Showing posts from category security.
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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. -
South African Water Expert Suspended: Turton Tells Hard Truths – And Pays a Price
›December 5, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerAnthony Turton, a South African water expert and fellow at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), was suspended November 21 from CSIR for “insubordination” and bringing disrepute to the scientific research and development organization. CSIR is supported by grants from the South African Parliament, other government departments, and the private sector.
The suspension followed a ban on Turton’s scheduled keynote address, “A Clean South Africa” at the November CSIR conference “Science Real and Relevant.” CSIR said the presentation “could not be sufficiently substantiated,” and that images of violence from the recent spate of xenophobic attacks were offensive.
Now fighting for his academic survival, Turton spoke to the media to defend himself, including a video interview in which he calls the water crisis more severe than the power problems currently challenging the country. “Water scarcity is a fundamental developmental constraint, not only to South Africa, but also to the entire SADC [Southern African Development Community] region,” he says. An ECSP Navigating Peace brief coauthored by Turton and colleagues from CSIR points out that not only does the region have low rainfall, but also “the lowest conversion of rainfall-to-runoff in the world,” which “affects both surface water river flows and groundwater recharge.”
Due to South Africa’s mining industry, heavy metals, radionuclides, and other toxins in the water supply endanger human health. In addition, eutrophication in South Africa’s large dams support high levels of the potential toxin microcystin; according to Turton, while microcystin has the potential for long-term damage, “we’ve not done the science” to know for sure. He called on decision-makers to revive South African leadership in eutrophication research—a position it lost due to “lower priority status by government, which led to the termination of funding for research in this field,” reports Water Wheel.
But more graphically, Turton suggested that violence could erupt in Johannesburg’s townships in response to the water crisis; next to disturbing images of violence against Zimbabwean immigrants, his presentation asked, “Could this type of anger be unleashed in response to perceptions of deteriorating public health as a result of declining water quality?” His question could be timely; a cholera epidemic gripping Zimbabwe threatens South Africa as sick migrants cross the border to escape the collapsing nation.
As renowned water expert Aaron Wolf and others (including Turton) have pointed out, water has never led to wars between nations, but examples abound of local and civil conflicts—some of them deadly: violent protests in Cochabamba, Bolivia; pipeline bombings in California; and farmers and police clashing in China. The shocking photos of the anti-immigrant violence in Johannesburg’s townships may have touched a nerve in Turton’s intended audience, but they nevertheless drew a possible picture of the consequences of the state’s failure to meet the expectations of its most vulnerable citizens.
But which of Turton’s purported violations was more offensive to the powers that be: the violent images linking water and conflict, or his exposure of the government’s unwillingness to address the potential toxins dumped in the water supply by private interests? Both are bad for business—especially as South Africa’s economic growth slows. This situation eerily echoes the Bush administration’s suppression of climate scientists such as James Hansen for taking a similarly precautionary approach to future crises.
Wolf, who co-founded the Universities Partnership for Transboundary Waters with Turton, said in an open letter:Dr. Turton is one of the most careful and conscientious scientists I know. Moreover, he has great passion for the human dimension of his work, and holds his obligation for the betterment of society inviolable. Prof. Turton has a reputation for speaking hard truths about the world around him, and academic institutions generally have an obligation to protect academic freedom for precisely these sorts of cases.
Other public letters of support for Turton’s character and scholarship can be emailed to Mariette Lieferink, who is also leading an online petition effort.
“Must we be silenced and cowed into a corner?” Turton asks in his video interview. “This is for me a moral obligation, it’s a moral decision.”
Photo: Anthony Turton. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center. -
Weekly Reading
›The U.S. Army’s first annual sustainability report details its environmental “bootprint.” It reveals that the Army reduced its facility energy intensity use by 8.4 percent from FY04-FY07, but increased its hazardous waste generation by 35 percent from 2003-2006. The New York Times’ Green, Inc. blog weighs in.
The Economist’s “The World in 2009” features a special section on the environment. UN Under-Secretary-General Sir John Holmes discusses the urgency of preparing for and responding to climate change-related disasters, while Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestle, highlights the links between water scarcity, agriculture, and biofuels.
The Year of the Gorilla 2009, a project of the United Nations, will promote low-volume wood-burning stoves, ecotourism, anti-poaching projects, and human health care in an effort to save endangered gorillas. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), describes CTPH’s efforts to protect mountain gorillas through human health care and family planning, community outreach and education, and support for alternative livelihoods.
