Showing posts from category water.
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Time to Give a Dam: Alternative Energy as Source of Cooperation or Conflict?
›July 8, 2010 // By Kayly Ober
Mitigation 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. -
Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation
›The European Union’s biofuel goal for 2020 “is a good example of setting a target…without really thinking through [the] secondary, third, or fourth order consequences,” said Alexander Carius, co-founder and managing director of Adelphi Research and Adelphi Consult. While the 2007-2008 global food crisis demonstrated that the growth of crops for fuels has “tremendous effects” in the developing world, analysis of these threats are underdeveloped and are not incorporated into climate change policies, he said. [Video Below]
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Voices of World Water Day: Water and Health
›“Inadequate access to water supply, sanitation, and hygiene cause the deaths of over 1.5 million children each year,” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said at the National Geographic Society and Water Advocates’ “World Water Day 2010” event. Her address marked a warmly welcomed recognition by the U.S. government of the strong connections between water and health.
“Voices of World Water Day” is a video capturing highlights of the discussion on water and health. Created by PATH and Water Advocates, it seeks to keep the messages and momentum from World Water Day alive and to share them with others.
Importantly, Clinton was not alone in her recognition, and her sentiments were widely shared among the event participants representing both the public and private sectors. Congressmen, Clarissa Brocklehurst of UNICEF, and William Asiko of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation – to name a few – all weighed in on the necessity of clean, available water for public health. -
Look Beyond Islamabad To Solve Pakistan’s “Other” Threats
›After years of largely being ignored in Washington policy debates, Pakistan’s “other” threats – energy and water shortages, dismal education and healthcare systems, and rampant food insecurity – have finally moved to the front burner.
For several years, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program has sought to bring these problems to the attention of the international donor community. Washington’s new determination to engage with Pakistan on its development challenges – as evidenced by President Obama’s signing of the Kerry-Lugar bill and USAID administrator Raj Shah’s comments on aid to Pakistan – are welcome, but long overdue.
The crux of the current debate on aid to Pakistan is how to maximize its effectiveness – that is, how to ensure that the aid gets to its intended recipients and is used for its intended purposes. Washington will not soon forget former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s admission last year that $10 billion in American aid provided to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda was instead diverted to strengthen Pakistani defenses against archrival India.
What Pakistani institutions will Washington use to channel its aid monies? In recent months, the U.S. government has considered both Pakistani NGOs and government agencies. It is now clear that Washington prefers to work with the latter, concluding that public institutions in Pakistan are better equipped to manage large infusions of capital and are more sustainable than those in civil society.
This conclusion is flawed. Simply putting all its aid eggs in the Pakistani government basket will not improve U.S. aid delivery to Pakistan, as Islamabad is seriously governance-challenged.
Granted, Islamabad is not hopelessly corrupt. It was not in the bottom 20 percent of Transparency International’s 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (Pakistan ranked 139 out of 180), and enjoyed the highest ranking of any South Asian country in the World Bank’s 2010 Doing Business report.
At the same time, the Pakistani state repeatedly fails to provide basic services to its population – not just in the tribal areas, but also in cities like Karachi, where 30,000 people die each year from consuming unsafe water.
Where basic services are provided, Islamabad favors wealthy, landed, and politically connected interests over those of the most needy – the very people with the most desperate need for international aid. Last year, government authorities established a computerized lottery that was supposed to award thousands of free tractors to randomly selected small farmers across Pakistan. However, among the “winners” were large landowners – including family members of a Pakistani parliamentarian.
Working through Islamabad on aid provision is essential. However, the United States also needs to diversify its aid partners in Pakistan.
For starters, Washington should look within civil society. This rich and vibrant sector is greatly underappreciated in Washington. The Hisaar Foundation, for example, is one of the only organizations in Pakistan focusing on water, food, and livelihood security.
The country’s Islamic charities also play a crucial role. Much of the aid rendered to health facilities and schools in Pakistan comes from Muslim welfare associations. Perhaps the most well-known such charity in Pakistan – the Edhi Foundation – receives tens of millions of dollars each year in unsolicited funds.
Washington should also be targeting venture capital groups. The Acumen Fund is a nonprofit venture fund that seeks to create markets for essential goods and services where they do not exist. The fund has launched an initiative with a Pakistani nonprofit organization to bring water-conserving drip irrigation to 20,000-30,000 Pakistani small farmers in the parched province of Sindh.
Such collaborative investment is a far cry from the opaque, exploitative foreign private investment cropping up in Pakistan these days – particularly in the context of agricultural financing – and deserves a closer look.
