Showing posts from category security.
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Uganda’s Demographic and Health Challenges Put Into Perspective With Newfound Oil Discoveries [Part Two]
›April 26, 2012 // By Kate Diamond
“We never thought we would end up having the same problems here as the people in the Niger Delta. But now I’m worried,” Henry Ford Mirima, a spokesman for Uganda’s Bunyoro kingdom, said last fall in Le Monde Diplomatique. The kingdom – which calls itself East Africa’s oldest – sits along Lake Albert, where over the past seven years British oil company Tullow Oil has discovered oil reserves big enough to produce an estimated 2.5 billion barrels.
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Richard Cronin, World Politics Review
China and the Geopolitics of the Mekong River Basin
›April 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Richard Cronin, appeared in World Politics Review.
Two decades after the Paris Peace Accord that ended the proxy war in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin has re-emerged as a region of global significance. The rapid infrastructure-led integration of a region some call “Asia’s last frontier” has created tensions between and among China and its five southern neighbors – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Both expanded regional cooperation as well as increased competition for access to the rich resources of the once war-torn region have created serious environmental degradation while endangering food security and other dimensions of human security and even regional stability.
China’s seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials and tropical commodities has made it a fast-growing market for several Mekong countries and an increasingly important regional investor. Economic integration has been boosted by a multibillion dollar network of all-weather roads, bridges, dams, and power lines largely financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is linking the countries of the Lower Mekong to each other and to China. To date, the ADB’s Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperative development program has primarily benefited large population centers outside the basin proper in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the same infrastructure that speeds the flow of people and goods to urban centers also facilitates the environmentally unsustainable exploitation of the forests, minerals, water resources, and fisheries that are still the primary source of food and livelihoods to millions of the Mekong’s poorest inhabitants.
No aspect of China’s fast-growing role and influence in the Mekong region is more evident and more problematic than its drive to harness the huge hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong through the construction of a massive cascade of eight large- to mega-sized dams on the mainstream of the river in Yunnan Province. The recently completed Xiaowan dam, the fourth in the series, will mainly be used to send electricity to the factories and cities of Guangdong Province, its coastal export manufacturing base some 1,400 kilometers away. China’s Yunnan cascade will have enough operational storage capacity to augment the dry season flow at the border with Myanmar and Laos by 40-70 percent, both to maintain maximum electricity output and facilitate navigation on the river downstream as far as northern Laos for boats of up to 500 tons.
Continue reading in World Politics Review.
Photo Credit: “Xiaowan Dam Site,” courtesy of International Rivers. -
John Donnelly, Global Post
Aspen Institute on Women, Population, and Access to Safe Water
›April 24, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffLoading the player…The original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on the Global Post.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s World Clock says that the population of the world today is estimated at 7.008 billion people, while projections show that the world could reach the 9 billion marker by 2050.
In the last of its series called “7 Billion: Conversations That Matter,” Aspen Institute’s Global Health and Development hosted a panel of experts based in Africa and the United States on the interconnectedness of gender issues, family planning, population, and access to safe water.
The point of the series was to ask questions about why it mattered that the world was passing the seven billion mark, and the questions today in Washington were appropriately big: Will water wars replace oil wars? What are the solutions to expand water and sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who don’t have it? And just how many people can the world support in an equitable fashion?
An answer to the last question: You need a bigger pie, better manners, and fewer forks.
Borrowing from a book by Joel Cohen called How Many People can the Earth Support? (written in 1996 when the world supported a 5.7 billion population), Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, said that the answer was “it depends on how we use resources.”
Continue reading on the Global Post.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau. -
Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future
›“We’re in an urban century, there is no doubt,” said Peter H. Liotta, visiting scholar at the U.S. Military Academy West Point and co-author of The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security, and the Map of the Future, during a March 20 event at the Wilson Center. Liotta’s book focuses on the geopolitical impacts of poorly managed urbanization on the most vulnerable as well as the security issues such urbanization might create. He was joined by Jaana Remes of the McKinsey Global Institute, who painted a more promising picture of a globally rising, economically prosperous urban middle class, and Stimson Center visiting fellow Peter Engelke, who grappled with the contradictions between these alternative urban realities. [Video Below]
“Urbanization is key to economic development, but it has been, is now, and will continue to be into the future beset by a very large shadow side, wherein the marginalized face grinding poverty, squalor, and despair,” explained Engelke.
