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Geoff Dabelko at the Aspen Environment Forum: “We Have to Find Ways to Do Things Differently”
›July 9, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was in Colorado last month to participate in the fifth annual Aspen Environment Forum, a three-day series of discussions about some of the world’s most vexing environmental concerns, hosted jointly by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic. Dabelko took part in two panel discussions, considering recent efforts to “green” the U.S. military in one and addressing the nexus of climate change and conflict in the other.
The U.S. Department of Defense is currently pursuing an ambitious strategy to minimize its dependence on oil, aiming to produce 25 percent of its power from renewable energy sources by 2025. During the 75-minute “Is the Military a Model?” panel, Dabelko joined Sharon Burke of the Department of Defense, Sherri Goodman of CNA, and U.S. Army Major General Joseph Anderson to discuss the extent to which the military’s embrace of more efficient and alternative technologies can spur wider innovation and adoption. Many have previously cited the military’s role in developing technologies like the Global Positioning System and the internet as a reason for optimism in this regard.
The “Climate and Conflict” panel, meanwhile, addressed how and to what degree climate change might affect future conflicts. According to Scientific American, “the consensus was that climate change per se will not cause conflict, armed or otherwise, but will exacerbate existing conflicts and instabilities.”
This was Dabelko’s third trip to the Aspen Environment Forum, and he spoke enthusiastically about the event in a brief interview with genConnect, which was covering the event. “The experience has been excellent,” he remarked, highlighting the diversity of participants as one of the forum’s greatest strengths.Dabelko acknowledged that much work remains to be done to achieve environmental and energy-related goals, but praised the realistic and grounded approach of attendees: “We have a tremendous set of challenges, and we’re not yet really succeeding in addressing them. So there’s a self-reflection that what we’ve been doing isn’t necessarily getting us where we want to get, and so we have to find ways to do things differently.”
One way to improve, according to Dabelko, is to work on communications. “[We need to have] conversations about complex issues, [and we] need to understand how to make them more accessible and more simple. But ‘simple’ does not mean ‘dumb’ or ‘incorrect’…we need to get smarter about how to have these conversations with wider and [more] diverse audiences.”
Photo Credit: Geoff Dabelko, courtesy of the Aspen Institute. Video: genConnect. -
USAID Turns to Crowdsourcing to Map Loan Data
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The original version of this article, by Aaron Lovell, appeared on the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program Commons Lab blog.
On June 28, officials from USAID met at the Wilson Center to discuss a recent experiment in using crowdsourcing to help clean up and map data on development loans. The agency had 117,000 records on private loans made possible by their Development Credit Authority, which theoretically could be mapped and made available to the public. The problem? Location data for the loans was not standard and was difficult to parse. USAID decided to turn to “the crowd” and recruit interested volunteers from the Standby Task Force and GISCorps – two online volunteer communities – to help clean the data, making it available for additional analysis.
Shadrock Roberts, Stephanie Grosser, and D. Ben Swartley – all with USAID – discussed the results of the project. They were able to clean up the information at virtually no cost to the government, noting that they hope it will be an example for further collaboration between government and engaged volunteers.
“Our hope is that the case study will provide others in government with information and guidance to move forward with their own crowdsourcing projects. Whether the intent is opening data, increased engagement, or improved services, agencies must embrace new technologies that can bring citizens closer to their government,” the officials wrote in a recently released case study focused on the exercise. While the exercise resulted in high-quality output, Roberts et al. did provide advice for other agencies considering similar work. Grosser stressed the need to “crawl, walk, [then] run” – that is, start small with a few hundred records and then expand on that, as the system is refined.
But USAID sees crowdsourcing becoming a key part of improving government data. “We need to be working as hard to release relevant data we already have as we are to create it,” Roberts concluded, when discussing how the experience could apply more generally. “The crowd is willing to do research, data mining, and data cleanup.”
