On Monday, California became the first U.S. state to issue a report outlining strategies for adapting to climate change. Among other recommendations, it suggests that Californians should consider moving.

Three people died in the city of Bhopal, in north-central India, in a battle between neighbors for scarce water, The Guardian reported this past week. Fights regularly broke out when the water tankers that serve 100,000 of the city’s residents make their deliveries.

The monsoon this year produced less rain than usual, exacerbating a drought. In addition, the number of people in Bhopal’s slums is growing. “The population has increased, but the water supply is the same,” a local committee chairman told The Guardian.

The northern parts of India were hardest hit, but much of India experienced similar conditions, including the city of Mumbai. Officials there cut water supplies for the city by 30 percent when the levels of the five lakes that serve as Mumbai’s primary sources of water dropped dangerously low.

But while heavy rains in the last few days mostly restored supplies, they also shut down the waterlogged city, reviving fears of 2005’s deadly floods. According to a new book and exhibit by University of Pennsylvania architects, the sprawling city has paved over the mangrove wetlands that protect it from flooding.

Pollution, climate change, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in the world’s developing countries continue to increase demand for its finite water supplies. Today, 700 million people live in countries experiencing water scarcity or stress; by 2035, that figure is expected to have reached 3 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population. Asia, with 60% of the world’s population but only 36% of the world’s freshwater, will be particularly hard hit.

The problems vary across South Asia. The rivers around Dhaka, Bangladesh, are so polluted from industrial dumping that specialists are saying the situation is beyond repair. Lack of access to clean water and knowledge about hygienic sanitation practices leads to thousands of preventable deaths from diarrhea every year in Nepal. In Karachi, Pakistan, stealing public water out of pipes and tankers is a $500 million industry, “a mark of the state’s decreasing capacity to provide for its own,” reports Bill Wheeler in a special report in GOOD magazine.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 between India and Pakistan has long been hailed as an example of the cooperation that can result from the necessity of sharing such an essential resource across borders. But with climate change causing the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River to melt at a faster pace, some experts warn that balancing the water needs of both countries across their contested border could be a trigger point for conflict—particularly for two nations that cannot provide many of their citizens with access to safe drinking water under normal circumstances.

South Asian governments will be called upon more and more to balance the water of needs between different users at the local level and work with other governments to share and conserve water at the international level. But as Ashok Jaitly of New Delhi’s Energy and Resources Institute told Wheeler, both India and Pakistan share a “mentality that obscures the need to manage demand with conservation, water tariffs, and an end to destructive but politically popular practices in both countries.”

Despite the recognition of water as a growing security issue by the international community, it is difficult to improve what is a symptom of deeper-set problems. But they must try, if only for their own security. As Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned in a Washington Post op-ed, “The water crisis in Pakistan is directly linked to relations with India. Resolution could prevent an environmental catastrophe in South Asia, but failure to do so could fuel the fires of discontent that lead to extremism and terrorism.”

By Comparative Urban Studies Project intern Elizabeth Hipple and edited by Meaghan Parker

Photo: The Ganges River in Varanasi, India. Courtesy flickr user Denver Pam

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“The breakdown of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods is likely to remain the premier driver of long-term migration during the next two to three decades,” says In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, a report launched at the recent international climate negotiations in Bonn.

According to the report, climate change will threaten livelihoods (and could consequently drive migration) through its impact on agriculture, glacial melt, sea-level rise, and the severity and frequency of natural disasters. While the report recognizes that migration is a complex issue involving a “combination of environmental, economic, social and/or political factors,” it stresses the impact of environmental change on “livelihoods which are dependent on ecosystem services, such as agriculture, herding, and fishing.”

Key to the report’s findings is the disproportionate effect that climate change will continue to have on developing countries, which are ill-equipped to adapt to climate change, and where many people’s livelihoods depend directly on ecosystem services. The report calls for the reduction of carbon emissions to mitigate climate change; the promotion of technologies that will enable adaptation; and the active participation of women and other marginalized groups in adaptation planning.