Although Liotta and Remes laid out very different “maps of the future,” Engelke suggested three commonalities. First, they both highlight the “unprecedented scale and speed of global change.” Second, they acknowledge that “a global demographic shift is well underway, and has been for some time.” And third, they accept that we have yet to fully integrate cities into the physical and mental maps by which we navigate the world, he said. Despite the economic dynamism of cities, “we live in a world that, I submit, has not yet grasped this reality even in conceptual terms, much less political and policy ones.”
The City as a Source of Vulnerability
People come to megacities “because there’s a chance,” said Liotta. “It looks like a nightmare to us, but people come because they’re waiting for a future.” This chance, however, is often slim, according to Liotta.
The sheer scale of modern urbanization (approximately 200,000 people move every day from rural to urban areas) produces myriad sources of vulnerability for the poorest and most marginalized, said Liotta. “World population growth will occur in the poorest, youngest, and often heavily Muslim states, which lack education, capital, and employment. And for the first time in history the world will be primarily urbanized, with most megacities in the poor states where you don’t have policing, sanitation, and health care.”
This urban shift concentrates young populations presumed to be unstable, exacerbates the risk of disease and climate change, and increases the threat of declining resource availability and food production, Liotta said. In states where “the lights are out” – that is, where urbanization is not met with sufficient economic development – our new urban century may feature significant security challenges, he argued. “Every single security problem we have today, and in the future – whether it’s human security, environmental security, or national security – is [in] the places where the lights are out.”
In The Real Population Bomb, Liotta links these sorts of security issues to what he terms “entangled vulnerability scenarios,” such as scarcity of water for drinking and irrigation, outbreak and rapid spread of disease, or lack of sufficient warning systems for natural disasters or environmental impacts. These scenarios, he argues, deserve a greater showing next to the traditional focus on hard security “threats.”
Fertility rates are generally declining, which will eventually dissipate the youth bulges being experienced by many countries, but the challenge is how to “manage that glide path,” said Liotta. It is about “doing it well collectively, because we are not thinking collectively well about how to do this and places in the world are in serious trouble.”
The City as a Center of Growth
Jaana Remes presented both a broader scale of analysis and a more positive outlook. Urbanization is “the most powerful positive economic force in today’s environment,” she asserted, drawing on the McKinsey Global Institute report, Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities.
Compared to the historical experiences of the Western world, change in the most rapidly urbanizing of today’s developing states is occurring at “100 times the scale, in one tenth of the time,” said Remes. This change is fundamentally shifting the economic profiles of states such as India and China, which are projected to account for approximately one third of global GDP by 2050.
This growth in economic prominence can be accounted for by the rise of urban populations of middle class consumers not just in megacities, but also in the rapidly growing “middleweight” cities (from 200,000 to 10 million people) explained Remes. The path that these cities take will be “very significant for…how our world is going to look like in the next few decades,” she said. They are where “the lion’s share of global investment is going to be made.”
Engaging Global Urbanization
“That we are seeing cities rise in their profile is nothing new in history,” said Remes, “in fact you can argue that cities are actually some of the longest-lasting assets in the world.” Today, 600 urban centers generate more than 60 percent of global GDP; 400 of these are in emerging markets. So, “even though the scale of the change we expect to see is very dramatic, from the cities perspective, it is probably going to be more evolution than revolution.”
Taking advantage of this growth will require some significant global re-posturing. In terms of commercial diplomacy for instance, most nations continue to distribute their people more according to the “geopolitical power of the 20th century than the economic opportunity of the 21st,” said Remes. She points out, for example, that the city of Wuhan in China is expected to generate 10 times the GDP growth of Auckland, New Zealand, yet the number of foreign service officials stationed in each city is in the opposite proportion.
Policymakers looking to adapt should also look more closely at opportunities to re-develop existing, or “brownfield,” infrastructure. The challenge of accommodating the tremendous pace of urbanization may be great, she said, but “we have not yet seen one piece of infrastructure where you can’t make substantial improvements.”
Summing up the need to work on what he argued has been a shortfall in policy engagement, Engelke concluded that, “we are indeed quite a ways from acknowledging the enormous challenges, but also the opportunities, that global urbanization presents to us.”
Event ResourcesSources: UN Population Division.
Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
‘Green Prophet’ Interviews Geoff Dabelko on Water Security in the Middle East
›April 18, 2012 // By Schuyler NullTafline Laylin, managing editor of the Green Prophet blog, recently interviewed ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the just-released U.S. intelligence assessment on global water security and what it says about the Middle East.
The conversation touched on regional water scarcity, Palestinian-Israeli water tensions, and the role of the international community.