Sources: USAID. -
Guttmacher Updates Unmet Need Estimates, and West Africa’s Demographic Dividend Examined
›The Guttmacher Institute has updated their estimates for global contraceptive services, putting the number of women around the world who have an unmet need for modern family planning at 222 million (up from 215 million). Authors Susheela Singh and Jacqueline E. Darroch, in Adding It Up: Costs and Benefits of Contraceptive Services Estimates for 2012, also examine the estimated current costs of contraception, cost of meeting the current unmet need, and the money saved from having fewer unintended pregnancies. An estimated four billion dollars is currently spent on contraception in the developing world, and “the total cost of fully meeting the contraceptive needs of all women in the developing world with appropriate services would…be $8.1 billion per year.” Singh and Darroch note that there are substantial benefits to increasing access to contraception, including reduced infant and maternal mortality and lower education and health costs as smaller populations put less strain on existing systems. They conclude that “the gains that derive from meeting the contraceptive needs of all women in the developing world more than outweigh the financial costs.”How Can We Capitalize on the Demographic Dividend?, by Jean-Pierre Guengant of the Institute of Development Research, explores the connection between population age structure and economic growth in 12 West African countries (the West African Economic and Monetary Union plus Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, and Nigeria). While much of Africa has recently experienced economic growth between four and six percent, Guengant notes it has been “too low to allow for any substantial increase in per capita income levels” due to continued population growth. And he suggests that projections of declining fertility in much of Africa are overly optimistic. “Contrary to popular belief,” he writes, “the demographic future of sub-Saharan Africa has not been written.” Guengant extrapolates his own fertility projection using data beginning in 1960. If fertility declines rapidly, he writes, the larger proportion of people in the labor force could increase the GDP per capita and drive up the standard of living. -
UNHCR Report on East African Environmental Migrants: Long on Anecdotes, Short on Data
›July 6, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodAs part of the recently-concluded Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) presented a new report last week, titled Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Human Mobility: Perspectives of Refugees From the East and Horn of Africa. The report was created in order to “understand the extent to which refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons) in the East and Horn of Africa have perceived, experienced, and responded to climatic events and trends in recent years.”
In order to achieve this goal, UNHCR and its collaborators (including the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, the London School of Economics, and the University of Bonn) interviewed approximately 150 refugees and IDPs in parts of Ethiopia and Uganda.
While the narrative is more anecdotal than data-driven, it nevertheless identifies several apparent trends in climate-related migration:Overwhelmingly, stories of mobility associated with moving away from worsening impacts associated with climate variability followed a specific pattern. That is, where movement related to climatic stressors did occur, such movement was taken as a last resort (only after all efforts to remain and adopt other methods of adaptation had been exhausted), particularly where the land being left was self-owned and only after all efforts to remain and try a number of alternative forms of adaptation had failed. Where movement occurred, in most cases it was likely to be internal, circular, and temporary rather than cross-border and permanent.
Stories of international migration were rare, and generally occurred either because migrants already lived near a border and were familiar with the area, or because they had encountered violent conflict (often of a political nature) during an earlier intra-state relocation.
The report also mentions that a majority of those interviewed claimed to have noticed significant changes in weather patterns over a 10- to 15-year period. In fact, many interviewees frequently claimed to be able to distinguish “normal” climate variability from more “permanent” changes.
Significantly, Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Human Mobility highlights several ongoing sources of debate and controversy regarding the issue of climate-induced migration as well.
The links between climate change, migration, and violent conflict are not well understood. And the question of whether climate change precipitates conflict or merely exacerbates it is still unresolved, though research on the subject is ongoing.
The terminology used to describe climate migrants remains a hotly-contested issue as well. While terms like “environmental refugee” and the especially popular “climate refugee” can make for good headlines, the UNHCR report strongly disapproves of such terms, given that the word “refugee” has a very specific legal definition.