“While policymakers, wedded to an outmoded worldview, fret about what Arctic climate change might do to national power directly in the basin, human wellbeing could be devastated around the world by cascading consequences of shifts in the Arctic’s energy balance,” writes Thomas Homer-Dixon in “Climate Change, the Arctic, and Canada: Avoiding Yesterday’s Analysis of Tomorrow’s Crisis.” “Ironically, these changes could – in the end – do far more damage to state-centric world order and even to states’ narrowly defined interests than any interstate conflicts we might see happen in the newly blue waters of the Arctic.”
A new paper from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute explores the links between mining and conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone.
Diamonds and Human Security: Annual Review 2008 examines the socio-political impacts of diamond extraction in 13 countries, including the DRC, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Cote d’Ivoire.
Former ECSPer and current freelance writer Ali Gharib dissects “greenocons,” arguing that “the apparent convergence of the right-wing with environmentalism, typically a politics of the left, is complex and conflicted.” -
Natural-Resource, Demographic Pressures Collide With Political Repression as Guinea Reaches Potential Breaking Point
›December 3, 2008 // By Will Rogers“We have had enough of false promises” from the government, said one resident of the northwestern Guinean mining town of Boké, a sentiment shared by many of his countrymen. Long ruled by self-serving autocrats, members of this predominantly youthful society, angered by their lack of access to basic services like electricity, water, and education, have ramped up demonstrations against the central government in Conakry.
Despite its extensive reserves of bauxite—the ore from which aluminum is produced—Guinea, ranked 160 out of 177 countries in the United Nation’s Human Development Index, has long been plagued by underdevelopment and poverty. Pockets of protests have erupted throughout the country over the past two years, with the frequency increasing in recent weeks in response to high fuel prices and continuing lack of access to basic services such as water and electricity. President Lansana Conté has regularly dispatched state security forces to crack down on protesters, and these forces have murdered, raped, beaten, tortured, and unlawfully imprisoned unarmed demonstrators and bystanders. “There is a tremendous amount of frustration and anger in Guinea,” Corrine Dufka, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times. “People protest to express that anger, and security forces respond with excessive force.”
Given Guinea’s very young age structure—46 percent of its population is younger than 15—violent suppression by the central government heightens the already-high risk that the country will devolve into civil war. According to Elizabeth Leahy in The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World, presented at a 2007 Wilson Center event, Guinea, like other countries with very young age structures—including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Uganda—is three to four times more likely to experience civil conflict than countries with more balanced, mature age structures, like the United States. And with the global economic downturn expected to take a devastating toll on the developing world, Guinea may soon find itself embroiled in conflict if the government maintains its violent tactics and fails to provide the services Guineans need.
Photo: In the capital of Conakry, demonstrations fueled by lack of opportunity and civil services have continued unabated despite violent repression by the central government. Courtesy of flickr user martapiqs. -
Coltan, Cell Phones, and Conflict: The War Economy of the DRC
›December 2, 2008 // By Will RogersEclipsed by the world economic downturn, the great heist of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) resources continues unabated. In recent weeks, former Congolese General Laurent Nkunda’s Tutsi rebels have launched offensives in North Kivu, and the Congolese army and UN peacekeepers have been hard-pressed to stop them.
With some of the world’s greatest reserves of minerals, metals, natural gas, and oil—including 10 percent of global copper reserves and 33 percent of global cobalt reserves, in addition to vast deposits of diamonds, gold, silver, timber, uranium, and zinc—eastern DRC has frequently been exploited by rebel groups, foreign militaries, and international firms looking to fill their coffers. Other African conflicts have been sustained by diamonds and gold, but in the eastern DRC, columbo-tantalite (coltan), is one of the most coveted commodities. And with 80 percent of global reserves of coltan lying in the DRC, coltan has become the new “black gold”.
Coltan is refined into tantalum powder to make heat-resistant capacitors in cell phones, laptops, and other high-end electronics. With global technological innovation on the rise, the demand for the mineral continues to surge, creating the incentive for miners and traders to step up their efforts to extract it. At its peak in September 2001, coltan traded at close to $400 per kilo; today, the market price has steadied at around $100 per kilo.
Struggle for control over coltan mines remains central to the conflict in eastern DRC, which has claimed more than four million lives over the past decade. Whether it is a Hutu militia like the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which fled Rwanda< following the 1994 genocide; a Congolese rebel faction, like Nkunda’s Tutsi rebels; or the Congolese army itself, each has a stake in the lucrative coltan trade.