In a recent invitation-only meeting hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne suggested that migration that is partially due to climate might be an opportunity, as “you could use migration to facilitate adaptation.” In Search of Shelter also recognizes this potential opportunity, and suggests that development strategies be formulated accordingly. Better infrastructure, health care, and education in likely receiving cities—many of which are in the developing world and are already overwhelmed by burgeoning slum populations—would significantly reduce the pressure of migration on both migrants and receiving populations.

In Search of Shelter is a unique contribution to the field, examining climate change’s impact on migration in a careful, evidence-based manner. Yet it strikes a common chord with general reports on development by stressing the important role that access to health care, education, and infrastructure play in supporting healthy, secure populations. It may be up for debate how large of a role climate change will play in prompting migration, but it is clear that we need to integrate this issue into broader development, health, and governance strategies.

Image: Cover of In search of shelter: mapping the effects of climate change on human migration and displacement. © 2008 by CARE International. Used by permission.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which integrates federal government research on climate change, released Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States this week. The report examines climate’s likely impacts on various regions of the country.

The Guardian examines ongoing conflicts over natural resources between indigenous people and governments.

In her final dispatch from the Bonn climate negotiations, Population Action International climate director Kathleen Mogelgaard notes the conspicuous absence of demography in international climate discussions.

A webcast is now available of the Johns Hopkins University-Population Reference Bureau symposium “Climate Change and Urban Adaptation: Managing Unavoidable Health Risks in Developing Countries.”

A new policy paper from the World Bank seeks to answer the question, “Do the households in game management areas enjoy higher levels of welfare relative to the conditions they would have been in had the area not been designated as a game management area?”

A Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, led by John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and Lincoln Chafee, former Republican senator from Rhode Island, has been formed to advise President Obama on how to reduce tropical deforestation through U.S. climate change policies, reports Mongabay.com.

“Indonesia’s forest loss continues more or less unabated, despite global concern for the resource and forest-dependent people, as well as a wealth of knowledge about the problems and solutions: poor governance, corruption, perverse incentives in the industrial sector,” said AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow Steve Rhee. Rhee was joined by Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who also studied the effects of environmental degradation on conflict in Indonesia, for “Demography, Environment, and Conflict in Indonesia and India,” an April 21, 2009 event sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program.

Parsing the Patterns: Population, Resources, and Conflict

Urdal argued that case studies have sometimes overstated the links among population, resource scarcity, and conflict. Researchers tend to choose cases where there is conflict and then look for a population or resource dimension. If you look hard enough, “it’s always possible to find some connection,” said Urdal.

However, quantitative studies are also imperfect, cautioned Urdal, because most of them use national-level data, which do not capture local dynamics. In addition, they have a tendency to ignore conflicts in which the state is not involved.

Two Sub-National Studies: India and Indonesia

Urdal sought to avoid these problems by using sub-national data and including political violence and riots, as well as armed conflict, in his quantitative studies of India and Indonesia. From 1956-2002, he found that high rural population growth and density, as well as declining agricultural wages, increased the likelihood of violence in Indian states. Surprisingly, those states with high rates of urban population growth were less likely to experience conflict.

In Indonesian provinces, Urdal and his colleagues found a relationship, albeit a weak one, between population growth and non-ethnic violence between 1990-2003. They also found an increased risk of non-ethnic violence in provinces with high population growth and high levels of inequality between different religious groups. However, there was no relationship between land scarcity and conflict.

Forests, Conflict, and Participatory Mapping in Kalimantan: Unintended Consequences

Forty million Indonesians—one-fifth of the population—depend on forests for their livelihoods, said Rhee. Yet much of Indonesia’s forests have never been surveyed, so the people who live there are considered squatters and receive little or no compensation from the logging and mining industries. This inequity has generated both violent and non-violent conflict between the indigenous dayaks, the government, and extractive-industry companies.

