Showing posts from category *Main.
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Weekly Reading
›CIA Director General Michael Hayden identified demographic change as one of three trends that will shape the 21st century earlier this week, noting the “importance of underlying population trends and the factors that influence them…things like fertility rates, life expectancy, the prevalence of HIV, and ease of migration. Clearly,” he said, “there will be many implications for our national security to come out of this, and these trends will contribute to the complexity of the security threats facing America over the next several decades.” Population growth will hit African countries the hardest, he said, and may threaten stability on the continent.
ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses how the environment can be used as a tool for peace today in the concluding program in Chicago Public Radio Worldview’s weeklong “Environmental War and Peace” series.
The U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute has released a collection of the proceedings of a colloquium on “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this year. Contributors agree that climate change is a security issue that merits serious attention and discuss the proper role for the U.S. Armed Forces in addressing it on a global scale.
“Intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict” are likely to characterize the coming century, warns Jeffrey Sachs in Time magazine’s web-exclusive feature, “What’s Next 2008.” But all is not lost; Sachs encourages us to recognize that by “seeking global solutions, we actually have the power to save the world for all, today and in the future.”
As population pressures increasingly strain ecological resources in Madagascar’s biodiversity hotspots, CARE’s Extra Mile Initiative is working in partnership with Madagascar’s government to provide family planning and reproductive health services to six remote communities on the “eighth continent.” A new report discusses the program’s challenges and successes. -
New Paper Says Longer-Term, Innovative Approach to Security Analysis Needed to Address Climate Change Threats
›May 1, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarClimate change will create hard security problems—including increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, pandemic disease, desertification, and mass migration—but these challenges will not have hard security solutions, argues Nick Mabey in Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World (subscription or purchase required), a policy paper published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Instead, policymakers, NGOs, the private sector, and the security community will need to develop nontraditional, innovative policies and programs to mitigate these threats.
Mabey, who served as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit before becoming founding director and chief executive of E3G, an NGO working on sustainable development, thoughtfully outlines the security challenges that many previous reports on climate security (including by the CNA Corporation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security) have discussed. But he also examines several less frequently mentioned risks. For instance, he warns that some countries will try to use the need for renewable energy as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology for military purposes. Mabey argues that the development and dissemination of less risky energy technologies is the best way to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In addition, Mabey notes, if the international system fails to address the threat of climate change effectively, its legitimacy will be undermined, and it will find it more difficult to resolve other global threats.
Mabey also calls our attention to the critical role that the environment plays in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Strategic planners developing 10-15-year security strategies for Afghanistan based on sustainable livelihoods must take climate change into account. Attempts to use a “hearts and minds” strategy against Islamist extremism may fall short as higher temperatures and lower rainfall dry up some of the main sources of jobs for young men in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Mabey notes, terrorists are likely to use climate change to feed existing grievances; Osama bin Laden has already spoken several times on climate change’s unequal impacts on different parts of the globe.
“Information on present and future serious climate security impacts is as good, if not better, than other information routinely used in security planning and assessment,” asserts Mabey. Therefore, he argues, the security community has no excuse for not planning for the worst-case climate change scenarios, just as it plans for the worst-case terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation scenarios. Yet Mabey believes the international response to climate change so far has been “slow and inadequate.” He urges nations and international institutions to devote far greater resources to addressing the myriad threats it will pose to political stability and human well-being. -
Population and Climate: It’s Not Me, It’s You (China), Say Candidates’ Environmental Advisers
›April 28, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerAt a news conference (watch; listen; read) with the three presidential candidates’ environmental advisers, Constance Holden of Science dropped the population bomb, asking what each candidate proposed to do about the role of population growth in the climate change problem. The advisers immediately scrambled to duck and cover, mentioning China and its growing consumption, then quickly moving on to something—anything!—else.
Jason Grumet, environmental adviser to Sen. Barack Obama and the president and founder of the Bipartisan Policy Council in Washington, DC:
“It’s not just a question of population growth, but it’s also a question of the rest of the world beginning to aspire to the comforts that we have come to take for granted here. When people achieve an annual income of about $5,000 a year they start to buy cars and you are going to see somewhere between 3 and 500 million people in China find themselves in that position in the next decade.”
Todd Stern, adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and partner at the Washington, DC, law firm WilmerHale:
“I don’t have an absolute direct answer on the population question, but let me make a point that’s perhaps relevant, which is that the controlling of CO2 and greenhouse gases in developing countries is going to be increasingly critical. I think 75 percent of emissions growth in the next 25 years is expected to come from developing countries and China is, far and away, the lead among them.”
Jim Woolsey, environmental adviser to Senator John McCain, former CIA Director, and attorney with Goodwin Procter:
“[W]e shouldn’t assume that just because the Chinese young couple who have finally kind of made it into the middle class want to buy an automobile, that for the foreseeable future it’s always going to be an automobile propelled by carbon emitting sources of one kind or another. The technology is changing.”
The upcoming SEJ Annual Conference in Roanoke, Virginia, will include a panel discussion on population and climate. -
PODCAST – Fishing for Families: Reproductive Health and Integrated Coastal Management in the Philippines
›April 28, 2008 // By Sean PeoplesAt the Third National Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Conference in Tagaytay City, Philippines, ECSP editor Meaghan Parker spoke with Joan Castro of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc., who manages the Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management or IPOPCORM project. The Philippines’ rapidly rising population has overwhelmed the fisheries that have traditionally supported the country, but IPOPCORM’s innovative and integrative approach may save families along with the fish and their habitats. In the following podcast, Castro discusses how IPOPCORM’s integrated approach improves reproductive health and coastal resource management more than programs that focus exclusively on reproductive health or the environment—and at a lower total cost. A description of IPOPCORM and its results is available in “Fishing for Families,” the latest issue in our FOCUS series. For more information on population-health-environment connections, please visit our website, www.wilsoncenter.org/phe.
