Showing posts from category water.
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World Population Day 2012: Looking Beyond Reproductive Health
›How should the seven billion or so of us on Earth mark World Population Day? Today, major global players are focusing on increasing access to family planning around the world. But there are other important aspects to population that also deserve our sustained attention.
The links between demography and development have come into the limelight over the last few months, first as advocates decried the last minute removal of reproductive rights language from the Rio+20 outcome document and now as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation prepares a massive funding push for reproductive health (starting today, not coincidentally).
“Multiple crises – food, fuel, and financial – have caused significant suffering and served as a wake-up call about the need to pay far more attention to the building blocks of sustainable development,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in an address for today. “Reproductive health is an indispensable part of the sustainable development equation.”
The sustainable development connection is fairly obvious. Environmental destruction in some of the most biodiversity-rich parts of the world has complex but significant population drivers, as Wilson Center consultant Laurie Mazur explains:Human impact on the environment is mediated by a host of factors, including culture, technology, institutions, and market forces. And inequitable socioeconomic systems mean that some human beings have far greater impact than others.
“Often, the value of biodiversity becomes apparent only when it is lost,” Mazur continues. “For example, with the global decline of honeybee populations, growers can now calculate the monetary value of pollination services that were once provided for free by nature. ‘Bee pollination is worth $190 billion,’ said Pavan Sukhdev, a Yale environmental economist, in an interview with Bloomberg. ‘But when did a bee ever send you an invoice?’”
But some generalizations can be made. We live on a planet dominated and transformed by human activity. As we have become more numerous, we have also become more adept at altering ecosystems for human use, replacing species-rich natural landscapes with simpler monocultures.
In other areas, population drivers threaten more basic scarcities: food and water, which in turn impede development and cost human lives. Some of the most successful efforts to address these relationships have combined women’s empowerment, family planning, and basic health interventions with site-based conservation and livelihood efforts.
But besides reproductive rights, there are other important aspects of population that deserve attention on this day.
The demographic dividend – a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics – requires more than just fertility decline to take effect in countries. Economic and social policies that prepare and enable young people to enter the workforce are just as important.
And the Arab Spring helps illustrate the complex relationship between population and democracy. “Among the five countries where revolt took root, those with the earliest success in ousting autocratic leaders also had the most mature age structures and the least youthful populations,” writes Wilson Center consultant and demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. The work of fellow Wilson Center consulting demographer Richard Cincotta shows that countries with very young age structures are prone both to higher incidence of civil conflict and undemocratic governance. What happens next in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria will further test the connection between youth and democracy.
In South Asia, Madsen finds that as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined, their demographic paths are more closely parallel than expected. “For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not,” she writes in the first issue of the newly re-launched ECSP Report, “Afghanistan, Against the Odds: A Demographic Surprise.”
In more developed countries, population aging is a concern. At the Wilson Center last year, economists Andrew Mason and Ronald Lee explained the challenges that those on the other side of the “demographic divide” will face in the near future. From 2010 to 2015, 85 countries are projected to witness the largest absolute increase in history of their populations aged 60 and over, straining public welfare systems and reducing labor forces. It’s not the “catastrophe” that it has been portrayed to be in the media, they said, but like many demographic issues, it is a challenge that will require planning for.
These connections demonstrate the wide importance of population dynamics to understanding how the world works today. Demography is the study of us – all seven billion of us. Demography affects – and is affected by – economics, political stability, health, the environment, food security, foreign policy, development, and conflict. Let’s not overlook that breadth on this World Population Day 2012.
For more, be sure to read some of our additional resources from the recent archives:- Food Security in a Climate-Altered Future: More Than a Supply Problem
- Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics
- Uganda’s Demographic and Health Challenges Put Into Perspective With Newfound Oil
- New Surveys Generate Mixed Demographic Signals for East and Southern Africa
- In Building Resilience for a Changing World, Reproductive Health Is Key
- Demographic Security 101 (video)
- Yemen: Revisiting Demography After the Arab Spring
- Hania Zlotnik Discusses Latest Changes to UN Population Projections (audio)
- Book Review: ‘World Population Policies’
- Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us
- Joel E. Cohen on Solving the Resource-Population Equation in the Developing World (video)
Photo Credit: UN Day Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with students in October celebrating the seven billion mark, courtesy of Eskinder Debebe/UN Photo. -
Poor Planning, Population Boom Stress Abuja’s Water System, Says Pulitzer Center
›June 26, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodNigerian journalist Ameto Akpe, who recently spoke as part of the Wilson Center’s “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines” event, has published a new article on water scarcity in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s “Waiting for Water” series.
