric Chivian of Harvard Medical School. Courtesy of the Wilson Center and Dave Hawxhurst. -
Reading Radar– A Weekly Roundup
›January 23, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“As long as we continue to subsidize Gaza’s extreme demographic armament, young Palestinians will likely continue killing their brothers or neighbors. And yet, despite claiming that it wants to bring peace to the region, the West continues to make the population explosion in Gaza worse every year. By generously supporting UNRWA’s budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries,” argues the University of Bremen’s Gunnar Heinsohn in the Wall Street Journal.
In an article for the Huffington Post, Water Advocates’ John Sauer argues that we should group together waterborne diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and cholera under the name “No-Plumbing Disease,” to help water and sanitation get the attention they deserve.
It takes a strong editor to push for stories on development issues like poverty and public health, but there is often surprisingly high interest in these stories, writes Richard Kavuma for the Guardian.Yale Environment 360 sums up President Obama’s statements on the environment in his inaugural address.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has cancelled nearly 60 percent of its logging contracts in an attempt to end corrupt and environmentally destructive logging, report the BBC and Reuters.
“Could the crises of food, fuel and finance that we experienced in 2008 simply be three canaries in the coalmine? What if these are just the early-warning signals that our current economic system is not sustainable at a much deeper level?” asks Dominic Waughray, head of environmental initiatives at the World Economic Forum.
“A flurry of scientific field work and environmental reports have linked the spread of oil palm plantations in Indonesia to the decimation of rain forests, increased conflict between logging and oil palm interests and rural and indigenous people, and massive CO2 emissions through logging, burning, and the draining of carbon-rich peat lands,” writes Tom Knudson on Yale Environment 360.
A nickel mine in Madagascar is likely to harm biodiversity in one of the world’s most biologically unique places, reports mongabay.com.
“It is high time that India and Pakistan consider the primacy of ecological cooperation as a means of lasting conflict resolution,” argues Saleem Ali in Pakistan’s Daily Times. -
In Rio de Janeiro, an Opportunity to Break Barriers
›January 23, 2009 // By Will Rogers
The city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 650-meter long, three-meter high concrete wall between the 7,500 residents of the Dona Marta slum and the surrounding rainforest signals the government’s reluctance to address the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Although it is heralded by authorities as an “eco-barrier” that will protect the rainforest and “improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio’s 600 or so slums,” the wall does not address the issues of acute poverty and lack of access to affordable housing that keep many Brazilians living in slums, harvesting resources from the rainforest.
Without access to decent housing and living-wage jobs, many slum residents will continue to encroach on the hillsides, warn Brazilian environmentalists. “It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest,” said Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil.
Slums have often stalled Rio’s efforts to improve its environmental report card, as slum residents tend to be focused more on daily survival than on the environmental consequences of their actions. But slums do not have to be a thorn in the side of the government’s eco-friendly image. In fact, Rio’s previous attempts to reverse deforestation through grassroots reforestation projects have been extremely successful.
According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, municipal reforestation projects around Rio employed several hundred slum residents to plant millions of trees surrounding their communities. The projects “resulted in the return of dozens of species of birds, monkeys and other animals—many not seen in decades,” as well as cooler air temperatures, writes William Bennett. At the same time, the municipal projects became a source of steady work for residents. “Before this job, I worked as a day laborer; one day I would have work—the next day nothing,” said Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, a reforestation worker who earned about $200 a month planting trees. By 2005, community reforestation projects had employed 914 slum residents in 93 projects that had restored a total of 4,500 acres of native-species trees to the region.
Rather than segregating slum residents from the rest of the city in what some critics have called “social apartheid,” perhaps Rio should scale up community forestry projects, employing greater numbers of slum residents to improve the health of the Atlantic rainforest. While the government still has far to go in providing affordable housing, a steady wage could help residents secure access to adequate housing and reduce pressure on the region’s delicate environment.
Photo: Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slums with an estimated 200,000 residents, is one of hundreds of slum neighborhoods surrounding Rio, putting extreme pressure on the region’s environment. Courtesy of flickr user andreasnilsson1976.
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Population, Family Planning Experts Urge Obama to Make Billion-Plus Investment
›January 22, 2009 // By Rachel WeisshaarFamily planning experts and advocates have wasted no time urging President Barack Obama to reverse former President George W. Bush’s international family planning policies. Five former directors of population and reproductive health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) call for the United States to renew its political and financial commitment to global family planning programs in Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance, a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The former bureaucrats recommend that USAID’s budget for international family planning be increased to $1.2 billion in FY 2010, up from $457 million in FY 2008, and that it be raised gradually to $1.5 billion in FY 2014 in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015.
