A vast symphony of natural processes sustains our life on Earth. Recognizing the complex interdependence of nature’s concert reminds us of a simple fact: the social, economic, and environmental challenges we face are not isolated from one another, and neither are their solutions. Tom Friedman drives this point home in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Connecting Nature’s Dots.”

“We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems—climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet—separately,” Friedman argues.

Financial Times South Asia Bureau Chief James Lamont has written a flood of environment-as-political-dialogue stories this week! (Well, only two, but that constitutes a deluge in the world of environmental peacebuilding.)

On Monday he wrote about India and China’s agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from seasonal snow and glacier melt is finally seeping into the consciousness of policymakers outside the climate world, including the diplomatic and security communities. Lamont frames the step as a rare instance of cooperation in a strategically sensitive area at the center of a 1962 territorial war between the countries.

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.

A Population Reference Bureau (PRB) policy brief considers several methods of integrating population, health, and environment initiatives in Uganda, citing the Ruhiira Millennium Village Project and the Conservation Through Public Health program as successful examples. Also new from PRB: Farzaneh (Nazy) Roudi explains that Iran’s “youth bulge, along with changes in women’s fertility and reproductive health, provide a backdrop for understanding Iran’s current political instability.”

In “Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift From the Bush Years to the Obama Era,” Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies compares U.S. government spending on climate change and military, arguing for dedicating more resources to climate security.

A new report from Global Witness reveals that all main warring parties in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo—including rebel groups and members of the Congolese national army—are heavily involved in the mineral trade in North and South Kivu provinces.

In the Spring 2009 edition of The New Atlantis, Kendra Okonski asks if water is a human right, while Travis Kavulla looks at “Aids Relief and Moral Myopia” in Africa, arguing that the Western public-health lobby “must realize that HIV has a social dimension that must be addressed.”

“The natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, as population pressures mount in the Arab countries,” says the 2009 Arab Human Development Report, which was published this week by the UN Development Programme. A launch event in Washington, DC, features New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Wilson Center scholar Robin Wright.

A special issue of IHDP Update focuses on “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” a synthesis report tied to the recent GECHS conference. Articles by GECHS members, including Karen O’Brien and Alexander Lopez, address water and sanitation, the global financial crisis, poverty, and transborder environmental governance in Latin America.

An op-ed by Stanley Weiss in the New York Times argues that the best way to bring water–and peace–to the Middle East is to ship it from Turkey. A response by Gabriel Eckstein in the International Water Law Project blog argues that “transporting water from Turkey to where it is needed will require negotiations of Herculean proportion.”

CoCooN, a new international program sponsored by The Netherlands on conflict and cooperation over natural resources, recently posted two powerpoint presentations explaining its goals and the matchmaking workshops it will hold in Addis Ababa, Bogota, and Hanoi. The deadline for applications is August 5.

Two new IFPRI research papers focus on the consequences of climate change for poor farmers in Africa and provide policymakers with adaptation strategies. “Economywide Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa” analyzes two possible options for the region. “Soil and Water Conservation Technologies: A Buffer Against Production Risk in the Face of Climate Change?” investigates the impact of different soil and water conservation technologies on the variance of crop production in Ethiopia.

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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Climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back” for California’s precarious water system, said W. Michael Hanemann of the University of California, Berkeley, at an event hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 15, 2009. He was joined by Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne, who discussed some of Australia’s policy responses to its increasingly dry, variable climate.

“I don’t know of an armed conflict that has got a single cause,” said International Alert Secretary General Dan Smith at an event sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 10, 2009. “Our argument is simply that climate change adds another major variable into that mix.” Smith was joined by Shruti Mehrotra, a senior consultant to International Alert on climate change, for a nuanced discussion of climate change’s potential impacts on global stability.

The Netherlands and Bangladesh: Capacity Matters

Both the Netherlands and Bangladesh are low-lying coastal countries vulnerable to sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Yet the Netherlands is “a wealthy country with stable government that’s transparent and accountable to the people,” said Smith. “A country like Bangladesh which is poor, which has got democracy but it’s a very iffy democracy—it’s really still in a state of transition—and which does not itself have the resources to handle those problems” could experience “great social pressure as a consequence of climate change,” he said.

Cascading Impacts: Water, Food, Livelihoods

Four hundred million people depend on the glacier-fed Ganges-Brahmaputra river system for water, food, and industry, said Smith. “A very large number of people’s livelihoods are going to be affected if water management in the Ganges-Brahmaputra area is not adequate to the task” of adapting to changing precipitation patterns and melting glaciers.

Seventy percent of Peruvians depend on glacial runoff for their water needs, according to Smith. But the Andean glaciers will essentially melt and disappear by 2015, meaning that an initial excess of water will be followed by a terrible deficit, said Smith. The impacts on Peruvian society will largely depend on how well the government, the private sector, and civil society mobilize to manage their water supply.

Scarce Resources: Migration and Conflict

Scarcer resources may lead to mass migration and conflict, said Smith, but he urged the audience to be wary of the “factoids and guesstimates being thrown around about how many people will migrate under the pressure of climate change.”

People sometimes move to avoid conflict, but “very often, unwittingly, they become the vector of conflict themselves,” said Smith. Most climate-induced migration is likely to be within a country or within a region, so “a lot of that migration is going to be people moving from areas which are no longer viable to areas which are barely viable—indeed, where their arrival threatens the viability of the area into which they’re moving,” he said.

According to International Alert’s report A climate of conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, there are 46 countries that will be at high risk of violent conflict due to the intersecting impacts of climate change and economic, political, and social problems.

Envisioning Adaptation

No matter what happens at the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, people will need to adapt to the changes already underway in the climate system. But if adaptation is seen as a purely technical process, it will fail, said Smith. It is a cultural process that will only work if people have the chance to express their opinions and misgivings—and then buy into it.

“Most of development discourse is not being taken into account in these environmental negotiations,” said Mehrotra. Most climate negotiators are climate scientists or diplomats, not development practitioners. But in low-income countries, climate change will primarily be a development issue. “There is a potential that huge amounts of money will be put into this [adaptation], using a way of thinking about development from the 1970s,” warned Mehrotra.

Photos: Dan Smith and Shruti Mehrotra. Courtesy of David Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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