Abuja faces acute shortages due to insufficient government planning and a major population boom, she writes:The FCT [Federal Capital Territory] has seen an unprecedented population growth in the last 10 to 15 years. In 2006, population growth rate was pegged at 9.3 percent, the highest rate in the country and way above what the city’s planners envisaged. Recently, increased migration to the city has been spurred by terrorism attacks in the North, numerous incidences of kidnappings in the South, and the generally high unemployment rate in the country as millions of young graduates pour into the city in search of the very elusive promise of a “government job.”
Read the full article on the Pulitzer Center website.
Jibril Ibrahim, the Director of the FCT water board, the agency solely responsible for the production and supply of water in the territory, admits that the authorities did not see this coming. He says this unexpected population growth has overwhelmed existing water infrastructure and ruined the careful plans for water service delivery in the territory.
“This is what has made nonsense of the design we have in the city,” Ibrahim says. “Nobody believed that we were going to have this huge number of people and not even within this space of time.”
Patience Achakpa, executive secretary for the Women’s Environment Programme, believes that the government should have foreseen the potential attraction a city like Abuja presents to the urban migrant and should have put in place more efficient plans.
This lack of foresight means there is no pipe reticulation in many districts, particularly in peripheral areas. Even government housing projects are routinely built without being connected to the grid, simply lacking the crucial distribution network that would bring water to individual homes. Thus each household is forced to sink its own borehole, which in the long run has obvious implications on ground water.
Photo Credit: A water point in Gishiri, Abuja, courtesy of Ameto Akpe/Pulitzer Center. -
Alexandra Cousteau on the Global Water Crisis and Choosing Between the Environment and the Economy
›Above is a short discussion filmed after a full dialogue TV episode last week; for the full interview, please visit the Wilson Center.
“We have serious issues that we need to address, yet we’re largely unaware of them because water seems so abundant,” said Alexandra Cousteau in an interview at the Wilson Center. “That myth of abundance is finally reaching an age of limits.”
Cousteau spoke with John Milewski of the Wilson Center’s dialogue TV program, after an event on the recent global water security assessment by the U.S. intelligence community. She discussed the work of her organization, Blue Legacy, which seeks to raise awareness of the ‘global water crisis’ – from degrading quality to growing scarcity and the proliferation of water refugees.
Global Water Crisis
“Traditionally our understanding of the global water crisis has been very narrow,” said Cousteau. “We have talked about it mostly in terms of the very real water and sanitation crisis that is happening in the developing world.” Without minimizing the severity of the situation in developing countries or oversimplifying the tangled nature of their problems, she characterized these water and sanitation struggles as fundamentally “solvable.”
Cousteau argued that there are also substantial water problems in the United States. Pollution due to runoff and over-utilization of major riverways are threats that are much different from those in the past.
“In Nixon’s time, when he signed the Clean Water Act, it was because rivers like the Potomac were in such bad shape, and they could see it from their office windows,” she said. “But the threats to our water are different today…before, it was industrial effluent, and what we were putting in the water that we could see. The Hudson River would change color daily based on the paper mills and what color paper they were printing that day.”
Today, chemicals may impact water quality without changing the appearance of water: “You don’t see it, the water can be perfectly transparent.”
Blue Legacy Expeditions
Cousteau has taken two expeditions with Blue Legacy to highlight water issues around the world. The first in 2009 was global; Cousteau and her team traveled from India to Botswana and beyond. Throughout the voyage, she worked to make her travels accessible to the general public and was surprised at her success.
“It was an experiment, but it worked. And when we came back to the United States, we got a lot of feedback, and one of the things people said was, ‘Gosh, that was an incredible adventure, thanks for taking us along for the ride! Clearly, there is a global water crisis, now I understand that. I’m just so relieved it’s not happening in America.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my Lord, I guess we have an expedition to do in America!’”
Her 2010 North America expedition focused on issues ranging from the over-exploited Colorado River to the polluted Mississippi, and sought to make water problems personal “at a time when our demand on water is at a tipping point.”
