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Climate and Security Meets YouTube
›June 20, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoYou can now watch commentary from some of the 11 retired U.S. generals and admirals who contributed to National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, a report that is one of the more recent voices on the links between climate and security. A seven-minute video on YouTube features interview clips, press conference footage, and narrated background on the CNA Corp’s Military Advisory Board. If you would like longer versions, you can watch Generals Sullivan and Ward and Admiral Truly testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; or watch Generals Wald, Kern, and Farrell present the report for the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
One of the recommendations of these 11 retired flag officers is for the National Intelligence Council to produce a government-wide National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to assess climate’s threats from a U.S. national security perspective. Legislation calling for a NIE has been contentious on the Hill, with some Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee claiming precious time could not be wasted on such investigations in the midst of the war on terror.
Representative Edward J. Markey (D.-Mass.), who is chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, has a different view. In this video from the House floor he favorably cites the CNA report and defends the allocation of intelligence community resources to climate assessments.
And a final climate and security video recommendation, again from an ECSP meeting. Although the NSF-funded research is still in progress, initial results from Marc Levy (CIESIN), Charles Vörösmarty (University of New Hampshire), and Nils Petter Gleditsch (PRIO) on drought’s connections to violent conflict in sub-Saharan Africa indicate a statistically significant relationship. A substantive meeting summary gives you more details on their use of geo-referenced rainfall data and newly coded conflict data to provide the largely elusive quantitative evidence for these linkages. -
Not So Sweet: Conflict Cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire
›June 15, 2007 // By Karima TawfikRevenues from natural resources have funded and fueled civil conflicts in Africa—including oil in Nigeria, minerals in the DRC, and timber in Liberia. This month, Global Witness added cocoa—the main ingredient in chocolate—to the list of conflict resources, claiming that the cash crop has funded civil conflict in Côte d’Ivoire.
The world’s largest producer of cocoa, Côte d’Ivoire accounted for 40 percent of world production in 2006, and a quarter of the country’s inhabitants work in the cocoa sector. The current civil conflict began decades ago when northern Ivoirians migrated to high cocoa-producing land in the western part of the country. In the late 1990s, bloody clashes and discriminatory policies drove thousands of migrants off the land, and in 2002 the northern rebel group Forces Nouvelles (FN) began a military campaign against the southern-based government.
For the last five years, the rebels and the government have used revenues from the cocoa trade to fund the ongoing conflict. Côte d’Ivoire’s climate of corruption and lack of transparency, coupled with the global economy’s persistent demand for cocoa, has allowed the government to tap into US$38.5 million in cocoa revenues, according to Global Witness. In addition, the report claims that cocoa institutions (with the assent of the biggest multinational exporters’ union) used levies paid by international cocoa exporters to direct US$20.3 million to the government’s war effort in an effort to retain control of land in the war zone.
Currently, a European company, Gambit Investment Ltd, is facing allegations that it traded military helicopters for cocoa, which were possibly used in attacks on civilians. Global Witness reports that government helicopter attacks and executions killed 370 civilians in the principal cocoa-growing region between October 2002 and April 2003.
The rebels in the north control a tenth of Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa exports, using a system of blockades to extract taxes on cocoa moving through their territory. Global Witness alleges that the profits from this trade now serve as an additional incentive for the FN to continue to hold the north and resist reunification.
As in its successful campaigns to bring attention to “blood diamonds” across the continent, the international community must recognize that the cost of cocoa extends beyond its market price. The UN banned the exports of diamonds from Côte d’Ivoire in 2002. Until it, along with international financial institutions and individual governments, puts pressure on the chocolate industry to take concrete steps to promote transparency and reduce its role in the conflict, there will be no end to the civil strife in Côte d’Ivoire. -
If I Get Sick in a Combat Zone – Nicholas Kristof in Central Africa
›June 15, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeNicholas Kristof’s editorial (subscription required) in yesterday’s New York Times outlines the huge challenges facing health care in developing countries. In addition to poverty, inadequate facilities, insufficient medications, and lack of trained personnel, civil conflict and instability join his list of “great killers” that significantly impede efforts to improve health and development in Rwanda, Burundi, and other African countries. Death and disease from poor health are thus part of the “the vast human cost” of allowing conflicts to “fester in forgotten parts of the world.”
Similarly, speakers at a recent ECSP meeting series described ways that health and population issues can be both part of the problem and the solution to instability and conflict. Countries in conflict and post-conflict face almost insurmountable obstacles to providing adequate health care for their citizens. But improving health and health capacity (e.g., a better-trained workforce and improved infrastructure) is part and parcel of increasing a region’s stability.
