Showing posts from category water.
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Historic Floods Plague Pakistan
›August 19, 2010 // By Shawna Cuan
“Staggered by the scale of destruction from this summer’s catastrophic floods, Pakistani officials have begun to acknowledge that the country’s security could be gravely affected,” reports the Washington Post. The Pakistani government – already cash-strapped between fighting “the war on terror” and trying to prevent an economic collapse – now faces recovering from the worst flooding in over 80 years.
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Flooded With Food Insecurity in Pakistan
›The floods sweeping across Pakistan have caused widespread destruction, ruined livelihoods, displaced millions, and sparked a food crisis. Food prices have skyrocketed across the country as miles of farmland succumb to the deluge, including 1.5 million hectares in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket and agricultural heartland.
Food insecurity is now rife across the country — yet even before the floods, millions of Pakistanis struggled to access food. Back in 2008, the UN estimated that 77 million Pakistanis were hungry and 45 million malnourished. And while many developing nations have begun to recover from the global food crisis of 2007-08, Pakistan’s food fortunes have remained miserable. Throughout 2010, Pakistan’s two chief food staples, rice and wheat, have cost 30 to 50 percent times more than they did before the global food crisis. Drought, rampant water shortages, and conflict have intensified food insecurity in Pakistan in recent months.
A new edited book volume published by the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Hunger Pains: Pakistan’s Food Insecurity, examines the country’s food insecurity. The book has already been the subject of a news story and an editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The book, edited by Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway, is based on the 2009 Wilson Center conference of the same name. It assesses food supply challenges, access issues, governance constraints, social and structural dimensions, gender and regional disparities, and international responses.
The book makes a range of recommendations. These include:- Declare hunger a national security issue. Since some of Pakistan’s most food-insecure regions lie in militant hotbeds, hunger should be linked to defense, and food provision projects should be given ample public funding.
- Diversify the crop mix so that Pakistan’s agricultural economy revolves around more than wheat and rice. The country should accord more resources to crops that are less water-intensive and more nutritious.
- Give schools a central focus in food aid and food distribution. Using schools as a venue for food distribution gives parents powerful incentives to send their children to school.
- Tackle the structural dimensions. Strengthening agricultural institutions, improving infrastructure and storage facilities, and injecting capital into a stagnant farming sector are all key to making Pakistan more food-secure. Yet unless Pakistan deals with poverty, landlessness, and entrenched political interests in agriculture, food insecurity will remain.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Photo Credit: “Chitarl, Pakistan” where floods damaged the way over Lawari pass and killed five in August 2006. Courtesy of flickr user groundreporter -
Population Reference Bureau Releases New Projections
Seven Billion and Counting
›August 6, 2010 // By Russell SticklorThe Population Reference Bureau recently released its annual World Population Data Sheet, and lo and behold, the world is getting more crowded. By next year, the global total is expected to top seven billion, as we march toward upwards of nine billion by mid-century.
Much of that growth, of course, will be unfolding across Asia — China and India already account for more than 35 percent of the world’s population, and the two countries will continue to drive global demographic change. But the PRB report emphasized that Africa will also contribute significantly to world’s shifting demographics in the coming decades. By 2050, the continent’s population is slated to double, reaching the neighborhood of two billion. In that time span, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia are expected to knock Russia and Japan off the list of the world’s top 10 most populous nations.
The Young Continent
Africa’s population growth through 2050 could actually be even greater than PRB predicts, since current projections assume that total fertility rate in sub-Saharan Africa will drop from 5.2 to 2.5 in that time span. The assumption is that as the region’s countries travel farther down the path to economic modernization, access to family planning services will become more widespread, resulting in smaller average family sizes—a trend well-documented in other parts of the developing world.
A slower than expected decrease in total fertility rate (TFR) across sub-Saharan Africa over the next 40 years could render current predictions inaccurate, however. While TFR has dropped significantly over the past 50 years in countries like Ghana (where it is now 4.0), just 17 percent of married women in sub-Saharan African utilize a modern type of family planning. That is one of the reasons Africa as a whole maintains a high average TFR of 4.7 children per woman, and why countries like Niger and Uganda sport some of the highest TFRs in the world (at 7.4 and 6.5, respectively).
According to the 2010 PRB Data Sheet, Africa is also notable for its demographic youth bulge. Of the world’s 10 countries with the highest percentage of their populations aged 15 or younger, nine of them—Niger, Uganda, Burkina Faso, the DRC, Zambia, Malawi, Chad, Somalia, and Tanzania—are on the continent. The question facing these countries is whether their young populations will yield a “demographic dividend” during the coming decades, whereby the large youth bulges translate into a sizeable and productive workforce. Harnessing the economic potential of the younger generation could help accelerate the development process in many of the region’s nations, but it will require significant investment in health and education infrastructure—funding that may prove hard to come by for many cash-strapped governments.