The Environment and the Economy
Cousteau’s interview was particularly timely in light of global economic troubles which have led some to say the environment should take a backseat. Cousteau said this doesn’t have to be the case. She emphasized the interconnected nature of the environment and the economy, saying that policymakers don’t have to choose to focus on one or the other.
“We feel like we have to make a choice between the economy and the environment, and that’s a false dilemma. A healthier environment is a more prosperous economy. And when we fail to realize that we don’t have to sacrifice one to have the other, then I think we wind up sacrificing a lot of the quality of life and the opportunity that we take for granted.”
Video Credit: Dialogue/Wilson Center and Alexandra Cousteau. -
Climate-Conflict Thresholds and Water as a Casualty of Conflict
›While numerous studies have examined the perils faced by businesses operating in conflict-affected or high-risk locations, Water as a Casualty of Conflict: Threats to Business and Society in High-Risk Areas, written by Kristina Donnelly, Mai-Lan Ha, Heather Cooley, and Jason Morrison, is the first such report to focus specifically on water. The report – a collaborative effort between the UN Global Compact and the Pacific Institute – aims to provide a framework for understanding the conflict-water-business nexus by first tracing the ways in which conflict and high-risk areas can adversely impact local and regional water systems and then illustrating the challenges such impacts can pose to businesses in conflict-affected or high-risk areas. Water as a Casualty of Conflict was published online this week and was introduced at a Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum panel session.
In an article titled “Climate Change and Violent Conflict,” appearing in the May 18th edition of Science, authors Jürgen Scheffran, Michael Brzoska, Jasmin Kominek, Michael Link, and Janpeter Schilling attempt to sort out some of the controversy surrounding the intersection of climate change and violent conflict. They urge greater interdisciplinary research to identify and provide solutions for possible “tipping points” where the impacts of climate change may prove too great for human adaptive capacity. Such research has been scarce due to difficulties in collecting sufficient data. Moreover, the authors note that many of the extant studies on climate change and conflict are flawed because of how they define violent conflict. The commonly-used Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute Oslo (UCDP-PRIO) Armed Conflict dataset, for instance, excludes by definition many riots, protests, incidences of livestock theft, and other violent or potentially violent behaviors. This is problematic because, as the authors point out, “in recent decades, climate variability may have been more associated with low-level violence and internal civil war – which fall below the UCDP-PRIO definition cutoff – than with armed conflict or war between countries.”
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African Nations Pioneer Natural Resource Accounting With ‘Gaborone Declaration’
›June 20, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodIn a move with potentially substantial ramifications for future sustainable development, 10 African nations have agreed to begin assigning monetary value to the benefits provided by non-commodity natural resources, including ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, and coral reefs.
Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania each affirmed their support for the “Gaborone Declaration” during last month’s Summit for Sustainability in Africa, co-hosted by Conservation International and the government of Botswana. The goal, according to Botswanan President Ian Khama, is to include these new valuations in national accounting, providing policymakers a clear perspective on the costs and benefits associated with the development or conservation of their natural resources for the first time.
Coming just prior to the Rio+20 conference, the signatories said they hoped assigning calculable costs to resource usage would encourage more sustainable development by bringing hitherto “invisible” costs and externalities into the open and onto the balance sheet.
Though the challenges of properly assessing the values of various ecosystem services are understandably many, the potential benefits of natural capital accounting are substantial.
According to SciDev.Net, the World Bank’s Vice President for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte spoke in support of the declaration at the summit. She pointed out, for example, the advantage of knowing that a hectare of mangrove trees in a certain region of Thailand has been calculated to provide approximately $16,000 of flood protection when considering whether to clear-cut and sell the raw wood (worth about $850), convert the region into a shrimp farm ($9,000), or preserve it.
Such accounting may be particularly beneficial to the Gaborone signatories and other African nations, given growing concern among experts about foreign investment in land, natural resources, and even water on the continent.
But the declaration – and the very idea of natural capital accounting – is not without controversy.
Some argue that commodifying such resources will actually encourage their destruction rather than protect them by ascribing monetary values to previously free and shared resources, thus advantaging richer stakeholders and nations at the expense of poorer ones. As Hannah Griffiths of the UK-based World Development Movement recently wrote in The Guardian, “the result [of natural resource accounting] would be the further privatisation of essential elements of our planet to which we all share rights and have responsibilities.”