Kristof finds answers in Paul Collier’s new book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. At the Wilson Center in May, Collier recommended four potential policy tools for assisting developing countries—aid, improved access to trade, foreign investment, and security and peacebuilding—yet pointed out that most of our time, attention, and money is dedicated to aid. He argued that a more well-rounded approach—one that recognizes that infrastructure and an educated workforce are necessary but not sufficient for development—has a higher likelihood of success. As Kristof says, “It’s pointless to build clinics when rebel groups are running around burning towns and shooting doctors.”
Ultimately, he calls on the West “not just to build hospitals and schools, but also to work with the African Union to provide security in areas that have been ravaged by rebellion and war.” Kristof deserves tremendous credit for making and publicizing the critical—but overlooked—connection between civil conflict and health. -
Environmental Trustbuilding Opportunities – DOD and the PLA
›June 2, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAs the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. and Soviet (then Russian) militaries conducted joint scientific assessment of radioactive threats in the highly militarized waters off Russia’s Northwest. The Norwegians started the dialogue with Gorbachev’s USSR a few years earlier and helped bring in the Americans as relations began to thaw. Environmental threats were an honest concern: Norwegians worried for example about irradiating their lucrative salmon industry and the Russian habit of decommissioning their nuclear submarines by just scuttling them with reactors intact worried everyone.
But scientific assessment and environmental management also served as a means to an end. It was a less controversial avenue for dialogue, one that allowed civilians and uniformed military on both sides of the superpower confrontation to meet, build trust, and begin cooperating. NATO went on to make such exchanges a fundamental element of its Partnership for Peace programs for engaging the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Such exchanges are now possible (again) between the United States and China. In the late years of the second Clinton Administration, the US Department of Defense and the People’s Liberation Army started dialogue on natural disaster preparedness and response, a non-warfighting mission both militaries were commonly asked to execute on home soil. The April 2001 Hainan incident and Secretary Donald Rumsfield’s absolutist reaction (severing all ties with China and ratcheting up the China as strategic military threat perspective) put an end to such plans for military to military environmental engagement. The attacks of 9-11 came four months later and this opportunity for engagement has languished since then.
Now Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has reopened the prospect for such environmental engagement. On his current Asian tour, Gates said there was an opportunity to “build trust over time” and even cited the U.S.-Soviet dialogue at the end of the Cold War as a model. DOD should re-energize its use of bilateral environmental agreements to regularize such an avenue to trust-building exchanges. Such exchanges should utilize environmental dialogue as both a means to bring deeper understanding and greater stability to the bilateral relationship while taking steps to redress real environmental challenges in both countries. In this way the environment should be an integral part of an engagement strategy that provides a new interpretation on the saying do well while doing good. -
Persian Gulf to the “New Gulf”: New Book Takes New Approach to U.S. Energy Relationships
›May 29, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesAs Americans grow increasingly uneasy with our reliance on oil imports from the Middle East, a new region in Africa—the Gulf of Guinea—is emerging as a pivotal oil exporter. An ambitious new book, Oil and Terrorism in the New Gulf, written by James J. F. Forest and Matthew V. Sousa, focuses on this region of Africa and highlights the U.S. strategic interest in its oil-producing countries: Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, and the island nations of Príncipe and São Tomé. This “New Gulf” not only provides the U.S. with a new oil supply, but also affords a chance to reframe our energy relationships.
Oil consumption is on the rise, with the United States leading the pack at nearly 25 percent of aggregate global oil use. Meanwhile, rapid industrialization and economic growth in India and China continues to push demand even higher. The Gulf of Guinea region is vying to meet the demand.
This book asks a critical question: how will the New Gulf cope with growing demand for oil in the face of pervasive poverty, weak governance, and corruption? The crux of the problem: stability in this region is an obstacle. According to the authors, stability is contingent on a calculated foreign policy framework, and the United States’ ability to learn from its mistakes in its quest for Middle East oil:Our continued support for undemocratic regimes, coupled with our willingness to do virtually anything to maintain open and reliable access to the oil resources of the Middle East, has produced increasing animosity throughout the region that will take years of hard work to reverse.
The authors advocate building energy relationships that avoid the Middle East model—a model beset by “shortsighted U.S. interests rather than long-term, fundamental U.S. values.” Instead, they say, America’s energy relationship with the New Gulf should be stable and cooperative, and built off a clear framework that promotes three, integrated priorities:- 1. Human security
- Economic development
- Democratization
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Not Just Outside the Box, But Without a Box: World Bank’s Marketplace Finalists
›May 22, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeThe finalists of the World Bank‘s annual Development Marketplace competition are presenting their winning projects this week in Washington, DC. Overall, 2,500 proposals were submitted on population, health, and nutrition, and the final 104 projects—hailing from 42 countries around the world—will be on display for all to see on May 22 and 23.
The Development Marketplace is sort of a micro-version of the Gates Foundation-sponsored Grand Challenge Initiative, in that it provides funding to non-traditional projects that would otherwise not be funded because they fall outside the development community’s comfort level. Innovative projects are something of a double-edged sword—funders tend to be turned off by their uniqueness; yet if successful, these projects could serve as useful models in other development settings.