Persistent Divides
Other findings featured in the report involved sanitation and wastewater treatment, where some headway is being made at the global level. The PRB Data Sheet reveals that 43 percent of urban populations in sub-Saharan Africa (and 24 percent of the region’s rural populations) now have access to improved sanitation, while 86 percent of urban populations (and 55 percent of rural populations) have better sanitation services in Latin America and the Caribbean. The figures highlight progress, but reveal the significant divide that persists between urban and rural areas in terms of access to quality sanitation. According to the PRB, some 2.7 billion people—40 percent of the world’s total—still do not enjoy adequate sanitation facilities, and most live in rural areas of the developing world.
Finally, an interesting trend that will impact developed and developing nations alike involves elderly support ratios, or the number of active workforce members between the ages of 15 and 64 available to support a nation’s non-working, 65-and-older population. While rapidly growing countries in the developing world will continue to enjoy high elderly support ratios, a number of countries across the developed world will face a potential financial crisis, as comparatively low support ratios combine with rapidly aging populations to strain available financial resources earmarked for covering pension payments and healthcare infrastructure costs. To make up for the shortfall over the coming decades, the PRB report predicts that some developed nations may be inclined to further throw open the doors to immigration to bolster workforce ranks—a step recommended by Jack Goldstone in ECSP Report 13.
Sources: New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, Population Council, PR Newswire, United Nations Population Division, WHO/UNICEF Jointing Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation
Photo Credit: “Famine in Niger, Africa,” courtesy of flickr user liquidslave. -
Wilson Center’s Michael Kugelman Finds the Real Culprit in Pakistan’s Water Shortage
›July 28, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpt from Dawn:
ON Jan 15, 2006, the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) inaugurated its new fountain – the Rs320m lighted harbour structure that spews seawater hundreds of feet into the air.
Also on this day – as on most others in Karachi – several million gallons of the city’s water supply were lost to leakage, some hundred million gallons of raw sewage oozed into the sea, and scores of Karachiites failed to secure clean water.
Over the next few years, the fountain jet would produce a powerful and relentless stream of water high above Karachi. Meanwhile, down below, tens of thousands of the city’s masses would die from unsafe water.
After several fountain parts were stolen in 2008, the KPT quickly made the necessary repairs and re-launched what it deems “an extravaganza of light and water”.
In an era of rampant resource shortages, boasting about such extravagance demonstrates questionable judgment. So, too, does the willingness to lavish millions of rupees on a giant water fountain, and then to repair it fast and furiously – while across Karachi and the nation as a whole, drinking water and sanitation projects are heavily underfunded and water infrastructure stagnates in disrepair.
Continue reading on Dawn.
For more on Pakistan’s water crisis, see the Wilson Center report, “Running on Empty.”
Photo Credit: Adapted from UN map of South Asia, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. -
A Return to Rural Unrest in Nepal?
›July 27, 2010 // By Russell SticklorIn the four years since the end of Nepal’s civil war, political progress in creating a multi-party unity government in Kathmandu has moved in fits and starts. While the effort to bring the Maoists into the fold has made some headway since 2006, continuing environmental and economic troubles in the Nepalese countryside threaten to undermine these tentative steps.
In recent months, a new threat to political stability has emerged: the Sapta Kosi Multipurpose Project, a massive, India-backed hydropower scheme in eastern Nepal currently in the early stages of development. Once operational, the controversial dam—slated to reach a height of nearly 270 meters, making it one of the tallest dams in the world—is projected to generate 3,300 megawatts of electricity.
A proposed barrage and series of canals round out the project, enabling new irrigation and flood-control infrastructure in both eastern Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar, immediately to the south. But the potential environmental impacts of the mega-project have already sparked significant backlash among some Maoist-linked ethnic groups in the region, where the reach and influence of Nepal’s fledgling unity government is tenuous at best.
“Strong” Protests Threatened Over India-Backed Mega-Dam
In June, a network of 15 groups sympathetic to the Nepalese government’s Maoist wing warned of “strong” protests if survey work on the dam continued and “the voice of the indigenous people was not heard.” A memo released by the group dismissed the Sapta Kosi project as “anti-people.”
Specific criticisms of the project have ranged from safety concerns (the dam would be built in a seismically active region) to population displacement. Maoist leaders in the region have alleged that many villages—as well as important local religious sites and valuable agricultural land—could be flooded if the project goes forward. Other Maoists say the project should be delayed until Nepal is reorganized as a federal republic, at which point the states directly impacted by Sapta Kosi could be given greater control over the project.