Indeed, there is still much debate over how to classify climate migrants. It has been pointed out, for instance, that it is virtually impossible to separate out the various factors that induce migration, and questions as to whether migration is forced or voluntary also persist. For the most part, the UNHCR report shies away from such contentious questions, aiming instead to present a general and “human” narrative designed to call attention to the plight of climate migrants.
Definitional debates aside, the issue of climate-induced migration has been in headlines recently. The Asian Development Bank reported in March that 42 million people were displaced in the region during the last two years due to storms, floods, and other extreme weather events. And Israel signaled a tougher stance on immigration by deporting South Sudanese refugees in the wake of a major Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection report warning of future climate-induced migration.
The particular vulnerability of women too is drawing increased interest. An article in Environmental Research Letters points out that “women tend to be poorer, less educated, have a lower health status, and have limited direct access to or ownership of natural resources,” and will therefore be disproportionately affected by climate change. Gender disparities must be accounted for in policymaking then, to ensure that future climate migration policies are equitable and inclusive, the author, Namrata Chindarkar, argues.
The challenges of defining and measuring the phenomenon remain – the UN Environment Program’s 2006 prediction of 50 million climate migrants by 2010 has not come true, and has even been a source of some embarrassment for the organization – but the recent UNHCR report is a timely reminder that climate-induced migration remains a major issue with tremendous long-term implications.
Sources: Asian Development Bank, Environmental Research Letters, Human Rights Education Association (HREA), The Jerusalem Post, The New Republic, National Geographic, OECD, Scientific American, Der Spiegel, UNHCR, The Washington Post.
Photo Credit: Displaced Somalis, courtesy of UNHCR. -
Hania Zlotnik Discusses Changes to Latest UN Population Projections
›Former UN Population Division Director Hania Zlotnik spoke recently at the Wilson Center discussing last year’s highly-publicized UN world population projections and explaining the methodology behind the figures. “The latest projections are very special,” she said, adding that “we think that this methodology is a lot better than what we had before.”
What accounts for such improvement? Zlotnik said it has a lot to do with greater availability of data. “The UN has been…mandated by governments to produce population estimates since the 1950s,” she stated, and they have refined their projections process over the years based on an increasing record of data and identification of some “patterns that can inform the future.”Former UN Population Division Director Hania Zlotnik spoke recently at the Wilson Center discussing last year’s highly-publicized UN world population projections and explaining the methodology behind the figures. “The latest projections are very special,” she said, adding that “we think that this methodology is a lot better than what we had before.”
What accounts for such improvement? Zlotnik said it has a lot to do with greater availability of data. “The UN has been…mandated by governments to produce population estimates since the 1950s,” she stated, and they have refined their projections process over the years based on an increasing record of data and identification of some “patterns that can inform the future.”
The increasingly large dataset accumulated during this process is particularly important because of what Zlotnik called “inertia” in population change. “There’s something called ‘population momentum,’ where the population changes on the basis of how many people have already been accumulated on the planet,” she explained, pointing out that many of the people included in the UN’s population projections for 2050 have already been born.
This inertia helps make population projections fairly accurate, but last year’s projections differed from previous efforts in two significant ways.
First, the UN Population Division provided projections not just to 2050 but also to 2100. These more long-term projections estimated an end-of-century population of more than 10 billion – notably higher than previous reports, which had predicted that population would stabilize mid-century at around nine billion.
Second, the underlying methodology used shifted from a deterministic to a probabilistic approach that, according to Zlotnik, does a better job capturing variability in each country’s fertility rate over the next century. “Essentially,” she explained, “a model was developed for every country that takes into account the past path of fertility change [and] also takes into account changes that have happened in other countries…Then [it] does a simulation for the future for every country, in which 100,000 paths are projected, essentially by throwing dice, and then the central path of those 100,000 is used to project the future.”
Zlotnik cautioned that projecting so far into the future is an inexact – albeit necessary – science: “Of course, as we go further into the future, the numbers are more subject to uncertainty. But [the long-term projections] help us give people a better feeling of how important it is to change trends from here to 2050, so that we ensure that, at the end of the century, the number of people on the planet is sustainable.”