The finalists’ projects range from selling soap to buy medicine in the
I was thrilled to participate as a judge in this competition. It was exciting to see so many novel ideas, from creative recycling of garbage to board games used to teach reproductive health. Choosing certain projects to advance to the next round was difficult, given the wide array of problems they were addressing. In the end, the projects that made it to this last round share a few characteristics – creativity, small-scale, and potential for replication in a variety of settings. Hopefully these new, small, non-traditional projects will help us solve the old, large, traditional problems.
World Bank staff have created their own blog for the Development Marketplace. Judges, attendees, contestants—and interested readers—are encouraged to comment. They will be updating the blog with stories about the projects throughout the two day competition. -
Halfway Gone: Tracking Progress on the MDGs
›May 15, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesRemember the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? We are approaching the halfway point marking the 15-year effort toward eradicating poverty, and improving livelihoods and sustainability. Taking stock of progress in reaching these targets could not come at a better time.
The Global Monitoring Report 2007 annually reviews progress on the MDG targets and highlights emerging priorities on achieving them. This year’s report focuses on gender equity and fragile states. According to the report, progress is evident, but it is clear there is much more work to be done, specifically in harmonizing aid and “translating good intent into viable outcomes on the ground.” It also says that promoting gender equity and empowerment of women can be a conduit to achieve targets for universal primary education, improved child mortality rates and maternal health, and reduced HIV/AIDS transmission—each an MDG in its own right. Similar themes are voiced—albeit with an emphasis on health disparities—in Save the Children’s latest report State of the World’s Mothers: Saving the Lives of Children Under 5.
One of the most interesting resources in tracking progress is The World Bank Group’s Online Atlas of the Millennium Development Goals, which maps each of the eight MDGs by country. The atlas is an easily digestible interface with visually stimulating functions that complement narrative progress reports.
Together, these reports provide a sobering snapshot of what still needs to be done. Indeed, others sources point to the lack of quality data for indicators within the MDGs, which makes tracking progress and assessing success extremely difficult. The Global Monitoring Report doesn’t mince words when it says that “[s]even years after the Millennium Summit at which the MDGs were adopted, there is yet to be a single country case where aid is being scaled up to support achieving the MDG agenda.” Continuing with the MDG development framework is important, but failing to scale up support and harmonize donor effort could further stall progress and “jeopardize the credibility of the program itself.” -
Saving the World
›What’s wrong with the world today? A whole lot. War in Iraq, poverty in rural America, malaria in Africa, global warming…the list is endless. But the editors of Foreign Policy think they have a way to solve these problems and more. The magazine’s new cover story, “21 Ways to Save the World,” is a collection of short essays on a wide range of global issues by some of the world’s leading thinkers.
Besides the interesting topics and the authors’ engaging styles, I like this series because it forces journalists and scholars—both of whom usually write about problems—to write about solutions. This shift is important because policymakers often get stumped when they hear that issues like high fertility and pollution are concerns of national security—what can they do about these seemingly insurmountable problems?
Most of the dilemmas and solutions presented in the article will be familiar to the informed reader. Amy Myers Jaffe extols the virtues of electricity. Seth Berkeley is optimistic about an AIDS vaccine. Jeffrey Sachs calls for malaria intervention. But some of the proposed solutions will be a tough sell for the policy audience.
For example, as he does elsewhere, Nicholas Eberstadt draws attention to the astonishingly high mortality of Russians—males in particular. He argues that if the United States intervenes, the benefits would be two-fold: humanitarian gains through Russian lives saved, and also political dividends in the form of a strengthened Russian democracy. But increased foreign aid for Russia’s health crisis will likely be a bitter pill for American politicians to swallow for a couple of reasons: First, there are still too many people occupying important government posts who got their first taste of power during the Cold War. For these folks, Russia is still the big bad bear and they may not be too keen on taking action to strengthen the Russian state. And for policymakers who are more humanitarian-minded, Eberstadt’s argument is still a hard sell because there’s simply no room for another needy state. Thanks to relentless campaigning by celebrities like Bono and philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, the U.S. government is finally attempting to gain traction in Africa and see the deplorable conditions there as both a humanitarian and security concern (AFRICOM is the most recent example of the United States trying to get ahead of the problem). Now they have to save Russia, too?
This gets at the larger issue with the collection of essays. While the editors of FP are noble in their aim to tackle all of the world’s troubles, I fear that policymakers will just continue to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of problems and the multitude of solutions—the deer-in-headlights response. Thomas Homer-Dixon is correct when he writes that problems are complex, systems are complex, and solutions must be complex. With so many problems of equal importance—in an environment where everyone has their issue—and so many solutions of equal viability, how are policymakers ever to choose?
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, and a consultant to Policy Planning in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense.
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