Meanwhile, some objections to the project have targeted Nepal’s partnership with India. According to ShanghaiNews.net, members of the Maoist opposition have insinuated that hydropower from Sapta Kosi will not be consumed domestically, but rather exported to meet the needs of energy-hungry India.
A number of prominent Nepalese and Indian environmental activists have also spoken against the project, including Medha Patkar, a well-known activist who has played a major role in many past Indian anti-dam protests. Patkar warns the project will not mitigate but instead worsen seasonal flooding, calling plans for the joint India-Nepalese dam project “inauspicious from [an] environmental, cultural and religious point of view,” according to the Water & Energy Users’ Federation-Nepal.
As Nepal Pledges Security for Dam Project, India Pushes Forward
In the past, threats against the Sapta Kosi project have caused surveillance work in the area to be suspended repeatedly. But after the latest round of warnings, the Nepalese government adopted a different tactic, pledging heightened security in the region to ensure the safety of Indian officials doing fieldwork.
In doing so, Nepal’s coalition government is throwing its limited weight around, and—to a degree—staking its reputation on its ability to prevent an outbreak of violence. Historically, Nepal’s government has been largely bypassed or ignored in matters of hydroelectric development. As Nepal Water Conservation Foundation Director Dipak Gyawali told International Rivers in a June 2010 interview:The main players are private investors, with state entities and civil society unable to stand up to them….In Nepal, we just saw local politicians burn down the office of an international hydropower company even after the project was sanctioned by their leaders in the central government.
Gyawali added that during the Nepalese civil war (1996-2006), private developers were able to build “small hydropower projects even while a Maoist insurgency was raging because they did not ride roughshod over local concerns.” Regarding Sapta Kosi, Gyawali said the government should adopt a similar approach, and “start listening to the marginalized voices.” Otherwise, he warned, the Indian-Nepalese team spearheading the project “will be faced with delays, impasse, and intractable political problems,” including the potential for Maoist violence in the region. (As noted earlier this month in New Security Beat, the Indian government has also struggled with Maoist-linked violence in recent years, as New Delhi struggles to pacify a Naxalite insurgency in eastern and central India.)
Rural Nepal’s Troubles Far Bigger Than Sapta Kosi
Maoists may be wielding Sapta Kosi as a weapon to gain political leverage both in the countryside and Kathmandu, but the proposed dam is far from the only environmental issue impacting rural lives and threatening to undermine support for the central government.
In a country where firewood still accounts for 87 percent of annual domestic energy production, deforestation has been hugely problematic across rural Nepal. As of 2010, less than 30 percent of the country’s original forest-cover now remains. The rapid removal of forest cover has reduced soil quality, exacerbated seasonal flooding, and caused degraded water quality due to high sedimentation levels.
Further, as the country’s population grows at an annual rate of 2 percent, low soil productivity and unsustainable farming practices have turned Nepal’s effort to feed itself into a constant uphill struggle. According to the World Bank, the country sports one of the world’s highest ratios of population to available arable land, paving the way for potential further food shortages.
Sustainable energy development in Nepal perhaps represents one way of slowly restoring environmental health to the country. By investing in a more reliable national power grid, the central government could reduce rural dependence on firewood for fuel, allowing the country’s forests, soil, and waters to recover even as population increases. Further, hydroelectric projects like Sapta Kosi—implemented with greater involvement from local communities—could play an important role in moving the country forward. With an estimated untapped hydroelectric potential of 43,000 megawatts, Nepal could not only meet its own energy needs by developing its waterways, but profit from hydroelectric energy exports as well.
On the other hand, the Nepalese government could—at its own peril—continue to overlook rural populations’ grievances, and the environmental degradation unfolding outside Kathmandu. If left unchecked, however, these conditions could once again make the Maoist insurgency an appealing movement, potentially reviving grassroots support for anti-government extremism.
Sources: CIA, eKantipur.com (Nepal), International Rivers, Kathmandu Post, NepalNews.com, New York Times, ShanghaiNews.net, South Asia News Agency, Taragana.com, Thaindian News, Times of India, U.S. Energy Information Administration, WaterAid, Water & Energy Users Federation-Nepal, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund.
Photo Credit: “Neither in Nepal Nor India,” courtesy of Flickr user bodhithaj. -
Time to Give a Dam: Alternative Energy as Source of Cooperation or Conflict?
›July 8, 2010 // By Kayly OberMitigation can be a means to peace, not just conflict, said Stacy VanDeveer in the lead up to Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation at the Woodrow Wilson Center on June 10. VanDeveer believes that mitigation techniques, particularly alternative energy sources like hydroelectric dams, could stimulate cooperation rather than exacerbate threats.