“In order to make sure that the population projections made by the United Nations [are realized],” Zlotnik said, “it’s very important that fertility continues to decline, and especially that fertility decline happens in the countries that still have very high fertility.”
“Fertility decline happens in many ways,” she continued, “but the immediate reason why fertility can be reduced is that more people use modern methods of contraception.” -
An Update on PRB’s Population, Health, and Environment Project Map
›As reproductive rights advocates reflect on their disappointment with the outcome of last week’s Rio+20 summit, it is encouraging to see that population, health, and environment (PHE) projects – which fundamentally connect women’s health with sustainable development – continue to sprout up around the world. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) launched their community-supported PHE Project Map in March 2010, and since then, the map has grown to include 76 projects across three continents, and has been viewed more than 82,000 times.
The goal of the map is to show which organizations are doing what PHE work where and when. While the map highlights expected hotspots like Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines, it also brings into focus countries that may not necessarily come to mind when thinking about PHE – South Africa, Venezuela, and Vietnam being among them. The map is updated on a rolling basis, and has grown substantially during its first two years.
These numbers should offer encouragement to reproductive rights and sustainable development advocates. Even if world leaders are still struggling to integrate these issues into a global development framework, NGOs, local nonprofits, and development agencies across the world are moving full-speed ahead to improve healthcare, strengthen ecosystems, and empower women and men across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
To add a project to the map, contact PRB’s Rachel Yavinksy at ryavinsky@prb.org. -
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, The Huffington Post
Global Threats Exist, But Also Many Global Demographic Opportunities for the United States
›July 3, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba, appeared on The Huffington Post.
Events like the Arab Spring gave birth to a generation of demographic converts in the national security community. Many are now convinced that demography matters because demographers today can clearly show how youthful population profiles in the developing world could lead to conflicts over the next 20 years – a major concern for policymakers.
Too much focus on demography and conflict, though, means policymakers miss opportunities for cooperation.
We are used to thinking of the wealthy and stable “Global North” and the poor and tumultuous “Global South,” but a demographic divide within the developing world is emerging, a third category of states that are growing older, more urban, more prosperous, more peaceful, and active in international affairs. These states – particularly India, Brazil, and South Africa – represent opportunities for building U.S. and world security.
Even as it maintains its longstanding relationships in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world, the U.S. should be more assertive in seeking partnerships with India as both a counterbalance to China and as a global security partner in addressing piracy and terrorism and in distributing international aid.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Photo Credit: Tahrir 2011, courtesy of flickr user Denis Bocquet. -
Top 10 Posts for June 2012
›With the focus on sustainable development last month, Rio+20 coverage and related-population, health, and environment stories crept into the top posts (measured by unique pageviews). Carl Haub of Population Reference Bureau made a surprise appearance too with his update on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s latest demographic and health survey coming in at number three. To read ECSP’s full coverage of the 20th anniversary of the UN Earth Summit, see a full line-up of posts from Sandeep Bathala and our partners here.
1. India’s Maoists: South Asia’s “Other” Insurgency
2. The Year Ahead in Political Demography: Top Issues to Watch
3. Republic of Congo Demographic and Health Survey Shows High Maternal Health, But No Fertility Decline
4. In Search of a New Security Narrative: The National Conversation Series Launches at the Wilson Center
5. Reading Radar: USAID’s New Global Health Framework and Delivering Equity in Health Interventions
6. Guest Contributor Tim Hanstad: Poor Land Tenure: A Key Component to Why Nations Fail
7. Pop at Rio+20: Getting Women’s Rights on the Agenda
8. Bringing Environment and Climate to the 2012 Population Association of America Annual Meeting
9. On the Beat: Sex and Sustainability on the Road to Rio+20
10. PHE and Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Stronger Together
A Publication of the Stimson Center.
