Showing posts from category security.
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Coltan, Cell Phones, and Conflict: The War Economy of the DRC
›December 2, 2008 // By Will Rogers
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 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. -
Weekly Reading
›In “Who Cares About the Weather?: Climate Change and U.S. National Security” (subscription required), Joshua Busby argues that although advocates have overstated some of climate change’s impacts, it nevertheless poses direct threats to conventional U.S. national security interests, and therefore deserves serious consideration by both academics and policymakers.
An article in the Economist examines the melting Kolahoi glacier, which could soon threaten water supply and livelihoods in the Kashmir valley.
“Marauding elephants in northern Uganda have added to the challenges faced by civilians trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of 20 years of civil war, destroying their crops and prompting some to return to displaced people’s (IDP) camps they had only recently left,” says an article from IRIN News.
In an EarthSky podcast interview, Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, discusses her work researching how HIV/AIDS affects families’ use of natural resources.
Payson Schwin of the World Resources Institute recently interviewed Crispino Lobo of the Watershed Organization Trust about his work helping rural Indian villages escape poverty by managing their natural resources sustainably.
A research commentary from Population Action International explores family planning trends in Pakistan, as well as the relationships between demography and security in this critically important country.
Despite—or perhaps because of—its extremely high population density, Rwanda has launched a series of initiatives to protect its environment and reduce poverty, reports the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Population Reference Bureau has released two new policy briefs examining population, health, and environment issues in Calabarzon Region and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform proposes changes to education, employment, and housing that would offer Middle Eastern youth additional opportunities. “Young people in the Middle East (15-29 years old) constitute about one-third of the region’s population, and growth rates for this age group are the second highest after sub-Saharan Africa,” say the authors. “Today, as the Middle East experiences a demographic boom along with an oil boom, the region faces a historic opportunity to capitalize on these twin dividends for lasting economic development.”
An October 2008 brief from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs uses examples from Africa and Latin America to explore ways to ensure that non-renewable resource revenues contribute to sustainable development.
Video is now available for “Breaking Barriers: Family Planning, Human Health and Conservation,” a session at this month’s Conservation Learning Exchange conference in Vancouver. -
PODCAST – Wouter Veening on Environment-Security Linkages
›October 29, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffEnvironmentalists from around the world gathered in Barcelona from October 5-14, 2008, to discuss issues impacting a sustainable world at the World Conservation Congress. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko interviewed Wouter Veening, co-founder and chairman of the Institute for Environmental Security (IES) in The Hague, following his discussion of “Environment and Security Challenges for Change.” In this podcast, Veening discusses the impact of climate change on traditional security threats and the global implications of failing to effectively address this issue. Dabelko analyzes related environment-security links in a chapter in IES’s Inventory on Environmental and Security Policies and Practices, as well as in numerous Grist dispatches from the IES 2004 Hague Conference on Environment, Security, and Sustainable Development. -
Rebels Overrun Government Troops in Eastern DRC; Thousands Displaced, Including Virunga’s Gorilla Rangers
›October 29, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarRenegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized Virunga National Park headquarters at Rumangabo on Sunday, overtook the town of Rutshuru yesterday, and continue to advance on the regional capital of Goma, facing little resistance from either Congolese government troops or MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force. Thousands of local residents have fled the fighting, including 53 gorilla rangers who were in the park when it was taken by Nkunda’s rebels. Twelve of the rangers made it back to the relative safety of Goma today, after more than two days dodging bullets in the forest with no food or water, but the rest remain missing. Almost nothing is known about the condition of the park’s mountain gorillas, which represent half of the world population of 700. -
Weekly Reading
›In an open letter on water policy to the next U.S. president, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute urges the next presidential administration to develop a national water policy; highlight national security issues related to water; expand the United States’ role in addressing global water problems; and integrate climate change into all federal planning and activity on water.
A recent survey conducted by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that land disputes are a key threat to peace in Liberia, reports BBC News.
Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the former Soviet Union, called for a global glasnost, or openness, on environmental problems. “This financial turmoil, which will heavily affect the real economy, was absolutely predictable, and it is only one aspect of the wider crisis of all the current development systems,” said Gorbachev. “In fact, there are connected simultaneous crises that are rapidly emerging. These relate to energy, water, food, demography, climate change and the ecosystem devastation.”
The World Health Organization has developed a plan for research on the health impacts of climate change, reports the Science and Development Network.
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 
Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized 
