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Africa Atlas’s Exquisite Images Reveal Effects of 40 Years of Environmental Degradation
›June 16, 2008 // By Daniel Gleick
On June 10, at the 12th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment, a comprehensive look at the environmental devastation being wrought in Africa. Highlighting the ecological damage caused by high population growth, climate change, and the unsustainable use of natural resources, the atlas shows before-and-after satellite images of “disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers and degraded landscapes.” The above image, courtesy of UNEP, shows how Lake Chad has shrunk to one-twentieth of its size 30 years ago.
As The Independent put it: “Put it all together and you have a picture that is hard to credit, so enormous is the destruction.” Much of the impetus behind the atlas was to spur African governments to improve their environmental records.
On July 1, ECSP will host UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner at the Washington, DC, launch of the atlas. -
This Mangrove Forest Could Save Your Life: Protected Areas and Disaster Mitigation
›June 16, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski
Natural disasters “are not ‘natural’ at all but are the consequence of our scant regard for the ecosystem services our natural environment provides,” write the authors of “Natural Security: Protected areas and hazard mitigation,” fifth in the Arguments for Protection series published jointly by the World Wildlife Fund and Equilibrium. -
Public Health in the Wake of Disasters: An Overlooked Security Issue
›June 16, 2008 // By Kai Carter“Public health and public health infrastructure and systems in developed and developing countries must be seen as strategic and security issues that deserve international public health resource monitoring attention from disaster managers, urban planners, the global humanitarian community, World Health Organization authorities, and participating parties to war and conflict,” argue Frederick Burkle and P. Gregg Greenough of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in a new article in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Burkle, who is currently a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, will discuss public health management after natural disasters at the Center on June 17th.
In their article, “Impact of Public Health Emergencies on Modern Disaster Taxonomy, Planning, and Response,” Burkle and Greenough discuss the public health consequences of disasters, which they classify as natural; failures of human or technological systems; or conflict-based. The authors contend that disasters’ indirect effects are often overlooked, despite the fact that they continue months and even years after the event. Disaster severity is typically measured by direct morbidity and mortality; however, Burkle and Greenough highlight the need to account for the indirect deaths and illnesses caused by the devastation of public health and other infrastructure, poor and overcrowded living conditions, displacement, food insecurity, and disrupted livelihoods. Furthermore, as acute deaths decrease, humanitarian aid wanes—at a time when it is desperately needed to rebuild public health infrastructure.
In the case of conflict-based disasters,“health care and other essential services . . . may not return to baseline for more than a decade.” The authors note that in 2004, the Iraqi Ministry of Health announced that more lives had been lost to insufficient health services than to violence. Yet the former fails to garner the same attention and condemnation as the latter.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the safety, health, and infrastructure of even the wealthiest nations are at risk. No nation can afford to overlook the challenges highlighted by Burkle and Greenough. -
Weekly Reading
›New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century, a report from the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, was unveiled at a packed House Foreign Affairs Committee event this week.
The Economist continues to brush off those who worry that there are too many people consuming too many resources on Earth: “If global growth and development continue, worries about overpopulation may, in hindsight, seem a uniquely 20th century phenomenon.”
“Countries that stagnate are less able and sometimes less willing to help address transnational issues, many of which originate within their borders, including illegal migration; trafficking in narcotics, weapons, and persons; health threats such as HIV/AIDS and avian flu; and environmental concerns such as loss of biodiversity,” says USAID’s economic growth strategy.
“We know that the cruel indignities of life without clean water, adequate sanitation, sustainable livelihood, or democratic governance can deny us our basic freedoms as surely as any despotic regime,” says Condoleezza Rice, quoted in USAID’s report Expanding the Impact of Foreign Assistance Through Public-Private Alliances.
The Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa, headed by Wilson Center collaborator K. Y. Amoako, presented its report Securing Our Future to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon earlier this week. -
In Egypt, Record Food Prices Lead to Family Planning
›June 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAt Egypt’s National Population Conference on Monday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—whose government has struggled to respond to recent civil unrest over skyrocketing food prices and bread shortages—told attendees that high population growth is a “major challenge and fundamental obstacle” to development. The following day, Egyptian Minister of Health and Population Hatem el-Gabali announced an $80 million national family planning program with the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Egypt’s current fertility rate is 2.7 children per woman.
With a population of 81 million, Egypt is the 16th most populous country in the world, and, according to Philippe Fargues of the American University in Cairo (AUC), excluding the desert, Egypt has the highest population density in the world—twice that of Bangladesh.
Is the government’s plan a productive long-term response to the food crisis? How can it be part of a larger package? Or is population a distraction from the real issue of corruption, as identified by interviewees in the Washington Post article where I first read about the programs.
I posed these questions to a demography and security listserv and got some interesting responses. According to Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, a political scientist known best for her book Bare Branches on the security implications of imbalanced male-female population ratios: “Mubarak would do more to achieve his goal of 2.0 children per woman by a focused plan to raise the status of women, for example, by:- Outlawing polygamy, or erecting such high legal barriers to it that it becomes impractical
- Fully implementing CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women]
- Enforcing the ban on FGM [female genital mutilation]; 97% of Egyptian women are circumcised
- Educating women on a parity with men; the median number of years of schooling for men is 6.3; that for women is 4.4
- Raising average age at first marriage for rural women (current average is 19)
- Creating more parity in family law for women in matters such as divorce, inheritance, etc.—all of which can be found in CEDAW.”