“We put a lot of faith in the past helping us understand the future and it rests at the center of much of the way we analyze things,” said Dabelko. “But at the same time, we also, especially in the natural world, have established patterns of thresholds and tipping points and sudden changes.”
We’ve excerpted the first few questions below; read the full interview on Green Prophet:Green Prophet: So, for context, can you say a little bit about the National Intelligence report and why it was compiled?
Continue reading on Green Prophet.
Geoff Dabelko: The water and security assessment from the National Intelligence Council was done at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The National Intelligence Council has a strong history of looking at long term trends in the environmental, technological, demographic realms and working to understand how trends in these areas are and could be part of larger economic, political, and social dynamics that may pose national security issues for the United States.
Green Prophet: There were seven river basins of particular concern, of which four are located in the MENA region: the Euphrates, Jordan, Nile, and the Tigris. Why do you think these are of particular importance?
Geoff Dabelko: I do not explicitly know the criteria for their selection of the seven basins. But I think these four, like the other three, have some common characteristics. They are basins where the rivers are shared by two or more countries/territories that are heavily dependent on the waters; that have relations among the states that include uncertain, tense, or even overtly hostile relationships; that are now and/or likely to experience big growth in demand for the water resource based on both population growth and consumption growth, that at the same time there is concern that climate change will at least increase variability, timing, and or quantity of that water (both scarcity and abundance i.e. floods).
And then the report focuses on the institutional river basin arrangements and differentiates among their assessed capacities for addressing these current and future stresses. That diversity aside, it is fair to say that the transboundary water institutions remain a priority yet a challenge for addressing the multiple dimensions of the water relationship. I say “multiple” given all the different uses water performs in most of these settings (transport, irrigation, hydropower, culture, industrial, household, etc).
Photo Credit: “Umm Qais – Sunset,” courtesy of flickr user Magh. -
Geoff Dabelko On ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ Discussing Global Water Security
›April 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was recently a guest on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the just-released U.S. intelligence community assessment of world water security. He was joined by co-panelists retired Maj. Gen. Richard Engel (USAF) of the National Intelligence Council’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (a key figure in preparing the report), Jessica Troell of the International Water Program at the Environmental Law Institute, and Steve Fleischli of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Department of State-requested assessment (outlined in more detail, here and here) is a very positive contribution, said Dabelko. It “moves away from the arm-waving, headline-grabbing, water wars frame – the kind of sky-is-falling frame that is intuitively appealing and certainly appealing for politicians and headline writers, but doesn’t really reflect the reality.” He continued:What this report instead does, is recognize that there’s been an awful lot of cooperation around water even in the face of scarcity and that that cooperation in part helps us avoid conflicts, whether they’re violent or political, and that we should invest in those institutions that help us get to cooperation.
Visit the show’s program page to listen to the full segment, or read the transcript here.
It also suggests that it’s inadequate and incorrect to think of water as just a single-sector issue. The report is quite clear in connecting it to energy, connecting it to food, connecting it to health, economic development, agriculture obviously, and so that recognition [in] analysis sounds in some way straightforward, but unfortunately, when we organize our responses, we often respond in sector, and there’s not nearly enough communication and cooperation.
And finally, the report does say that the future may not look like the past, and so while we don’t have evidence of states fighting one another over water – and the judgment of the report is in the next 10 years, we won’t see that – it does hold out the prospect for as we go farther down the line, in terms of higher levels of consumption and higher levels of population, that we need to pay special attention because there’s some particular river basins in parts of the world where, as I said, the future may not look like the past and we have greater concerns for higher levels of conflict.
Sources/Image Credit: The Diane Rehm Show. -
Responses to JPR Climate and Conflict Special Issue: John O’Loughlin, Andrew M. Linke, Frank Witmer (University of Colorado, Boulder)
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Complexity, in terms of economic, cultural, institutional, and ecological characteristics, weighs heavily on contemporary attempts to unravel the climate change/variability and conflict nexus. The view that local-level complexity can be “controlled away” by technical fixes or adding variables in quantitative analysis does not sit well with many geographers (though some do try to adopt a middle ground position).
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A New Land Security Agenda to Enable Sustainable, Equitable Development
›The recent news that overseas investors have acquired over 10 percent of Australia’s farmland and 9 percent of water entitlements in its agriculture sector has struck a political chord in the country. Large grain-producing nations like Brazil and Argentina have passed laws to restrict the foreign ownership of land. In other global grain hubs, like Ukraine and Russia, compromised harvests due to droughts could result in export restrictions. In a globalized economy, the combination of scarcity, market and population pressures, and weather volatility will make fertile land an increasingly precious resource.
