The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has claimed responsibility for a May 26 night attack on a Shell oil facility. A government spokesman confirmed the explosion, suggesting “that explosives might have been used by miscreants.” Through its website, MEND claims that 11 deaths resulted from the blast, although officials deny that anyone was hurt. The Niger Delta has long been plagued by violence, including the January 2006 kidnapping of four Shell workers by MEND and the October 1998 explosion that killed more than 1,000 people in Jesse, Nigeria. These and other episodes of violence—including pipeline sabotaging and kidnapping—have regularly disrupted the Niger Delta. Anger over increased economic marginalization—in 2006, Nigeria ranked 159th out of 177 countries on the UN Human Development Index—distrust of the national government, and a lack of effective avenues of recourse for those left behind by Nigeria’s oil boom have driven violent protests against the state and international oil corporations. Moreover, local people, many of whom live on less than $1 per day, sometimes cut holes in the pipes to siphon oil, which can inadvertently cause dangerous explosions.

Earlier this month, more than 100 people were killed when a construction vehicle struck an oil pipeline in Nigeria, reports the Nigerian Red Cross. Reports indicate that this event was an accident, but the explosion nevertheless prompted the editorial board of the Abuja-based newspaper Leadership to suggest that “all those who live near oil pipelines should consider relocating to safer places,” and to condemn the “wealth-seeking, greedy soldiers and policemen who are supposed to protect us and our property from criminals.”

For more on the politics and conflict surrounding oil in Nigeria, see this article by Kenneth Omeje, a research fellow at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, which examines Nigeria’s experience with oil extraction, the paradoxical circumstance of simultaneous resource scarcity and abundance, and the violent outbursts spawned by perceived government mismanagement of the country’s oil reserves.

The authors of “Reassessing HIV Prevention,” an article in the most recent issue of Science, question the assumptions behind current HIV prevention interventions in Africa. The authors challenge the commonly accepted belief that poverty and political instability increase a population’s vulnerability to HIV infection, arguing that it is not supported by the evidence. They point to data demonstrating that “African regions suffering from conflict, genocide, and rape, such as Rwanda, Congo, and Angola, are much less affected by AIDS than peaceful, wealthier, and more literate countries such as Botswana or Swaziland, which have the world’s highest HIV prevalence.”

Studies have shown that civil war and the breakdown of health service delivery result in an increase in preventable deaths—such as those due to malnutrition, diarrhea, and malaria—but perhaps HIV follows a different pattern. Clearly, there is a need for research that compares the spread of HIV/AIDS in politically stable, wealthier African countries with those torn by conflict.

At a 2007 ECSP event on the human cost of war, Dr. Frederick Burkle of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative—who will discuss public health management after natural disasters on June 17—admitted that the direct impact of poverty, inequality, and cultural incompatibilities on the spread of infectious diseases and mortality during complex emergencies is “difficult, if not impossible,” to measure.

After a few years left out in the cold, environmental security came home to a warm welcome at this year’s International Studies Association conference in San Francisco, drawing large crowds to many star-studded panels. Water, climate, energy, and AFRICOM were hot topics, and the military/intelligence communities were out in force. Many of the publishers indicated they were seeking to acquire titles or journals on environmental security, given the scarcity of books on the topic currently in the works. Demographic security even got a few shout-outs from well-placed supporters.

Climate change and energy security panels dominated the program. Chaired by the National Intelligence Council’s Mathew Burrows, “Militarization of Energy Security” featured contributors to the edited volume forthcoming from Daniel Moran and James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School—including original resource conflict gadfly Michael Klare, who claimed that lack of oil itself isn’t the problem, but that efforts to extract less accessible supplies would provoke violence in places like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Siberia. The intense discussion contrasted the approaches of China and the United States to ensuring energy security; Moran pointed out that China sent “bankers and oilmen” into Africa, whereas the United States created AFRICOM. “If the Chinese had created a military command in Africa, there wouldn’t be a dry seat in the Pentagon,” he added. David Hamon of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency observed that BP has a “security regime to protect their interests that would make a military blush.”

