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What You’re Saying: Uncommon Discourse on Climate-Security Linkages
›October 8, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffMarc Levy’s response to Halvard Buhaug’s much ballyhooed paper, “Climate not to blame for African civil wars,” has drawn a number of thoughtful, interesting responses from our readers.
Idean Salehyan, of PRIO and the University of North Texas, defends Halvard’s paper and points out that Marshall Burke and his colleagues (see “Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa”) are guilty of similar immodesty:I think Halvard would agree with all of this (I was a discussant on a previous version of this paper). His analysis simply points out problems with the Burke et al paper’s model specification. Buhaug’s is a modest contribution about model specification and appropriate data; it should be read as a response to an earlier paper rather than as a definitive statement about climate change and conflict. The headline is certainly provocative and unfortunate. However, he makes a useful corrective to overly simplistic causal claims, which typically dominate the popular literature on climate change and conflict. Yes, he could have been a little more modest with the title and with the conclusions, but then again, so could Burke and his colleagues.
Cullen Hendrix, of the Climate Change and African Political Stability team and also of the University of North Texas, highlights the complexity of the many degrees of conflict:Marc’s assessment is spot-on, so I won’t belabor the point other than to reiterate that Halvard is making a limited point about specific empirical relationships and causal pathways.
And Halvard himself chimes in as well:
In addition to the issues raised by Idean, I would add that there’s an unfortunate tendency to think about social conflict only through the lens of civil war. The environment and conflict literature is dominated by such studies. While civil war is undoubtedly an important subject of inquiry, there are many types of social conflict that could be related to climate change, warming, and environmental shocks. We need to pay increasing attention to conflict that doesn’t fit neatly into either the interstate or intrastate war paradigm.I believe we’re all pretty much on the same page here. My article has little to do with climate change per se; instead is focuses on short-term climate variability and the extent to which it affects the risk of intrastate armed conflict. Yet, as climate change is expected to bring about more variability and less predictability in future weather patterns, knowing how past climatic shocks or anomalies relate to armed conflict is relevant.
To follow the full conversation or respond yourself, see Marc Levy’s post, “On the Beat: Climate-Security Linkages Lost in Translation.”
I absolutely agree that breaking out of the state-centered understanding of conflict is an important next step. Similarly, as Marc points to, more research is needed on possible scope conditions and longer-term indirect causal links that might connect climate with violent behavior. That said, we should not ignore established, robust correlates of conflict. Climate change is not likely to bring about conflict and war in well-functioning societies, so improving the quality of governance and creating opportunities for sustainable economic growth, regardless of the specific role of climate in all of this, are likely to remain key policy priorities.
Photo Credit: “Symposium scene,” courtesy of flickr user Ian W Scott. -
Rare Earths Wake-Up, Aid Shocks, and the “Securitization” Distraction
›October 8, 2010 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoHere are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.
• China’s willingness to cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan over its East China Sea dispute woke up the larger world to the heavy dependency on China for supplying these key inputs into the modern (and green, in particular) industrial economy. Chinese attempts to take back their shot across the bow are bound to fail, as illustrated by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke’s call for the G20 to guarantee rare earth access, Wednesday at the Wilson Center.
• The National Geographic headline, “Replacing Oil Addiction With Metals Dependence?” raises another key long-term question, explored in detail on NSB in several previous posts.• “Aid Shocks Likely Cause Armed Conflict,” is the provocative title on a post from the new blog AidData. The post summarizes a forthcoming scholarly piece in the American Political Science Review that suggests cutting-off foreign assistance (what the author team calls an “aid shock”) significantly increases the likelihood of violent conflict.
• Dan Smith, Secretary-General of the UK-based NGO International Alert, has multiple nuggets in his latest riff, “From the UK gov’t, a good message on development and peace.” Like the Global Dashboard post I mentioned last week, Smith uses the recent speech by UK Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell as his foil. The MDGs aren’t the sum total of development and a new narrative is needed. “Securitization” is a distraction that should be put to rest, and integration and focus on conflict-affected countries are the centerpiece of a welcome new narrative coming out of London.
• Finally, Wilson Center President and Director Lee Hamilton is stepping down this fall after twelve years heading the Center. His time at the Center comes after 34 years as a Congressman from Indiana. Lee’s departure has engendered numerous profiles; this one in Foreign Policy is one of the best. -
Wilson Center Scholar Huma Yusuf on Pakistan’s Population Policy: Will it Work?
