In a preview of his new book The Plundered Planet: Why We Must – and How We Can – Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, Paul Collier dispelled the common perception that Africa’s indentified resource reserves are the world’s largest. In actuality, it is estimated that up to four-fifths of the value of subsoil assets in the African continent are yet to be discovered. “That is the big story,” Collier remarked. “Here are assets which could finance transformation….but historically haven’t.” Instead, these resources have been plundered.

In a recent event hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Paul Collier, professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, and Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, discussed how resource-rich environments in developing countries have been traditionally misused. The two also proposed strategies to disrupt these processes and transform resource “curses” into deeply needed support for peace and stable development.

Conflict and instability in countries whose economies are heavily invested in natural resource have often hindered local development and security. Many of these countries—including Cambodia, Angola, Indonesia, and DRC—have suffered from one of two forms of plunder:

Types of Natural Resources Plunder:

1. Where the few steal from the many:
Natural assets are, by definition, without natural owners, and therefore lie as easily taken common goods. “This process of expropriation opens up a whole array of dysfunctional variants, many of which are violent,” Collier noted.

2. Where the present steals from the future:
Intertemporal mismanagement is a possibility, as unlike man-made assets, natural assets belong to all generations.

Operating from a worldview of weak sustainability, where profits from natural assets are reinvested for the benefit of future generations, Collier suggested that natural resource rights are more akin to “rights of stewardship” than traditional property rights. “We may well transform that value into something that is more productive, but if we pull up natural assets from the ground, we should leave to the future something that is equivalently valuable.”

Collier argued that the successful harnessing of natural resources for stable and sustainable development depends on the application of a tenuous decision chain:

Natural Resources Decision Chain:

1. Discovery Process:
Failure in this phase stems from poor property rights, and the time consistency problem—uncertainty that conditions and regulations that make expensive upfront investments profitable today will remain in place in the future.

2. Appropriate Taxation:
Currently, as a result of poor negotiations or limited information regarding the status of resources, governments are unable to craft tax regimes which effectively capture resource rent.

3. Avoiding the Delta:
Sustainable management any discovered subsoil assets must avoid a local “Nigerian Delta” catastrophe. Clearly designating the government as the sole responsible agent for resource rents may limit such failures.

4. Saving the money:
To avoid plunder of the future by the present, Collier suggested that, though politically difficult, a proportion of revenue streams must be delineated from general accounts.

5. Building the capacity to invest in the country:
Collier deemed the inability of resource-rich countries to attract diversified investment as the “killer link.” Governments must use returns from subsoil assets to fund “investment in investment”—directing public capital toward transportation and utility infrastructure, education, health, and other short-term projects. Once in place, such projects encourage future public and private investments, thereby multiplying long-term returns.

As with many complex systems, Collier warned that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If one link fails, “the chain won’t pull the country from poverty to prosperity.” On the other hand, if each link holds, the value is tremendous. ”[Y]ou really can pull the country from poverty to prosperity over the course of a generation. There are no fixes in economics that are faster than that.”

Ultimately, Collier and Birdsall emphasized that success depends upon the development of an informed and competent “critical mass” of people. Even the strongest decision chain will fail if it is not underwritten by a majority of the population. Birdsall reiterated the need for public participation in the process, possibly through direct income distribution or responsible interventions by non-vested third parties.

Photo: Courtesy of Oxford University Press.

At the United Nations, “we see more and more interest in looking at natural resources: how do they contribute to a conflict, and how can they contribute to peacebuilding,” says David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch in a video interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.

“There can be no durable peace if the natural resources that sustain livelihoods are damaged or destroyed,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his message today, the 9^th annual International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. He called for “Member States to clarify and expand international law on environmental protection in times of war.”

“We don’t do the gloom-and-doom scenarios anymore,” says David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, in a video interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko. “We focus on the opportunities provided by resource management. We focus much more on how they can support economic recovery, how they support livelihoods, how environment can be a platform for cooperation.”

As the impacts of climate change on national security are beginning to receive attention at the highest levels of government, climate-security experts must avoid oversimplifying these complex connections, said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The NYT’s Andrew Revkin muses about whether “whether family planning programs should be able to get into the carbon business,” citing a study released by Oregon State University that says that the number of children an American resident has could have the greatest environmental impacts of any decision taken by that individual. Reporting on the study, The Oregonian observes that “having fewer children is best way to reduce your carbon footprint.” An interactive graphic from Breathing Earth maps the relationship between population and carbon emissions.