In a compelling white paper (executive summary) submitted to the Obama transition team by Population Action International (PAI), the authors argue that by investing in voluntary family planning, the United States can “foster more peaceful, stable societies and improve maternal and child health, reduce unintended pregnancies and abortion, lower HIV infection rates, reduce poverty, enhance girls’ education, decrease hunger, and slow the depletion of natural resources.” PAI asks President Obama to:- Increase total U.S. FY 2010 spending on family planning and reproductive health to $1 billion;
- Rescind the Global Gag Rule/Mexico City Policy;
- Restore U.S. funding to the UN Population Fund; and
- Increase funding for programs to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and improve the status of women.
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Weekly Reading
›The Center for Global Development’s interactive 2008 Commitment to Development Index rates 22 wealthy countries on how much they help poor countries in seven areas: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.
“Destitution, distortion and deforestation: The impact of conflict on the timber and woodfuel trade in Darfur,” a new report from the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, says that saw-mills and wood-fired brick kilns are devastating Darfur’s fragile environment.
“If we are successful in reaching peak population sooner, at a lower number of people, rather than later with more people, we will be much more able to confront the myriad interlocking crises we face — a comparatively less crowded planet is an easier planet on which to build a bright green future,” writes Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen.
“In the case of the South American farms studied in this report, average simulated revenue losses from climate change in 2100 are estimated to range from 12 percent for a mild climate change scenario to 50 percent in a more severe scenario, even after farmers undertake adaptive reactions to minimize the damage,” finds a World Bank report on climate change and Latin America. Foreign Policy’s Passport blog comments.
In A Framework for Achieving Energy Security and Arresting Global Warming, Ken Berlin of the Center for American Progress sets out five sets of issues the federal government will have to address in order to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign oil.
“Ask any environmental organisation what it thinks about birth control; it’ll sidestep the issue, and say it’s not their place to comment. If a commentator says there are too many people on the planet, their words smack of authoritarian dictatorships and human rights violations, and echo traces of unpalatable eugenics. However, the reality is that every time we eat, switch on a light, get in a car, drink a beer, go on holiday or buy something to wear or use, we are adding to our environmental footprint,” writes Joanna Benn in BBC’s Green Room, in an article that generated a lively stream of commentary.
Land Conflicts: A practical guide to dealing with land disputes, a report by GTZ, is available online. -
Greening the U.S. Army: Report Calls Environment Critical to Post-Conflict Operations
›December 11, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarGreen Warriors: Army Environmental Considerations for Contingency Operations from Planning Through Post-Conflict (summary) is a comprehensive new RAND report on the U.S. Army’s environmental record in combat and peacekeeping operations. Green Warriors, which was commissioned by the Army Environmental Policy Institute, gives four main reasons why the Army should care about its environmental impacts, particularly in light of its lengthening overseas engagements:
- The environment can threaten soldiers’ health (through disease, polluted air or water, or exposure to hazardous substances);
- The military can harm its credibility with local populations by improperly disposing of waste or by damaging farmland or water supplies;
- Reconstruction projects that improve environmental conditions can foster support for the United States and the host-country government it supports, improving economic growth and security; and
- Environmental problems are often transboundary, and it is important to avoid allowing deficient U.S. environmental practices strain our relationships with other countries, especially given their importance to U.S. military activities.
Green Warriors emphasizes that environmental considerations are particularly significant during the post-conflict phase of operations:
[L]ocals often care deeply about the environment, which can be critical to their survival, livelihood, and well-being. Vital environmental issues can include access to clean drinking water, effective sewage systems, and viable farmland (see Box 1.1). Restoring or building these basic infrastructures is often essential for the economic and social development necessary for stability. To the extent that such projects improve cooperation with locals, they can lower security risks, improve intelligence, and speed reconstruction.
According to Green Warriors, the Army possesses extensive environmental policies and regulations for domestic and permanent foreign installations. Yet there are extremely few environmental regulations for contingency operations. The authors make the following recommendations:
- Improve environmental policy and guidance. The Army Strategy for the Environment, the Army’s new field manual on stability and reconstruction operations (New Security Beat coverage), and DoD’s 2005 decision to elevate post-conflict operations to the same level as combat operations (DoD Directive 3000.05) all provide a foundation upon which to build a standard DoD-wide environmental policy.