›October 8, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffExcerpt from op-ed by Huma Yusuf in Dawn:
The best news Pakistanis have received in the past week comes in the form of the National Population Policy 2010. The policy recognises that demographics are the key to promoting economic development and security in Pakistan. It also prioritises family planning — particularly in an effort to promote birth spacing — as the best strategy for achieving ambitious population targets (2.1 births per woman in 2025).
In many ways, the story of Pakistan is one of a failure of family planning. Although the Family Planning Association of Pakistan was set up as early as 1952, we have seen a five-fold increase in our population between 1951 and 2009, from 34 million to 171 million.
The urgent need for revamped family planning service delivery cannot be understated. Although 96 per cent of married Pakistani women are aware of at least one modern contraceptive method, only 22 per cent are currently using modern contraceptives, while another eight per cent use less effective traditional methods. One quarter of married women want to wait before having another child, or do not want more children, but are not using contraception. And 24 per cent of married women admit that their last child was mistimed or unwanted.
Many Pakistanis bemoan the prevalence of abortion here (a 2004 Population Council study estimates that there are 890,000 abortions annually), but this too should be understood as a shortcoming of our government’s family planning service delivery. According to the 2006-07 Pakistan Demographic Health Survey, 65 per cent of women who had an abortion were over the age of 30, while 80 per cent had more than three children. In this context, the population policy’s emphasis on family planning is a welcome paradigm shift.
Continue reading on Dawn.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “chitral photos,” courtesy of flickr user groundreporter. -
Tackling Youth Unemployment, Instability in Kenya
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Today, Kenya’s youth unemployment rate stands at 65 percent, among the highest in the world. Three in five unemployed Kenyans are 15 – 35 years old. The situation is exacerbated by a shrinking economy, political instability, and pervasive income inequality.
Significantly, youth are engaged in the informal sector, which is largely unregulated and subjects workers to low earnings and long hours, without any formal contract. Suffering under a slow-growing economy, youth, whether well educated or uneducated, have increasingly turned to crime and violence, serving as watu wa mkono (handymen) to the ruling elite and intimidating and harassing their political opponents.Violence during Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections left approximately 1,133 people dead and 650,000 displaced from their land. Many of these atrocities were committed by youth, for sums as low as $6. With the 2012 elections fast approaching, Kenya risks renewed violence if its daunting youth unemployment rate is not properly addressed.
Against this backdrop, the Kenyan government has established the Youth Enterprise Development Fund (YEDF) and Kazi kwa Vijana (KKV), which means “jobs for youth,” to boost employment and entrepreneurship among people 18 to 35 years old.
Through YEDF, groups of up to 12 people can submit a business plan and apply for funding, as well as other services such as training, mentorship, and market access. The fund also connects youth with local and international job markets. KKV facilitates access to temporary, labor-intensive jobs for generally low wages, and also offers some business training.
Given the high poverty levels among youth in Kenya, temporary jobs can help young people learn the marketable skills they need to find decent work. But it’s not a long-term solution, as these low-paying jobs can also trap people in poverty, making crime and violence seem like the only viable exit.
Kenya would do well to learn from other countries’ efforts, where similar programs have long existed. For example, Italy’s Imprenditorialita Giovanile, or “Young Entrepreneurs’ Company,” and the UK’s Prince Trust exist solely to support young people’s start-up businesses.
Like Kenya’s efforts, these two programs provide training and mentoring to young people. However, they also have autonomy from their respective governments, which gives them freedom to operate without political interference and burdensome bureaucracy. Services are delivered by highly competent, successful entrepreneurs, who inspire youth to become entrepreneurs, not as an alternative to joblessness, but as a genuine career path with financial reward and work satisfaction. Through these programs, youth have managed to start and sustain viable businesses, and attain financial independence and stability.
Compared to these cases, Kenya’s KKV and YEDF fall short. Their activities overlap, and their objectives are too broad, which makes them unachievable within a reasonable timeframe.
They are also constrained by heavy government control. The prime minister’s office oversees KKV, while the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs manages YEDF. As a consequence, the programs are burdened by politics rather than buoyed with professionalism.
The tendency to treat youth as a homogenous group could isolate some young people who cannot fulfill YEDF’s requirements, such as a business development plan, a registered group, or an existing bank account. The rules should be more flexible and needs-based in order to benefit some of the needy and illiterate youth who require more rigorous training and support to succeed.