Along these lines, Nigerian environmental activist and chair of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, has voiced his strenuous opposition to the plan made at the summit. “This declaration is blind to the fact that the bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for continued rape of African natural resources,” he said in SciDev.
However, the signatories of the Gaborone Declaration dismissed these concerns and pointed to the value of natural resource accounting for sustainable development.
“Africa is where sustained and sustainable economic growth and stewardship of natural wealth become one and the same thing,” said Kyte at the summit. “By endorsing natural capital accounting as a tool for delivering on more inclusive green growth, Africa is showing the way for the rest of the world.”
Conservation International CEO and Chairman Peter Seligmann agreed, calling the declaration “a very big deal, a very big moment, and a big step forward.” He connected it to the imminent Rio+20 conference as well, saying the pledge is “truly a beacon on the hill for the rest of societies” and that “it will be held up on top of that hill in Rio de Janeiro.”
Indeed, the World Bank has listed natural capital accounting as one of six key issues for Rio+20, and in a report last month titled Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development, noted that “it is vital that economic values for environmental assets be comparable to other economic values.”
The World Bank has already made significant progress in promoting the practice through its Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) global partnership, encouraging at least 24 countries to use some form of natural resource accounting to date. WAVES aims to sign up 50 more nations and 50 private corporations beginning at Rio+20, as a part of its “50:50 Campaign.”
WAVES and the Gaborone Declaration show that natural capital accounting is gaining momentum as a means to incentivize more sustainable development. The international news media is beginning to take notice as well. The results of the Rio+20 conference will be a good opportunity to gauge just how far the idea has come and what the extent of its future application might be.
Sources: Conservation International, The Guardian, SciDev.Net, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Saving the Sacred Rock,” courtesy of flickr user isurusen (Isuru Senevi); video: The World Bank. -
Gidon Bromberg at TEDx on Peacebuilding Through Water in the Middle East
›“Cooperation over water is not a privilege, it’s a necessity,” said Gidon Bromberg, co-director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, in a TEDx talk at Yale. He sees the shortage of water in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine as an opportunity to bring these contentious communities together – even more so during this period of upheaval in the region.
Water woes have long contributed to regional tensions, said Bromberg. Water rights between Israel and Palestine were supposed to be settled during the Oslo accords in 1993, but negotiations were unsuccessful and water discussions were consequently left unfinished. The lack of formal negotiations caused each side to seize whatever resources they could Although Jordan was not part of the negotiations, it does share water resources with Israel and the West Bank and thus has been impacted by the lack of formal allocation processes. Both Jordan and Israel have diverted flow of the Jordan River into dams and irrigation projects. As a result, the Jordan River has lost 98 percent of its historic flow and the Dead Sea has lost one-third of its surface area.
Today, Israel has restricted Palestinian water use such that Palestinians have access to water only once a week in winter and once every three weeks in the summer, leading them to store water in containers on their roofs, Bromberg said. Though mismanagement is as much to blame as conflict, he notes, Palestinians chafe under the limitations.
Yet Friends of the Earth Middle East has used this difficult situation to educate the public, propose reforms, and build trust between Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli communities. Bromberg highlighted “fear of a small but vocal minority on both sides” as a key factor in preventing dialogue between the communities, but insists that water can bring people together. Neighboring communities have to work together, he said, “not because they’re best friends,” but to improve their own water situations.
Friends of the Earth provides that opportunity with their Good Water Neighbors project and hopes the trust built between communities extends beyond water issues as well. Since communities have strong motives to solve these problems, they work together more effectively than high-level politicians who may not be as apt to collaborate.
A positive update on the state of the Jordan River given in an interview with ECSP in October suggests that Bromberg may be on to something.
Sources: Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth.
Video Credit: TEDx. -
Nancy Lindborg, The Huffington Post
For Yemen’s Future, Global Humanitarian Response Is Vital
›June 12, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Nancy Lindborg, appeared on The Huffington Post.
This weekend in Sana’a, I had dinner with a group of young men and women activists who are on the forefront of Yemen’s historic struggle for a better future. They turned out for change with great courage last year, and at dinner, with great eloquence they outlined for me the many challenges facing Yemen during this critical transition period: conflict in the north and south, weak government institutions, cultural barriers to greater women’s participation, an upended economy, and one of the world’s highest birthrates. And, as one man noted, it is difficult to engage the 70 percent of Yemeni people who live in rural areas in dialogue about the future when they are struggling just to find the basics of life: food, health, water.