- Promote an environmental ethic and culture that extends to contingency operations. The Army must encourage soldiers and commanders to recognize and embrace the strategic benefits of good environmental stewardship.
- Incorporate environmental issues more extensively into planning. Commanders should receive high-quality environmental information and analysis, and risk assessments should be routinely undertaken.
- Improve environmental training and awareness. Commanders, soldiers, and non-combatant personnel should receive training on environmental issues both prior to and during their deployment. This training should include lessons learned from field experience.
- Expand environment-related investment. The Army should invest in personnel with the skills to implement a global environmental program and expand research and development to create technologies that would minimize environmental impacts of Army’s operations.
- Use the concept of sustainability as a guiding principle. The Army Strategy for the Environment calls sustainability the “keystone” of the Army’s environmental strategy, and the RAND report encourages the Army to expand this principle into all aspects of its contingency operations.
In a memo released with the report, Addison Davis IV, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for environment, safety, and occupational health, says that “the Army has the power to implement most” of the report’s recommendations. The question remains: Is the Army’s leadership willing to do so?
Photo: U.S. Army Spc. Gabriela Campuzano, a water purification specialist with the 94th Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, inspects one of three water storage tanks at a water purification project site at the Baghdad Al Jadeeda Police Station in Baghdad, Iraq, June 12, 2008. The water site provides the local community with clean drinking water. Courtesy of Staff Sgt. Brian D. Lehnhardt, the U.S. Army, and Flickr. -
Food Production Goes Global, Sparking Land Grabs in Developing World
›December 8, 2008 // By Will Rogers
As global food prices soar and population growth and urbanization shrink the supply of arable land, many countries have been forced to adopt new forms of production to secure their food supply. But instead of embracing sustainable land-use practices and improving rural development, some nations have shifted food production overseas, igniting a massive land grab in the developing world.
From the Persian Gulf to East Asia, governments and international companies alike have been lobbying developing countries in Africa and Asia to produce grain for food and alternative energy. The Guardian reported on November 22nd that Qatar recently leased 40,000 hectares of Kenyan farmland in return for funding a £2.4 billion port on the island of Lamu, a popular tourist site just off the Kenyan coast. The Saudi Binladen Group is said to be finalizing a deal with Indonesia to lease land for basmati rice production, while other Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have bought land rights for agricultural production in Sudan and Pakistan. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has been “courting would-be Saudi investors,” despite his country’s own deplorable food insecurity and chronic malnutrition.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported that South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics has been working to secure a 99-year lease for 3.2 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar that it will use to “grow 5 million metric tons of maize a year and 500,000 tons of palm oil” to use as biofuel in South Korea. The company says it expects to pay almost nothing besides infrastructure costs and employment training in return for its use of the land. Despite Madagascar’s rapid population growth and pervasive food insecurity, the deal, if signed, will allow the South Korean company to lease approximately half of the current arable farmland on the island state.
In an effort to combat a freshwater shortage, China has secured an agreement with Laos for a 50-year lease of 1,600 hectares of land in return for funding a new sports complex in Vientiane for the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. And with only 8 percent of the world’s arable land and more than one-fifth of the world’s population to feed, China continues to encourage its businesses to go outside China to produce food, looking to developing countries in Africa and Latin America.
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, recently warned that these deals are a “political hot potato” that could prove devastating to the developing world’s own food supply, as several of these states already face severe food insecurity. Diouf has expressed concern that these deals could breed a “neo-colonial” agricultural system that would have the world’s poorest and most malnourished feeding the rich at their own expense.
And with land rights a contentious issue throughout the developing world—including in Haiti, Kenya, and Sudan, for instance—these agreements could spark civil conflict if governments and foreign investors fail to strike equitable deals that also benefit local populations. “Land is an extremely sensitive thing,” warns Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute. “This could go horribly wrong if you don’t learn the lessons of history” and attempt to minimize inequality.
As food prices continue to climb, more and more countries are likely to scramble to gain access to the developing world’s arable land. Without land-use agreements that ensure a host country’s domestic food supply is secure before its foreign investor’s, long-term sustainable development could be set back decades, something impoverished developing countries simply cannot afford.
Photo: A man threshing in Ethiopia. Long plagued by acute food insecurity, Ethiopia’s arable land is sought by more-developed countries to ensure the stability of their own food stocks. Courtesy of Flickr user Eileen Delhi.