A shift is underway in global financial markets, where global investors perceive that owning what grows on the land – or better still, owning the land itself – may be a hedge against the risks of more volatile financial markets. A surge in farmland investments is expected to grow over the next decade is due to a number of combined pressures: a growing global demand for commodities, rising commodity prices, ecological limits, and the fact that farmland is a “real asset” that offers diversification to the portfolios of investors at a time of market volatility.
The need to increase food production against the backdrop of resource limits, social vulnerability, and population growth, puts the question of land at the center of a new security agenda.
In sub-Saharan Africa large-scale acquisitions of land that neglect local livelihoods and resource scarcity, commonly referred to as “land grabs,” put the region’s future in the balance. Not all land investments have negative consequences, but given the lower levels of land tenure by communities and the fragility of human security in sub-Saharan Africa, regulating land investments with foresight is an urgent issue. Population growth and climate change underpin this agenda. A worse-than-average drought, exacerbated by climate change, may be all that is needed in certain places to realize the political, humanitarian, and ecological risks that are slowly building momentum.
From Land Grabs to Land Stewardship
Progress now depends on moving from a land grabs debate to land stewardship solutions. This shift, which the Earth Security Initiative summarized in a report published this month, The Land Security Agenda: How Investor Risks in Farmland Create Opportunities for Sustainability, requires an improved understanding by investors and political leaders of three priorities: managing land degradation, protecting human rights by focusing on food security and land ownership, and keeping economies within ecological – especially water – limits.
The agenda we have developed discusses why these issues form part of a new risk management agenda for investors as well as for countries seeking to attract foreign capital, whose economic competitiveness and political stability may be compromised by these trends. But managing these risks, we argue, will require making human rights and ecological limits a central feature of a new investment paradigm.
A range of international investors is already searching for solutions to engage practically with this debate. Among those with whom we have engaged throughout the study are individual investment funds, people seeking change within the financial sector, and investor networks such as the UN-backed Principles of Responsible Investment. Recently, governments, international organizations and civil society groups have also agreed on a set of voluntary guidelines for land governance under the auspices of the Committee on World Food Security. These developments are positive steps, but their voluntary nature remains problematic. The focus must now be placed on operationalizing their recommendations to ensure real accountability and creating political incentives in host countries to regulate their land to ensure long-term and equitable prosperity.
A Call to Action
In The Land Security Agenda we call on investors to turn their attention to their land and commodities portfolios, as well as the investments currently under due diligence, and begin to ask how soil resilience, the prosperity of local people, and freshwater limits are being considered. We recommend beginning to assess the risks of countries according to how well their governments are managing these issues.
We similarly call on heads of state in countries seeking to attract large investments in land to become more aware that these risks may undermine their country’s wealth, their stability, and economic competitiveness. Political leadership is needed to champion and enforce regulations that will encourage investments and modernization while protecting a country’s social and natural capital.
Some of the recommendations we have developed, which would help set the tone for investors and governments to move from voluntary principles to action, include:- Define land security parameters: Establish a set of verifiable measures that allows stakeholders to distinguish those land investments that advance equitable and sustainable prosperity from those that do not. Based on these criteria, which we suggest must consider people, water, and soil, it is possible to advance their integration into three important areas of the investment cycle: the identification of investment opportunities that build positive value, the due diligence process, and the performance reviews of fund managers.
- Build better country risk profiles: If the population of a given country is dependent on agriculture for livelihoods, shouldn’t issues like soil erosion, water availability and lack of recognition for people’s land rights increase that country’s sovereign risk? We think so and now seek to develop a “land security index” to help investors and host country governments assimilate these trends into their decisions as well as increase the advocacy capacity of local civil society.
- Advance the formal recognition of land rights on a large scale: The universal call for the prior and informed consent of communities must be supported, but will be of little practical value if communities do not hold the legal rights to their land or are not well informed about their rights and the commercial opportunities available to them. Civil society groups working to advance good governance, land titling, and capacity building – many of whom we have spoken to during this study – are in a position to help create a “land security partnership” that builds technical and political momentum for the formal recognition of land rights on a large scale, as well as the resourcing and oversight that government agencies will require to implement them.
Alejandro Litovsky is the founder and director of the Earth Security Initiative and lead author of the report. The Land Security Agenda can be downloaded here.
Sources: DGC Asset Management, Land Commodities Asset Management, Telegraph.
Image Credit: Cover of the The Land Security Agenda.