These groups, including the Congolese army, have been active in extorting coltan miners, as demonstrated by footage from “Blood Coltan.” With coltan miners earning $10 to $50 a week, five times more than most other Congolese earn in a month, government and rebel troops have taxed the miners for access to the mines—making control of the mines and surrounding land violently competitive. Despite the dangerous conditions of the mines, which have led to countless deaths, workers remain plentiful. And as demand for coltan has increased in recent years, the number of child laborers in the mines has grown, with approximately 30 percent of schoolchildren in the region deferring their education for mining work.
In addition to the human toll, coltan exploitation has also proven severely destructive to the region’s environment and biodiversity. North and South Kivu provinces contain the DRC’s greatest concentrations of coltan, and Kahuzi Biega National Park (KBNP), one of the last sanctuaries for the critically endangered eastern lowland gorilla, spans both provinces. Coltan mining has destroyed much of the gorillas’ natural habitat, leaving them vulnerable to poachers who kill them and sell them to coltan miners and rebel groups for food. According to park surveys, the population of eastern lowland gorillas in KBNP plummeted from 8,000 in 1991 to approximately 40 in 2005.
DRC Ambassador to the United States Faida Mitifu, speaking recently at a U.S. Institute of Peace event, urged the U.S. Congress to adopt what she describes as a Kimberly Process for coltan in an effort to end the illegal export of coltan from eastern DRC. A “Goma Process” could certify the origin of coltan and place punitive levies on those involved in the trade of conflict coltan from eastern DRC—much as the Kimberly Process does for diamonds. Meanwhile, building infrastructure and creating a regulated sustainable resource extraction industry could also help the country generate much needed revenue and profitable trade regimes. But given that coltan is smuggled into Rwanda and other bordering countries and traded to non-U.S. markets, the support of the international community and the UN Security Council would be critical to the success of this initiative and creating a lasting peace in the region. The UN Security Council has already condemned coltan’s role in financing conflict, so the creation of a Goma Process could be a logical—and achievable—next step.
Photo: In this makeshift refugee camp in Mugunga, 10 kilometers from Goma in North Kivu, tens of thousands remain displaced by ongoing conflict in eastern DRC. Courtesy of flickr user Julien Harneis. -
Climate Change in Mainstream TV and Film: Don’t Be Preachy, Preach Entertainment-Industry Insiders
›November 20, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarAs U.S. governors and international climate representatives met at the Beverly Hills Hilton for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change summit on November 18, a group of Hollywood writers and producers—plus a few climate change experts—gathered on the other side of Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center for “Changing Climate…Changing People: Connecting to the Biggest Story of Our Time,” a unique conference sponsored by the Population Media Center on how to incorporate climate change into mainstream TV and film.
Entertainment industry insiders like Sonny Fox emphasized that “earnest isn’t enough and won’t cut it”—that a show or film’s entertainment value cannot be compromised by its addressing serious issues like climate change impacts. Yet Chris Alexander, senior vice president of corporate communications for 20th Century Fox, showed that this is possible, with examples of how “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” and “Boston Legal” have seamlessly incorporated environmental issues into jokes, dialogue, and storylines.
David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for “CSI,” described how “CSI” has addressed climate change impacts in two separate shows: one that examined the surprisingly large effect of a degree or two difference in temperature; and another that explored the high concentration of pharmaceuticals in water that has been recycled due to water shortages. According to Rambo, after that episode aired, “CSI” received grateful letters from public officials and educators from around the country, who said that the fact that “CSI” had addressed water reuse had made it acceptable for them to broach this once-taboo topic.
The conference was also anchored by some heavy-hitters—Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn (Ret.). Frumkin discussed the potential health impacts of climate change, which include increased levels of air pollution; higher incidence of allergies; geographic spread of vector-borne and waterborne diseases; severe disruptions to water and food supplies; and mental health problems, often resulting from exposure to natural disasters. McGinn explained that because climate change is a threat multiplier for instability, it could increase the risk of humanitarian disasters, failed states, civil conflict, extremism, competition over scarce natural resources, and mass migration.
