Showing posts from category environment.
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China’s Environmental Health Problems Spurring Popular Protests
›February 6, 2008 // By Linden Ellis2007 was a significant year for China’s environment. An estimated 750,000 people in China died from respiratory illnesses related to air pollution, while approximately 60,000 died from waterborne diseases. China’s food processing and production sectors made headlines around the globe. Growing desertification in north and northwest China due to excessive water use and land mismanagement created more intense and frequent sand storms that affected the economy and health in China and Northeast Asia. In addition, China most likely surpassed the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses—and while the central government set laudable energy efficiency goals, it recently admitted that China had not met them.
These events have led to growing numbers of environmental health-related protests in China: 51,000 in 2005 and more than 60,000 in 2006. In June 2007, thousands of Xiamen residents protested the construction of a planned chemical plant. And last month, middle class residents of Shanghai took to the streets to oppose potential harm from an extension of China’s magnetic levitation train. As the Chinese government becomes increasingly concerned with the country’s stability, it is beginning to place greater emphasis on mitigating the effects of environmental degradation on its people. Read more about China’s environmental health problems—and what local and international NGOs, governments, and agencies are doing to address them—in China Environment Series 9, the flagship publication of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.
By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis. -
Reading Radar– A Weekly Roundup
›February 1, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffUSAID’s “Adapting to Climate Variability and Change: A Guidance Manual for Development Planning” seeks to help USAID country missions and partners increase their projects’ resiliency to global climate change, though it neglects to mention the links between climate change and population.
The North-South Institute’s Canadian Development Report 2008—Fragile States or Failing Development? (free registration required) assesses reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan; Canada’s contributions to gender equality in Afghanistan and Haiti; and the destabilizing effects development aid and intervention can have in fragile Latin American states.
Three policy papers by the Committee for International Cooperation in National Research on Demography (CICRED)—“Path to Development or Road to Nowhere: Poverty, Migration and Environment,” “Rural populations and agrarian transformations in the global South,” and “Urban Population, Development and Environment Dynamics”—examine the links between population, environment, and development.
An article in the Atlantic Monthly‘s January-February 2008 issue explores how climate change is exacerbating the many security threats already facing Bangladesh. Sound familiar?
The violence that has gripped Kenya following still-contested December 27, 2007 elections has blocked many roads, cutting off small-scale farmers’ access to markets and threatening their livelihoods, reports IRIN News.
Vol. 23, Issue 3 of LEISA magazine explores the links between health and agriculture, focusing on efforts to improve the health and agricultural output of small-scale farmers in the Global South. -
Palm Tree Highlights Challenges of Preserving Madagascar’s Biodiversity
›January 28, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarToday’s Washington Post reports on the discovery of a new species of flowering palm tree in northern Madagascar. The tree—which, when in bloom, sends a 30-foot-tall mass of fruits and flowers sprouting from the top of its trunk—is so unlike any other known palms that it has been assigned its own genus. The discovery of this tree is “helping to highlight the predicament Madagascar faces as population growth, poverty and poor land management conspire to destroy the last vestiges of that island’s ecological magnificence,” writes reporter Rick Weiss. According to the article, approximately 90 percent of Madagascar’s 10,000 plant species are endemic to the island, yet one-third of the country’s unique vegetative cover has disappeared during the past three decades.
But the situation is perhaps not as dire as Weiss makes it out to be. For instance, a successful population-environment program in Madagascar has helped preserve the country’s remaining rainforest while improving the health of the Malagasy people. -
Reading Radar– A Weekly Roundup
›January 25, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffReplacing 10-20 percent of mangroves in coastal areas of Thailand with shrimp farms does not seriously damage the mangroves’ ability to protect against tsunamis, says an article published recently in Science. According to the authors, “reconciling competing demands on coastal habitats should not always result in stark preservation-versus-conversion choices.”
Chimpanzees and other endangered species are being threatened by a thriving bushmeat trade in Tanzanian refugee camps, says a report by the NGO Traffic. “The scale of wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped conceal the failure of the international community to meet basic refugee needs,” said report lead author George Jambiya.
