The Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet shows that global population numbers will reach 7 billion in 2011. Among its key findings, PRB notes that “population growth is one root cause of increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the complexity of the mechanisms through which demographic factors affect emissions is not fully taken into consideration in many analyses that influence governments’ climate change mitigation efforts.”

Update: Read a response by Miriam Pemberton

“The Obama administration…has identified the task of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as one of its top priorities,” writes Miriam Pemberton in a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era.”

The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.

A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.

In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.

DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security

A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.

Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.

Raising a REDD Flag

A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.

For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.

REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.

The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.

Jim Jarvie is director of climate change, environment, and natural resources at Mercy Corps. In a recent video interview, he spoke to ECSP about how humanitarian groups are responding to new climate challenges.

Photo: Stoves that are more fuel-efficient not only help curb rapid deforestation, but help women spend less time gathering wood in dangerous areas. Courtesy Dee Goluba/Mercy Corps.

MORE

In the first decade of the new millennium, the relationship between the Department of Defense and civilian governmental agencies and NGOs has been a rollercoaster ride. At the high point of civil-military cooperation—the response to the Kurdish refugee crisis after the first Iraq war—the U.S. military provided security, access, and logistics, while USAID and NGOs provided direct assistance and expert advice to the 800-pound uniformed gorilla.

USAID convened a study group to determine the future civil-military relationship between USAID and the Department of Defense. Two members of the study group, Dr. Frederick Burkle, Jr., and Dr. Eugene Bonventre, offer their thoughts.

The success of all interventions and relief efforts in conflict and post-conflict situations is dependent on politics and political action. For the United States, political action translates into military action. During my career, I’ve been involved in five conflict situations with the U.S. military, and each one made a different claim and set different restrictions for intervening with “aid.”

In the 1990s, after several frustrating years of failures, many in government believed that humanitarian assistance without political solutions achieved nothing. In good Wilsonian fashion, they saw political action—and the military interventions that followed—as a means to project, influence, and spread U.S. values. As such, the military became the security and protection tool of political humanitarianism, especially among those who considered that the convergence of humanitarian actors with the military ensured that the duty to provide assistance and the right to receive it was guaranteed.

The Kurdish crisis after the Persian Gulf War was instrumental for many reasons. One, it was the first time the Security Council did not veto a resolution to protect vulnerable populations within a sovereign state. Two, it was considered in most circles to be a success, because the coalition led by the U.S. military was considered by the humanitarian community to have been an ally in the struggle to provide security and assistance. The military presence allowed the humanitarians to work in an austere environment and to save lives.

What happened afterwards is a different story. Influenced by the post-9/11 global war on terrorism, increasingly insecure conflict environments, and the unilateral approach to conflict management, the military began to provide direct assistance to the population themselves. Liberties were taken: NGOs were recruited as “force multipliers,” “a second front,” or “part of our combat team.” The traditional leaders of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, the Red Cross and the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, were ignored. A “partnership” of the U.S. military-political command, the World Bank, corporate contractors, and like-minded NGOs dominated the scene.

In the last four months I’ve been confronted by two retired generals. One strongly insisted that the military must “stay within their lane” or risk destroying the military and supporting the perception of a U.S. politico-military “empire.” The other strongly insisted that the only entity in the world that could do humanitarian assistance and disaster relief is the U.S. military

So who should be leading these efforts for the United States? USAID, which was decimated in the 1980s, has never come back. The more than 12,000 USAID professionals during the 1960s-70s now number only 2,000. Reestablishing USAID’s place in development and relief will take much money, time, and expertise.

In the meantime, the only show in town, DoD, grows even larger and stronger. Gates’ statement that more civilians are needed in Afghanistan and Pakistan was actually a request for more “civilians” to be coordinated by the military.

It is not unusual to find those who think that the politico-military “relief and reconstruction complex” is impossible to change, especially when they are favored by Congress over USAID and State to solve these problems. But if “outcome indicators” rather that the current DoD-dominated “achievement indicators” were used to measure success, they would tell a totally different story.

In the last few years, the argument that such efforts are essential to “winning the hearts and minds” of a population has come out of nowhere. This claim is not grounded in accepted measures that monitor and evaluate such success. Yet the defense budgets that are heavily supported by Congress are based on achievement indicators alone.

President Obama does not come to the table with a strong and substantive knowledge or experience with the nuances of foreign assistance and the critical importance of the traditional humanitarian community. He is currently hearing only voices from the military and industry on this issue. We owe it to both the humanitarian community and the military to ensure that evaluation of their effectiveness is transparent, accountable, and evidence-based.

Current USAID leadership, short of a named Administrator, must speak up. The opportunity to reestablish USAID’s role in development and humanitarian assistance may never come this way again.

Dr. Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., is a professor and senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University; a senior public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center; and a retired Navy Reserve Captain and combat decorated for service with the U.S. Marines.

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.

The second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Simon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”