In addition to panels, the conference also featured a one-act play, “Shuddering to Think,” about the challenges of incorporating serious issues into mainstream entertainment. It sounds dull—but was actually funny and incisive, thanks to sharp writing by Jon Robin Baird and adept acting by Bruce Davison, Scott Wolf, and Bradley Whitford, whom you may remember as Josh Lyman from The West Wing. Speaking after the performance about media’s power to convince the public to get serious about climate change, Whitford observed, “The press failed, the government failed, science failed—but Al Gore’s movie [An Inconvenient Truth] worked.” -
Caroline Thomas: Environmental, Human Security Pioneer
›November 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoI never met Caroline Thomas. But I certainly benefited from her human security insights.
The Southampton University professor passed away last month at 49, leaving behind notable contributions to the field of environment and human security. In her 1987 volume In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations, Thomas was one of the first to enunciate the insufficiency of traditional security approaches. She explained that statist security perspectives said little about the immediate environment, development, and health threats facing the majority of the world’s population—residents of the so-called Third World.
Thomas’ call for a broader definition of security was rooted in her focus on pressing threats to human well-being in developing countries. In an obituary of Thomas in The Guardian, Tony Evans describes the book’s contributions:While today the term is used in a variety of contexts – environmental security, food security, fresh water security, health security and so on – this was not the case until the 1980s. Security previously meant only the military security of the state. In proposing to broaden the agenda beyond its narrow focus on war and arms control, Caroline sought to include issues that confront the people of the developing nations, rather than their states….Caroline argued that questions of security and insecurity were qualitatively different for people in developing nations because the imperial powers had withdrawn, having paid little regard for their future. The people of decolonised states were left in conditions of economic, political, social and military turmoil, with fewer resources for avoiding future misery.
Reflecting a common British academic perspective, Thomas highlighted power inequities between the global North and South in the post-colonial era. At the same time, she did not undercut the utility of her arguments by descending into over-the-top caricatures or creating straw-man arguments, blunders that other British critics of environmental and human security research have not always managed to avoid.
Thomas’ focus on power extended to inequities in market relationships. Much of the early environment and conflict work spent too little time considering international trade in natural resources between developing and developed countries and consumer behavior in industrialized nations. Too often, early environment and conflict research focused narrowly on the local dynamics of natural resource extraction or environmental scarcity and what roles they played in contributing to violent conflict.
Thomas’s work should place her permanently on the short list of key early contributors responsible for broadening security’s definitions. -
Support Grows for Integrating Environment, Energy, Economy, Security in U.S. Government
›November 5, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarA new presidential administration always gives rise to a certain amount of bureaucratic restructuring. But for months now, momentum has been building behind the notion that governments need to improve the integration of their environmental, energy, economic, and security policies. Last month, Edward Miliband was named head of the UK government’s new department of energy and climate change. Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper tapped former industry minister Jim Prentice to lead a new ministry of environment, economy, and energy security. “I think that, as more and more countries are coming to realize, we cannot separate environmental and economic policy,” said Harper.
Yesterday, Grist’s David Roberts, noting that responsibility for addressing climate change is currently spread among the departments of State, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Energy, offered several possibilities for restructuring the U.S. government to improve its ability to address climate change and energy, including creating a cabinet-level Secretary of Climate; expanding and empowering the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency; or—my favorite—appointing “some kind of czar,” because “[e]verybody loves a czar.”
Initiatives linking these challenges are popping up in Congress, universities, and the military. Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) frequently speaks of the interrelated challenges of energy, environment, security, and economic growth “[O]ur addiction to foreign oil is a threat to our economic security, environmental security, and national security,” he said last year. The University of Colorado Law School recently established the Center for Energy and Environmental Security, which develops practical solutions to help move the world toward a sustainable energy future. In addition, the 2008 National Defense Strategy explicitly links energy, environment, and security: “Over the next twenty years physical pressures—population, resource, energy, climatic and environmental—could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty.”
A few small-scale initiatives to integrate environmental, economic, energy, and security policies within the U.S. government already exist. Yesterday, Carol Dumaine, deputy director for energy and environmental security at the Department of Energy, delivered a talk at the Harvard University Center for the Environment where she discussed a fledgling project to use unclassified data and a global network of experts in government, industry, and NGOs to identify interrelated environmental and energy security threats. Dumaine presented on the same project at a September 2008 conference on open-source intelligence sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will continue this and other ongoing projects, or instead launch new projects of its own on these issues.
Eclipsed by the world economic downturn, the great heist of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) resources continues unabated. In recent weeks, former Congolese General Laurent Nkunda’s Tutsi rebels have 