His comment makes plain the rising, complex humanitarian crisis facing Yemen. At a time of historic political transition, nearly half of Yemen’s population is without enough to eat, and nearly one million children under the age of five are malnourished, putting them at greater risk of illness and disease. One in 10 Yemeni children do not live to the age of five. One in 10. This is a staggering and often untold part of the Yemen story: a story of chronic nationwide poverty that has deepened into crisis under the strain of continuing conflict and instability.
Unfortunately, in communities used to living on the edge, serious malnutrition is often not even recognized in children until they are so acutely ill that they need hospitalization.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Nancy Lindborg is the assistant administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Sources: U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Informal settlements near the Haddjah governorate, courtesy of E.U. Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection. -
Bringing Environment and Climate to the 2012 Population Association of America Annual Meeting
›June 5, 2012 // By Sandeep BathalaOver 2,100 participants attended the 2012 Population Association of America (PAA) annual meeting in San Francisco this May. PAA was established in 1930 to research issues related to human population. This year, for the first time, the meeting featured a notable contingent of demographers, sociologists, and public health professionals working on environmental connections.
I followed as many of the environment-population discussions on newly published or prospective research papers as possible (about 20 in total). I found four papers particularly noteworthy for the connections made to women, family planning, and climate change adaptation.
Samuel Codjoe of the University of Ghana spoke about adaptation to climate extremes in the Afram Plains during one of the population, health, and environment (PHE) panels organized by Population Action International. Although developed nations are historically the major contributors of greenhouse gases due to comparatively high levels of consumptions, developing countries are the most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change – in part because of continued population growth. As a result, adaptation strategies in countries like Ghana are particularly important; and given women’s often-outsized role in water and natural resource issues, a focus on gender-specific adaptation even more so.
Codjoe presented an analysis of preferred adaptation strategies to flood and drought, broken down by gender and three common occupations – farming, fishing, and charcoal production). He said he hopes his assessment – part of a collaborative research effort with Lucy K.A. Adzoyi-Atidoh of Lincoln University – will aid in the selection and implementation of successful adaptation options for communities and households in the future.
“Understanding differences in the priorities that women place on adaptation may prove to be important in the effectiveness of climate change adaptation – and the sustainability of communities,” he said.
David López-Carr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, speaking on behalf of a group of researchers with World Wildlife Fund, teased out the gender dynamic further when he presented on ways to help the conservation sector determine next steps for existing PHE projects. Practitioners from seven of the eight PHE projects currently implemented by conservation organizations (defined by having been involved for at least three years in bringing family planning to local communities) recently said the links to women’s empowerment were among the most important aspects of successful projects.
López-Carr therefore emphasized the need for additional research on how PHE projects can support and empower women, both economically and socially. He also noted, like Codjoe, the potential impact women often have on the management of their community’s natural resources, saying this was another area where research on the empowering effect of PHE programs can provide further backing for integrated programs.
Karen Hardee of Futures Group spoke about how the experiences of integrated PHE projects, despite most not being designed to respond to climate change specifically, have lessons to offer climate change efforts. Her work was done in partnership with the Population Reference Bureau, Population Action International, and U.S. Agency for International Development. She concluded that community-based adaptation approaches should consider population dynamics in vulnerability assessments. Meeting unmet need for family planning, she said, can assist communities adapting to climate change by building resilience. And as result, “PHE approaches should be able to qualify for funding under community-based adaptation programs.”
Shah Md. Atiqul Haq of the City University of Hong Kong presented research he conducted in Bangladesh that found that women tended to feel that a large family size was not advantageous during floods. This, he said, was indicative of their increased understanding of vulnerability and an endorsement of providing knowledge and access to family planning services as part of climate change adaptation strategies.
The inclusion of more environment, and particularly PHE, related presentations at this year’s conference was good to see – perhaps a sign that demography is becoming a more complex and comprehensive field, with a focus more on population structure and its interactions with other issues, rather than a singular fascination with growth.
In particular, panelists showed that the nexus between demography, gender equity, and climate change continues to grow in importance, both in the research and practitioner communities.
Photo Credit: Tribal women and children in Kerala state, India, courtesy of flickr user Eileen Delhi.