Colorado State University’s Nicole Detraz and Michelle M. Betsill examine whether the April 2007 United Nations Security Council debate, “which emphasized the threat of climate-related conflict, reflects a discursive shift” in an International Studies Perspectives article, “Climate Change and Environmental Security: For Whom the Discourse Shifts.”

A study in Science, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” warns that overfishing has decimated global marine resources. However, it also reports that careful, collaborative restoration efforts at the international level could yield significant improvements.

In Der Speigel (republished on Salon.com), Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt report that investors, corporations, and governments are angling to profit from future food shortages (the result of a burgeoning global population and inhospitable climate changes) by buying arable land in less developed countries—particularly in weak states—with little concern for the food security of the host nation.

Now available online, a special issue of the International Social Science Journal from 2005 examines the resource curse. Eleven articles explore “how to translate revenues derived from natural resource exploitation into real benefits for citizens of resource-rich countries.”

“Climate change may well be a predominant national security challenge of the 21st century, posing a range of threats to U.S. and international security,” said Sharon Burke, vice president for Natural Security at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Her remarks at a July 21 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on climate change and security—along with those of two retired vice admirals and former Senator John Warner—amplified the growing chorus of national security experts and military personnel urging Congress to act promptly to address the security implications of climate change.

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.), called climate change “a clear and present danger to the United States of America,” while Burke cited a 2007 report from the Center for Naval Analysis that defined climate change as a “threat multiplier.”

Security Link Could Push Senate Climate Bill

Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scheduled last week’s hearing on climate’s security links in a bid to bolster support for congressional action on climate change, which is currently stalled in the Senate. “Just as 9/11 taught us the painful lesson that oceans could not protect us from terror, today we are deluding ourselves if we believe that climate change will stop at our borders,” he said.

Former Senator John Warner echoed this sentiment, noting that the hearing was an opportunity to “educate the American public on these potential risks to our national security posed by global climate change.”

“Leading military, intelligence, and security experts have publically spoken out that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world. If we ignore these facts, we do so at the peril of our national security and increase the risk to those in uniform who serve our nation,” stated Warner, who recently launched the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate with the Pew Environment Group.

Pentagon Looks to Reduce Reliance on Oil and Drive Innovation

Burke explained that the phenomenon will not only pose “direct threats to the lives and property of Americans” from wildfires, droughts, flooding, severe storms, the spread of diseases, and mass migrations, but will also have “direct effects on the military,” including problems with infrastructure and the supply chain.

As a massive consumer of energy—110 million barrels of oil and 3.8 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2006 alone—the Pentagon has recognized its vulnerability to disruptions in fossil fuel supplies, as well as its potential to develop alternative technologies. As ClimateWire’s Jessica Leber writes in the New York Times: “The long logistics ‘tail’ that follows troops into the war zone—moving fuel, water and supplies in and waste out—risks lives and diverts major resources from fighting.”

According to Leber, two-thirds of the tonnage in Iraq convoys was fuel and water. To mitigate such vulnerability in the future—not to mention in arid, mountainous Afghanistan—DoD has begun testing ways to turn waste into energy, distribute power through “microgrids,” develop jet fuel from algae, desalinate water using little energy, and purify wastewater on a small scale.

“While the military by itself won’t make a market for plug-in vehicles or algae-based jet fuel,” notes Leber in an earlier ClimateWire article, “its investment power can bump emerging climate-friendly technologies onto a larger commercial stage.”

At the hearing, Burke warned against the possible knock-on effects of switching dependence from fossil fuel to other resources like lithium for lithium-ion batteries in electric cars.

The Military Must Manage Uncertainty

Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret.), a member of the CNA’s Military Advisory Board, dismissed the argument that climate data and projections are too uncertain to form a solid basis for action. “As military professionals,” he told the Senate committee, “we were trained to make decisions in situations defined by ambiguous information and little concrete knowledge of the enemy intent. We based our decisions on trends, experience, and judgment, because waiting for 100% certainty during a crisis can be disastrous, especially one with the huge national security consequences of climate change.”

“The future has a way of humbling those who try to predict it too precisely,” Kerry said at the hearing. “But we do know, from scientists and security experts, that the threat is very real. If we fail to connect the dots—if we fail to take action—the simple, indisputable reality is that we will find ourselves living not only in a ravaged environment, but also in a more dangerous world.”

Photo: A convoy of the U.S. Army’s 515th Transportation Division moves fuel around Baghdad, Iraq. Courtesy Flickr user heraldpost.

MORE

The strategic minerals debate is back—but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.

Turns out lithium isn’t found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.