In an attempt to resolve some of this conflict, the Center for International Forestry Research initiated a participatory mapping project in 27 villages in the Malinau district of Kalimantan in 1999. Participatory mapping enables dayaks to establish land rights and negotiate compensation from companies.

Following the 1998 ousting of President Suharto, district governments, rather than the central government, began issuing timber permits. The villages in Malinau often used the maps they had created to justify their claims to the land. But the district government did not cross-check the claims, so this generated inter- and intra-village conflict—roadblocks, protests, and lock-ups of timber equipment.

Although the “cowboy logging” that characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s has largely ceased, Rhee believes it may be replaced by “carbon cowboys” seeking to capitalize on the UN Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by paying governments to preserve forests. “With climate change, and the link between climate change and forests, Indonesia is very much on the map again,” said Rhee.

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The authors of Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future, a report by the Asia Society, argue that population growth, urbanization, and climate change are converging to make water an important security issue in Asia. The authors argue for including water in policy and development discussions, but warn against “securitizing” the issue.

“Human-animal conflicts have assumed alarming proportions in the region,” Asghar Inayati, a regional wildlife warden in Kashmir, recently told Inter Press Service (IPS) News. Since India and Pakistan gained independence in 1949, both sides have fought for control of the territory. Not only has the decades-long conflict claimed 100,000 lives (by some estimates), it has also displaced animals from their natural habitats, sparking violent encounters with local people and threatening many species’ survival.

The city of Rio de Janeiro’s plan to erect a 650-meter long, three-meter high concrete wall between the 7,500 residents of the Dona Marta slum and the surrounding rainforest signals the government’s reluctance to address the underlying causes of environmental degradation. Although it is heralded by authorities as an “eco-barrier” that will protect the rainforest and “improve living standards and protect slum residents from the armed gangs that control many of Rio’s 600 or so slums,” the wall does not address the issues of acute poverty and lack of access to affordable housing that keep many Brazilians living in slums, harvesting resources from the rainforest.

Without access to decent housing and living-wage jobs, many slum residents will continue to encroach on the hillsides, warn Brazilian environmentalists. “It is hypocrisy to talk about protecting the Atlantic rainforest without considering the issues of housing and transport to take the pressure off the forest,” said Sergio Ricardo, a leading environmental campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, in an interview with the Jornal do Brasil.

Slums have often stalled Rio’s efforts to improve its environmental report card, as slum residents tend to be focused more on daily survival than on the environmental consequences of their actions. But slums do not have to be a thorn in the side of the government’s eco-friendly image. In fact, Rio’s previous attempts to reverse deforestation through grassroots reforestation projects have been extremely successful.

According to a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, municipal reforestation projects around Rio employed several hundred slum residents to plant millions of trees surrounding their communities. The projects “resulted in the return of dozens of species of birds, monkeys and other animals—many not seen in decades,” as well as cooler air temperatures, writes William Bennett. At the same time, the municipal projects became a source of steady work for residents. “Before this job, I worked as a day laborer; one day I would have work—the next day nothing,” said Carlos Alberto Ribeiro, a reforestation worker who earned about $200 a month planting trees. By 2005, community reforestation projects had employed 914 slum residents in 93 projects that had restored a total of 4,500 acres of native-species trees to the region.

Rather than segregating slum residents from the rest of the city in what some critics have called “social apartheid,” perhaps Rio should scale up community forestry projects, employing greater numbers of slum residents to improve the health of the Atlantic rainforest. While the government still has far to go in providing affordable housing, a steady wage could help residents secure access to adequate housing and reduce pressure on the region’s delicate environment.

Photo: Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slums with an estimated 200,000 residents, is one of hundreds of slum neighborhoods surrounding Rio, putting extreme pressure on the region’s environment. Courtesy of flickr user andreasnilsson1976.