“I don’t think population pressure is a distraction from the real issue of corruption; though the government of Egypt is indeed corrupt by developed-world standards (or maybe by any standard). Corruption, which is symptomatic of state weakness, limits the ability of the Egyptian government to address this problem credibly and effectively. But it doesn’t mean they are wrong about the problem.
I was actually struck by the modesty of official ambition to reduce the fertility rate from 2.7 (which is slightly above the world median, apparently) to 2.0 (which I’m guessing is pretty close to the middle). This assumes that, basically, a steady state population of, say, 100M Egyptians would be sustainable indefinitely. I’m not so sure of that. The impact of anticipated climate change on Egypt may prove quite formidable by the end of this century. I’m not sure a leveling off after some additional increase will do the trick….Too pessimistic? I hope so.” -
Climate Change, Resource Scarcity Motivating Local-Level Conflict in West Africa
›June 10, 2008 // By Daniel GleickThis weekend, Jan Egeland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on conflict, concluded a trip through Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to study the effects of climate change on the Sahel. The “trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009,” writes Egeland in one of his daily dispatches to IRIN News.
Climate change is causing diminished rainfall in the Sahel, and what rain there is comes in unpredictable flood/drought cycles, which alternately sweep away and wither crops. Local farmers adapt to these changes by using unsustainable farming practices, which may produce higher initial yields, but ultimately lead to lower long-term yields. Growing populations further strain these countries’ shrinking water supplies.
With limited water and fertile land, conflict and the potential for conflict are on the rise. “As was explained to me by the Nigerien minister of water who travelled with me in one of the many cars in our convoy through the desert, there are already many conflicts between and among nomads and agricultural people in Niger, and between various ethnic groups, because of the scarcity of resources,” writes Egeland. “Others have estimated that around Lake Chad there are as many as 30 or more named armed groups, and the potential for increased conflict is endless.” These conflicts are almost universally local—in Mali alone, “there are hundreds of small and quite localized conflicts,” he says. The brewing and active conflicts fuel arms trafficking, a security concern in its own right.
Egeland believes that major international investment in climate change adaptation is important to reducing both poverty and the potential for conflict in the region. He calls for developed countries to provide both monetary and technical aid to African countries struggling to adapt to the effects of climate change, and he plans to continue his advocacy in preparation for the 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen. -
Climate Change, Migration, Conflict: Are the Links Overblown?
›June 9, 2008 // By Wilson Center Staff“Experts say a third of Bangladesh’s coastline could be flooded if the sea rises one metre in the next 50 years, creating an additional 20 million Bangladeshis displaced from their homes and farms,” says a recent article from Reuters, echoing a refrain about the links between climate change, migration, and instability that has become common in news stories and think tank reports over the past several months.
Yet not everyone agrees that climate change will lead to massive, destabilizing human migrations. “Contrary to conjecture from security researchers, we find little evidence that migration will exacerbate already volatile situations in the developing world,” write Clionadh Raleigh and Lisa Jordan in “Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Migration and Conflict,” a paper prepared for the March 2008 World Bank “Social Dimensions of Climate Change” workshop. “As the people most affected by climate change are typically the poorest and least powerful within a country, they are less capable of waging significant conflicts to redress grievances against neighbors or governments.” In addition, they maintain, environmental migration tends to be short-term and internal, further lessening the likelihood that it will lead to conflict.
Although environmental degradation can increase people’s vulnerability to floods and landslides, so can “unequal patterns of asset ownership and income, rural land tenure systems, population growth in marginal areas, and governments’ land access policies,” say Raleigh and Jordan, and it is important that climate change not make natural disaster risk analysis one-dimensional. The authors agree that Bangladesh will be highly vulnerable to floods and wind storms in the future, but argue that this does not necessarily make them potential “climate migrants,” as even people who are very vulnerable to climactic changes can—and do—develop resilience strategies for dealing with gradual and extreme changes. -
A Weekly Roundup
›“Climate change is potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security, and therefore to national security. Tackling its causes, mitigating its risks and preparing for and dealing with its consequences are critical to our future security, as well as protecting global prosperity and avoiding humanitarian disaster,” says the UK’s first National Security Strategy report.
A water-sharing deal will be essential to achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace, reports National Geographic magazine.
In the BBC’s Green Room, Gonzalo Oveido, a senior social policy adviser with IUCN, argues that the global food crisis will only be ameliorated if policymakers put greater emphasis on biodiversity and overall ecosystem health.
USAID has released The United States Commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, which outlines the U.S. government’s contribution toward meeting the eight goals by 2015. Fragile states face some of the steepest challenges to achieving the MDGs.
An article in Nature Conservancy magazine asks five conservation experts whether—and if so, how—conservation organizations should contribute to poverty alleviation.
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