At “Climate Change, Natural Disasters, and Armed Conflict,” Clionadh Radleigh put the kibosh on the fearmongering predictions of waves of transnational “environmental refugees.” Similarly, Halvard Buhaug explored weaknesses in the reported links between climate change and conflict, calling for more rigorous research on this currently trendy topic. Christian Webersik’s research found links between negative rainfall and higher incidences of conflict in Somalia and Sudan, but he cautioned against using this relationship to predict climate-induced conflict.

A flood of panels on water, conflict, and cooperation took advantage of the conference’s West Coast location to call on water world heavies Aaron Wolf and Peter Gleick, who participated in a lively standing room-only roundtable chaired by ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko. Despite the obvious interest in the topic, publishers in the exhibit hall didn’t have much to offer on water and security.

AFRICOM drew some heat, especially from a panel of educators from military academies who explored peace parks and other “small-ball” approaches to conflict prevention. All the panelists were generally supportive of AFRICOM’s efforts to integrate nontraditional development work into the military’s portfolio—which, as discussant and retired U.S. Army Col. Maxie McFarland pointed out, it is already doing “by default” in Iraq and Afghanistan. McFarland cautioned, however, that “just because the Army can do it, doesn’t mean you want them to do it.” Air War College Professor Stephen Burgess predicted that the groundswell of climate change awareness would push the next president to include it in his or her National Security Strategy.

Rich Cincotta’s demographic security panel attracted significant interest—no small feat on the last day. The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Thomas Mahnken said that demographic trends and shocks are of “great interest to us in the government”—particularly forecasting that could identify what countries or regions the DoD should be worried about—particularly China and India (good thing demographer Jennifer Sciubba is on the case in his office).

The emphasis on prediction and forecasting stood out from the general trend of ISA panels, which mostly focus on analysis of current or past events. Mathew Burrows called for government and academia to “push the frontiers” on forecasting even further—particularly on the impacts of food security, water shortages, and environmentally induced migration.

Despite the warm, fuzzy feelings for environmental security, there were few panels devoted to general natural resource conflict, and none to post-conflict environmental peacebuilding (Michael Beevers contributed one of the few papers to explicitly address the topic).

What’ll be next year’s hot topics? Submit your proposals by May 30 for the 2009 ISA Annual Conference in New York City.

To download any of the papers mentioned above, visit the ISA’s online paper archive.

For more on ECSP at ISA, see “Environmental Security Is Hot Topic at the 2008 International Studies Association Conference.”

Concerned Ghanaian officials believe the country’s discovery of domestic oil reserves last year represents “perhaps the greatest managerial challenge” since its independence, reports IRIN News. Though oil revenues could boost Ghana’s sagging economy and improve its infrastructure, there are real fears that mismanagement could destabilize the country and exacerbate social inequalities. Francis Ackah, engineering manager of the Ghana National Petroleum Company (GNPC), confessed that the country currently lacks the “know-how” to manage the resource constructively.

In an attempt to avoid the “resource curse,” Ackah confirmed the government’s desire to implement the “Norway model” of resource revenue management, which deposits oil funds in a national petroleum fund at the central bank, hires external managers to invest the money, and uses the revenue to fund social services.

Ghanaian President John Kufuor warned that “oil sometimes proves the undoing” of countries blessed with reserves. Other oil-rich African countries—such as Nigeria, Chad, and Angola—have been plagued by insecurity and underdevelopment. Nigeria has been plagued by rebel attacks on strategic oil pipelines.

“The impact of climate change is going to be most likely so harmful that it would threaten governments,” said 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra K. Pachauri in an interview with Reuters earlier this week. Pachauri focused his remarks on Africa, whose one billion people are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and whose governments frequently lack the capacity to adapt to the impending changes.