“Health professionals have a vital contributory role in preventing and reducing the health effects of global environmental change,” argue A. J. McMichael and colleagues in an article in the British Medical Journal (subscription required to access full text).
Muslim countries around the world should follow the example of some of Indonesia’s pesantren (religious schools) and incorporate environmental conservation into the teaching and practice of Islam, argues MIT professor and frequent Wilson Center speaker Saleem Ali, who edited Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution.The rising price of oil is making food more expensive and threatening the food security of the poor, reports The New York Times. “According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.”
“The surge in the copper price has stirred up an emotional debate in Zambia about the obligations of the government—and investors—regarding the exploitation of minerals for the long-term benefit of countries. For a country built on the back of a previous copper heyday, but which has experienced massive poverty and underdevelopment for decades, this is unsurprising,” writes Diana Games for Resource Investor.
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PODCAST – Global Media Award Winners Highlight Population Issues
›January 4, 2008 // By Sean PeoplesThe Population Institute’s annual Global Media Awards (GMAs) honor journalists covering the numerous connections between population issues and development. Each year, GMA honorees visit Washington, DC, to present their award-winning projects to inside-the-beltway audiences and network with policymakers, NGOs, and each other. I had the chance to chat with two of this year’s GMA winners: Melclaire Sy Delfin, winner of the Best Individual Reporting category, and Jim Motavalli, winner of the Best Magazine Article award. Delfin is a television reporter with the Philippines’ GMA Network, Inc., and was recognized for her two in-depth investigative reports, “The Forbidden Games Filipino Children Play” and “When Wells Run Dry: A Tragedy Looming Large.” Motavalli is the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine; his winning article showed that falling birth rates are largely confined to developed countries, and that population growth remains high in many African and Asian countries. -
Weekly Reading
›Globalization and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century: Still searching for a Christmas gift for that serious reader on your list? Consider this comprehensive 1,148-page volume on the dual challenges of post-Cold War security: globalization and environmental degradation. Edited by Hans Günter Brauch, the book contains an unusual section examining security’s philosophical, ethical, and religious contexts, as well as more traditional sections on theories of security and the relationships between environment, security, peace, and development. You can see the table of contents here.
Landon Lecture (Kansas State University): U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for a significant expansion of the United States’ non-military instruments of power. “What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security—diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development….We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years,” said Gates.
“Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history”: Lead authors David Zhang and Peter Brecke argue that during the pre-industrial era, climate change was frequently responsible for war, famine, and population decline. “The findings [of our analysis] suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” write the authors in this article, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“War and the Environment”: This month’s World Watch Magazine cover story explores the ecological effects of violent conflicts around the world. “Several recent wars in varied environments and different parts of the world reveal that the ecological consequences of war often remain written in the landscape for many years. But the story is not always straightforward or clear. Instead, the landscape is like a palimpsest—a parchment written on, scraped clean, and then written over again—on which the ecological effects of war may be overlain by postwar regeneration or development,” writes Sarah Deweerdt.
UN World Youth Report 2007: According to this report, opportunities for the 1.2 billion young people aged 15-24 have expanded in recent years. However, this cohort, especially in developing countries, still faces significant challenges, including overcoming poverty and attaining adequate education and health care. -
From the Director’s Chair
›December 17, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and I recently attended “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa,” a conference held in November in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The conference was attended by more than 200 development practitioners from around the world, including many from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
Throughout the conference, organizers, presenters, and participants all professed the many benefits of integrating population, health, and environment (PHE) initiatives. President Girma Wolde-Giorgis and Ethiopia’s ministers of health, environment, and agriculture and rural development opened the conference by praising the comprehensive basket of services that PHE offers. All that said, perhaps the best evidence that this conference was a success, and that PHE’s integrated approach is both necessary and valued in countries like Ethiopia, came in comments from Glenn Anders, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Ethiopia Mission Director, during the closing ceremony:
As I wrote in my previous post, it is rare that a conference galvanizes such momentum and captures the imagination of so many people from so many countries. It’s good to know that policymakers are listening.