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Paper Tigers? Maoist Victory in Nepal Has Roots in Population Growth, Natural Resource Conflict
›April 25, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerThe final results confirm the Maoist victory in Nepal’s historic elections earlier this month, paving the way for the end of the monarchy and the final resolution of the decades-long civil war that led to more than 13,000 deaths. But will they be able to maintain stability after so many years fighting to disrupt the system? The roots of the Maoists’ rise—and the underlying conditions that supported their insurgency—may hold some clues to the future.
ECSP speaker Bishnu Raj Upreti told a Wilson Center audience in November 2006 that a critical factor in the conflict was lack of access to natural resources. Twenty percent of Nepal’s land supports 78 percent of the population—and the poor own only a small fraction of the arable land. A rapidly growing population—projected to increase more than 50 percent by 2050—and migration from the mountain highlands into the fertile lowlands compounds the demand on resources.
In ECSP Report 11, Richard Matthew and Upreti state that environmental and population factors are “important elements of what has gone wrong in Nepal, and they must be addressed before stability can be restored.” It remains to be seen how the newly capitalist Maoists will tackle Nepal’s environmental degradation and rapid population growth, given their past history of using these problems to drum up popular support. -
Weekly Reading
›An article in Time magazine surveys the growing awareness of climate change’s links to traditional and nontraditional security threats.
“Unless some way can be found to stop the explosive rise in food prices generally, and rice prices in particular, we will see sharply higher mortality….This will not be mass starvation, with people dying in the streets, but it will be sharply higher infant and child mortality and weakened adults succumbing prematurely to infectious diseases,” said Peter Timmer, an expert on agriculture and development and a current Center for Global Development non-resident fellow, in an interview earlier this week.
A report on “How a Changing Climate Impacts Women,” a high-level meeting sponsored by Council of Women World Leaders, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, is now available online. Gro Harlem Bruntland and Mary Robinson, among other speakers, explained that women—who constitute the majority of the world’s poor—will be more vulnerable to many of climate change’s expected impacts, including reduced crop yields, the spread of infectious diseases, and increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters. -
IPCC Head Says Climate Change Could Be “Problem for the Maintenance of Peace”
›April 24, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski“The impact of climate change is going to be most likely so harmful that it would threaten governments,” said 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra K. Pachauri in an interview with Reuters earlier this week. Pachauri focused his remarks on Africa, whose one billion people are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and whose governments frequently lack the capacity to adapt to the impending changes.
“If the situation in Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, then if the world has a conscience it has to remove that scar,” Pachauri said. While a number of high-profile conflicts in Africa’s recent history have revolved around natural resources, Pachauri warned that environmental change could soon eclipse the so-called “resource curse” as a driver of conflict, citing research predicting that by 2020, climate change could leave between 75 million and 250 million additional Africans without access to water and could reduce the yields of farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture by half. “Climate change has the potential to be a problem for the maintenance of peace,” he said.
The rapidly worsening global food crisis has hit certain parts of Africa particularly hard—instigating riots in Egypt and Burkina Faso, for example—and with food and water becoming increasingly precious commodities, dire outcomes seem increasingly likely. “The answer,” Pachauri said, “is for developed nations to realize that we are living on one planet. We are all inhabitants of spaceship earth.” But, he conceded, “we are nowhere close yet.”
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Jeffrey Sachs’ Memo to the Next U.S. President
›April 22, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffIn his keynote address at the 5th Annual Unite for Sight International Health Conference, held earlier this month, Jeffrey Sachs argued that world leaders must redouble their efforts to alleviate poverty, protect human and environmental health, and balance economic growth and sustainable development. He advocated many of the same solutions that appear in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, including increasing investment in sustainable technology research and development; hastening the diffusion of sustainable technologies to the poorer regions of the world; and allocating a smaller percentage of the national budget for military spending and instead achieving the international target of 0.7 percent of GNP for foreign aid.
One part of Sachs’ presentation that was not included in his book was a memo to the next U.S. president, consisting of ten objectives to achieve global sustainability. Included in this list were the following recommendations, which illustrate Sachs’ view that human health, the environment, economic growth, and security are all integrally linked:
- “Stop putting food into the gas tank.” Sachs spoke out against the current U.S. subsidies for converting corn into ethanol. He linked the initiative to the recent global increase in food prices and the resulting turmoil in areas such as Haiti and Burkina Faso.
- Create a global forum for the leaders of dry lands. Sachs argued that it is important for leaders of areas such as Senegal, Mali, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and California to discuss water scarcity, its impact on livelihoods, and strategies to ensure human security.
- Immediately send a U.S. envoy around the world to back climate change negotiations. Sachs emphasized the need for the United States to step up as a leader on curbing climate change and its environmental and social impacts, rather than stalling international cooperation and progress, as he believes the current administration has done.
- Increase U.S. funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Sachs disapproved of the U.S. government’s decision to decrease its financial support of the UNFPA, which he argued is instrumental in fueling the voluntary decline of fertility rates in less developed countries. He identified access to contraceptives and reproductive services, the empowerment of girls and women, and the promotion of maternal and child health as crucial strategies for slowing population growth and maintaining resource sustainability.
- Make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the heart of international development policy. Sachs noted that he had heard President Bush make reference to the MDGs only once during his two terms in office. He hoped the new administration’s approach to foreign relations and international aid would put a stronger emphasis on achieving the MDGs, which aim to increase health, stability, and prosperity worldwide.