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Rough Waters Ahead: Our Changing Ocean
›From the ocean-themed June issue of Science comes “Sea-Level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Zones“, by Robert J. Nicholls and Anny Cazenave. While sea-level rise will “almost certainly accelerate through the 21st century and beyond because of global warming,” Nicholls and Cazenave state that its magnitude remains uncertain. Small islands as well as the coasts of Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China are identified as vulnerable areas because of their “dense populations, low elevations, appreciable rates of subsidence, and/or inadequate adaptive capacity.” Nicholls and Cazenave call for more research and analysis into adaptation, which “remains a major uncertainty.”“Ocean Acidification: Unprecedented, Unsettling,” by Richard A. Kerr, also appears in the June issue of Science. “Humans are caught up in a grand planetary experiment of lowering the ocean’s pH, with a potentially devastating toll on marine life,” begins Kerr, who aims to convince climate change-focused readers to also look at the world’s oceans. Rising pH levels, caused by ocean waters absorbing higher levels of carbon dioxide, are damaging shelled creatures, coral, and the organisms that rely on them for sustenance (which includes people, especially coastal populations dependent on the oceans for protein). An Australian survey recently found that calcification in the Great Barrier Reef had declined 14.2 percent since 1990 – a severe decline that has not been matched in the last 400 years. Kerr claims that “aside from the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, the world has probably never seen the likes of what’s brewing in today’s oceans.” -
Is the Third Pole the Next Site for Water Crisis?
›July 1, 2010 // By Tara InnesThe Hindu-Kush Himalaya area may host future water crises as glaciers melt, population rapidly increases, and competition over scarce water resources intensifies, says a recent report from the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College.
Himalayan glaciers – often called the “third pole” because they house the greatest volume of frozen water outside the polar regions – provide the headwaters for 10 major river systems in Asia. Despite clear evidence that the HKH glaciers are receding, recent controversy over the 2007 IPCC report has sidetracked the discussion from the degree of glacial melt and its impacts on the surrounding environment.
Glacial melt sends more water into the rivers in the rainy season, and less water in the dry season. This variability will increase both floods and droughts, which in turn can damage agriculture and create food shortages. Melting glaciers can also create “glacial lakes” that are prone to sudden bursting, causing disastrous flooding downstream (ppt).
According to The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of Threat, Sources of Survival, climate change is already having significant impacts in the Himalayan region, intensifying natural disasters and the variability of the summer monsoon rains, and increasing the number of displaced people and government attempts to secure water supplies from its neighbors.
Rivers of People: Environmental Migrants
One of the major consequences, the report argues, could be “growing numbers of environmental migrants,” which the authors define as “people moving away from drying or degraded farmland or fisheries, and the millions displaced by ever-larger dams and river-diversion projects”—and including the Chinese government’s forced “‘re-location of people from ecologically fragile regions.”
Today, about 30 million (15 percent) of the world’s migrants are from the Himalayan region, the report says, warning that “in the next decade, should river flows reduce significantly, migration out of irrigated areas could be massive.” But the authors acknowledge that reliable estimates are rare – a problem pointed out in The New Security Beat.
However, it is clear that the region’s population is growing and urbanizing rapidly: By 2025, one-half of all Asians will live in cities, whereas one generation ago, the figure was one in 10. This incredible shift, says the report, places “some of the greatest pressures on water through increased demand and pollution.”
Water War or Water Peace?
The Waters of the Third Pole warns that growing scarcity could “raise the risk of conflict in a region already fraught with cross-border tensions.” While interstate tensions over water have been minimal to date, they could potentially increase in areas where significant percentages of river flow originate outside of a country’s borders – in 2005 Bangladesh relied on trans-boundary water supplies for 91 percent of its river flow, Pakistan for 76 percent, and India for 34 percent. Intra-state conflict is also expected to increase. The report notes, “In China alone, it has been reported that domestic uprisings have continued to increase in protest about water management or water-quality issues.”
However, the water-conflict link remains shaky within the scholarly community. As Dabelko recently told Diane Rehm about the region, “There are prospects for tensions, but quite frankly, water is difficult to [obtain] through war. It’s hard to pick it up and take it home.”
The report points out some areas in which water may actually pose an opportunity for regional cooperation rather than conflict, such as developing knowledge-sharing networks like the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development. The presence of such networks may help establish channels of communication and aid in diffusing other cross-border tensions. But the authors caution that “environmental cooperation generally lags far behind economic cooperation in the HKH region.”
The report concludes that policymakers must move the region higher on the humanitarian agenda; construct a framework for action that includes non-intrusive international support; and more thoroughly address knowledge and communication gaps.
Photo Credit: “Annapurna ways, Nepal,” courtesy of flickr user rakustow.