I myself have been in development for over 25 years. I know first-hand the challenges that arise from addressing a development issue as one problem with one cause and one solution. Sometimes it might seem like a more simple approach, but we know that development—and life—is much more multi-faceted and complex. The only way to find a common ground, common solution, and common funding is to recognize the interconnectedness between people and their surrounding environment.
Integrated programs touch more lives, improve program efficiency, and strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration. We see better, measurable results from an integrated approach, and that is something we certainly all want …
Let me share with you how USAID in Ethiopia is utilizing this holistic approach. We support the government of Ethiopia’s community health extension workers, who work on the ground in communities addressing much more than just health. There have been over 18,000 workers deployed to date across the country. All of the community health workers are women and they are empowered to educate their neighbors. The workers are immunizing children and providing family planning services in the community. The program is also improving water and sanitation, introducing clean water and hygiene practices. The community health extension workers in Ethiopia are combining development solutions to address environment, health, population, and gender issues. We applaud Ethiopia’s vision to prioritize this program, and we will continue to support its implementation. -
China’s Environment: A Few Things We Should Know
›December 17, 2007 // By Linden EllisLast week, I attended a conference hosted by the Berkeley China Initiative and the Luce Foundation entitled “China’s Environment: What Do We Know and How Do We Know it?” The two-day conference attracted many of the big names on China’s environment: leading Chinese journalist and environmentalist Ma Jun, Barbara Finamore of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Orville Schell of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jim Yardley of The New York Times, to name a few. While many of the speakers addressed the two questions in the title of the conference, a presentation that stuck in my mind was by the University of Alberta’s Wenrang Jiang, who also asked, “What should we know about China’s environment?” Proposed answers to this question surfaced and resurfaced throughout the conference, but there are a few with which most attendees would likely concur.
First, and most importantly, as Westerners addressing China’s environmental crises, we need to understand that China’s government and people do not need to be told how bad their environment is: They know. What they need are the technology and technical assistance to address these problems. A particularly striking example of where technical tools are needed, raised by speaker Ye Qi of Tsinghua University and again this week at a China Environment Forum meeting in Washington, D.C., is data collection. China needs researchers, academics, and policymakers to guide the development of a strong data collection infrastructure.
Second, we must recognize that China is not a threatening environmental culprit. In fact, many Chinese environmental regulations and policies are more progressive than our own. China’s biggest challenge is developing the mechanisms to enforce these policies and regulations at the local level—another area in which assistance from abroad could be particularly fruitful. Although several laboratories recently declared that China surpassed the United States in total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year, China’s per capita CO2 emissions are still only one-sixth of the United States’ per capita emissions. China and India’s combined CO2 emissions account for only 10 percent of the world’s total; furthermore, according to speaker Gang He of Columbia University, 27 percent of China’s emissions are due to goods it manufactures and then exports. China’s vehicle emissions laws will meet Euro IV standards nationwide by 2010, which 90 percent of U.S.-manufactured sport utility vehicles could not pass today.
Finally, we must bear in mind the level of pollution-related suffering that occurs in China. We cannot simply impose lofty, globally beneficial programs upon a population struggling daily with unmet human needs. A presentation by Shannon May of the University of California, Berkeley, on the failure of an eco-village in China illustrated this point beautifully. May polled villagers to find out why they had not moved into a new eco-village that had been built to improve land and energy efficiency. She discovered something environmentalists had failed to note: With the 60,000 RMB required to move into the eco-village homes, villagers could instead invest in aquaculture or other industries with high returns, build a home to their own specifications, or pay for a wedding for their children. We must make sure that global goals—such as slowing climate change—that require sacrifices from certain populations also produce tangible local benefits, such as reducing toxic air pollutants.
As several attendees mentioned during the conference, China needs more yin from its Western partners—more patience, flexibility, and self reflection, particularly. Many international NGOs that have worked in China for a long time understand this, but larger bilateral programs shaped by political agendas are not always as flexible.
By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.