“If the situation in Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, then if the world has a conscience it has to remove that scar,” Pachauri said. While a number of high-profile conflicts in Africa’s recent history have revolved around natural resources, Pachauri warned that environmental change could soon eclipse the so-called “resource curse” as a driver of conflict, citing research predicting that by 2020, climate change could leave between 75 million and 250 million additional Africans without access to water and could reduce the yields of farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture by half. “Climate change has the potential to be a problem for the maintenance of peace,” he said.

The rapidly worsening global food crisis has hit certain parts of Africa particularly hard—instigating riots in Egypt and Burkina Faso, for example—and with food and water becoming increasingly precious commodities, dire outcomes seem increasingly likely. “The answer,” Pachauri said, “is for developed nations to realize that we are living on one planet. We are all inhabitants of spaceship earth.” But, he conceded, “we are nowhere close yet.”

Meeting with world economic ministers in Washington, DC, this past weekend, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that IMF and World Bank officials “now need to devote 100 percent of our time” to ensuring political and democratic stability in the countries hit hardest by the global spike in food prices. He added that development gains made in the last five or ten years are in danger of being “totally destroyed.” Recent unrest in a number of developing countries—including Haiti, where the president was ousted last week, partially due to anger over food prices—underlines the urgency of this crisis.

Asian countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, which have spent the last decade working to strengthen their economies, may see their significant gains erased under this new economic strain. And they may be among the relatively lucky countries, with government ministries in place to provide subsidies and shield their populations from the worst effects of sky-high prices. In contrast, many sub-Saharan African countries have no safety net beyond reliance on international organizations like the World Food Program.

In many developing countries, where families typically spend between half and three-quarters of their total budget on food, World Bank President Robert Zoellick says that there “is no margin for survival.” Citizens in developing nations may abide corrupt governments while they are at least marginally able to feed their families, but when even that becomes impossible, “normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose,” reports Time magazine. “What Haiti’s riots show,” argued an op-ed in the Jamaica Gleaner, “is that there cannot be a secure democracy without food security.”

“A changing climate has been a feature of life in West Africa for thousands of years,” explain Oli Brown and Alec Crawford of the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Assessing the security implications of climate change for West Africa: Country case studies of Ghana and Burkina Faso. “Ghanaians and Burkinabes have not been passive recipients of climate change in the past and have developed many ingenious ways of adapting to their climate. Some analysts suggest that the inherent adaptability of the Sahelian peoples is one of their greatest assets. Nevertheless, this adaptability has been severely tested in the last few decades.”

Brown and Crawford identify several ways in which climate change could challenge economic and political stability in West Africa in general and Burkina Faso and Ghana in particular. They wrote their report after consulting with local agronomists, hydrologists, development specialists, and other experts. Responsibly, Brown and Crawford have deliberately narrowed the report’s focus from climate change’s potential security implications (which they acknowledge includes an extremely broad range of events) to climate change’s potential threats to 1) economic and 2) political stability.

In Ghana, climate variability is expected to aggravate five preexisting challenges: the north-south social divide (with poverty more pronounced in the rural north); the sharing of water between the north and the south (with the north using water primarily for agriculture and the south primarily for energy); the management of regional water sources; border security; and economic stability (if changes in climate reduced the profitability of cocoa production). Four main challenges were identified in Burkina Faso: food security; water availability; relations between pastoral and agricultural communities; and internal migration.

Non-climate factors—including governance, regional relations, and income distribution—play a significant role in determining a society’s vulnerability to climate-induced insecurity. Brown and Crawford emphasize that only extremely high levels of climate change will pose insurmountable challenges to economic and political stability in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which have both enjoyed relative peace over the past decade.

For more on climate change and security in West Africa, see Anthony Nyong’s article in ECSP Report 12.

Integrated population-health-environment (PHE) development programs can often produce greater improvements—at lower total cost—than multiple programs that each target only one sector. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko recently interviewed Lori Hunter, an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, about her work evaluating integrated PHE programs with colleague John Pielemeier. In the following ECSP podcast, Hunter discusses the challenges associated with encouraging men’s involvement in family planning, implementing integrated development projects on the ground, and designing projects that are sensitive to local residents’ livelihoods and other priority needs.