With all the talk in Washington about developing a strategic dialogue with Islamabad and ensuring the latter plays a central part in U.S. aid provision to Pakistan, it is easy to forget that Pakistan’s 175 million people have much to offer as well. These ample human resources – and their institutions in civil society – should be embraced and be better integrated into international aid programs.
While Pakistan’s rapidly growing population may be impoverished, it is also tremendously youthful. If the masses can be properly educated and successfully integrated into the labor force, Pakistan could experience a “demographic dividend,” allowing it to defuse what many describe as the country’s population time bomb.
A demographic dividend in Pakistan, the subject of an upcoming Wilson Center conference, has the potential to reduce all of Pakistan’s threats – and to enable the country to move away from its deep, but very necessary, dependence on international aid.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Photo Credit: Water pipes feeding into trash infected waterway in Karachi, courtesy Flickr user NB77. -
‘NATO 2020’ Recommendations Avoid “New Security” Challenges
›May 25, 2010 // By Schuyler NullA recently released report, NATO 2020, outlines expert recommendations for the alliance’s new strategic concept. However, while pointing to a nighttime satellite image of the globe at a Wilson Center conference last week, Professor Peter Liotta of Salve Regina University said the report focuses too much on conventional self-defense, when most of the new security challenges of the 21st century will come from areas of the world “where the lights are out.”
In an interview with New Security Beat, Liotta criticized NATO 2020’s emphasis on what he sees as a reactive, rather than a proactive, stance. By ignoring “new security” vulnerabilities such as environmental and demographic challenges, NATO may end up creating more threats for itself down the line, he said.
The report briefly acknowledges that demographic change and environmental degradation represent sources of uncertainty in forecasting global trends. However, neither are included as major threats to the alliance. Instead, the authors say the most probable threats are nuclear or non-nuclear armed ballistic missiles, terror attacks, and cyber intrusion.
Discussions about non-traditional security vulnerabilities often produce contentious and conflicting viewpoints, which makes it easier to ignore them, said Liotta. However, it is important for NATO to realize that security threats – even more conventional ones – do not exist in isolation.
Liotta said the continued focus on NATO’s Article 5, the invocation of collective self-defense, overshadows other important foundations of the alliance. For example, Article 2, which encourages “promoting conditions of stability,” could be invoked to help the alliance address non-traditional security threats.
In his presentation, Liotta, formerly of the U.S. Naval War College, cited mass migration, water scarcity, and low probability, high-risk events, such as rapid sea-level rise from Arctic ice melt, as examples of challenges that NATO should be preparing to meet. He also drew attention to the security challenges of a burgeoning global population, saying that rapid growth and urbanization will produce 600 cities with more than one million people by 2025.
Such extreme events as the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, which killed about 90,000 people and left five million homeless, might be a symptom of the strain our growing population has placed on the Earth’s natural systems, said Liotta. Scientists point out that an earthquake of such magnitude has never been seen in Sichuan and that large construction projects – particularly a large dam and reservoir that lie within 550 yards of the fault line – have likely had a considerable effect on local geology.
In Europe’s current deployment-adverse, difficult fiscal environment, it is perhaps understandable that NATO planners would focus on concrete threats rather than emerging vulnerabilities. But, as Liotta argues, the consequences for ignoring these new security challenges could be no less dire.
Sources: Daily Mail, Foreign Policy, NATO, Telegraph.
Photo Credit: “The Night Lights of Planet Earth” courtesy of flickr user woodleywonderworks. -
21st Century Water
›The Economist published this week For Want of a Drink, its special report on water. The report, a compilation of 11 articles, is a mix of surveys of global management strategies, health impacts, and economic considerations on the one hand, and deeper looks into specific practices in Singapore, India, and China on the other. Most interesting for New Security Beat readers is the article “To the Last Drop: How to Avoid Water Wars.” The article states there have been “no true water wars,” but goes on to question whether the pressures of climate change and population growth could generate different outcomes in the future. While the challenges laid out are manifold, the article concludes that potential for cooperation is equally present. “The secret is to look for benefits and then try to share them. If that is done, water can bring competitors together.”Global Change: Impacts on Water and Food Security, published by IFPRI in collaboration with CGIAR and the Third World Centre for Water Management, is an anthology of focused articles studying “the interplay between globalization, water management, and food security.” While heavily focused on trade and finance, the articles span the spectrum of food and water challenges, from biofuels to the global fish trade. Overall, the book finds that “global change provides more opportunities than challenges,” but taking advantage of globalization’s opportunities demands “comprehensive water and food policy reforms.”