Finally, the programs’ near-sighted focus on temporary employment is but a bandage; Kenya needs long-term strategies to enable youth to access more rewarding and productive work.
Fundamentally, the problem requires properly planned, well-structured, and broad-based programs, and so far the government seems to be tinkering at the superficial level without a long-term, comprehensive plan. Accelerating economic growth is central to creating employment opportunities for youth, as well as providing market-driven education, training, and life skills.
In order to make a smooth transition to adulthood, young people require decent work and the ability to actively contribute to economic and political development and stability. Short of this, youth will remain at the margin of the economy, to serve as the violent watu wa mkono in 2012 and beyond.
Margaret Wamuyu Muthee is Programs Manager for Kenya’s University of Nairobi Center for Human Rights and Peace, and is currently an Africa Program Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Promulgation,” courtesy of flickr user ActionPixs (Maruko). -
Nicholas Kristof on Maternal Health Challenges and Opportunities
›After a Wilson Center Global Health Initiative event last year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the importance of maternal health issues and what can be done about it.
“You just know that if men had uteruses and were dying at this rate, every country would have a Minister of Paternal Mortality, the Security Council would be meeting…this would be a real international priority,” said Kristof. “It just should not happen that one woman dies a minute for reproducing.” He recently revisited this topic with a column titled, “Birth Control Over Baldness.”
The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes. -
Choke Point U.S.: Understanding the Tightening Conflict Between Energy and Water in the Era of Climate Change
›Without sharp changes in investment and direction, the United States’ current strategy to produce sufficient energy — including energy generated from clean sources — will lead to severe water shortages, and cause potentially major damage to the country’s environment and quality of life. These are the conclusions from a comprehensive reporting project, “Choke Point U.S.” presented by Circle of Blue at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Sept. 22, 2010.At the event hosted by the China Environment Forum and Environmental Change and Security Program, J. Carl Ganter, Director of Circle of Blue, Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue’s senior editor, and Jeffrey J. Fulgham, Chief Sustainability Officer and Ecomagination leader at General Electric, discussed the findings of “Choke Point: U.S.,” an analysis of the tightening linkage between the nation’s rising energy demand and finite domestic freshwater supplies. The four-month Circle of Blue project explored whether the nation’s transition to a clean-energy economy will have net dividends or deficits for U.S. freshwater resources in an era of climate change, rising population, and a projected 40-percent rise in energy demand by 2050.
“In the next decade, every single sector will need to reform due to water shortage. This is not in fifty years, this is in the next decade,” Schneider told an audience of more than 70 energy and environmental experts from the research, policy, business, and security sectors.As part of the project, Ganter said that Circle of Blue dispatched reporters to the coal fields of southern Virginia, the high plains of the Dakotas, California’s Central Valley, Midwestern farms, and other regions throughout North America. On one hand, their reporting revealed riveting narratives about the urgent contests between energy development and water supply, and how those contests can be resolved. On the other hand, the reports also recognized the extraordinarily difficult challenges that the energy-water nexus will pose to regional economies, governing practices, technological development, and the quality of natural resources.
Schneider, who directed the reporting, summarized the findings:- Unless the U.S. government plans more carefully, generating energy from clean alternatives is almost certain to consume much more water than the fossil fuels that green energy sources are meant to replace.
- The region confronting the energy-water choke point in the most dramatic fashion is the Southwest, where climate change is steadily diminishing snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains, and a prolonged drought is threatening to halt energy production at the Hoover Dam.
- The next era of hydrocarbon development is well underway in the United States, as energy companies invest billions of dollars a year to tap the “unconventional” oil sands of Canada, the oil shales of the northern Great Plains, and the gas shales of the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma, and the Upper Midwest. However, tapping each of these carbon-rich reserves is using three to four times more water than the conventional oil and gas reserves they are replacing.
- Developers in North Dakota are spending roughly $7 billion annually to drill 1,000 wells a year now into the Bakken Shale. That effort will produce 100 million barrels of oil and 100 billion cubic feet of gas this year, but will use billions of gallons of North Dakota’s scarce groundwater.
- Each of the thousands of wells drilled each year into the unconventional gas shales underlying the Northeast, Gulf Coast states, the West, and Midwest requires three million to six million gallons of water injected under high pressure to fracture the rock and enable gas to flow out of the rock.
- In Kern County, California, where the agriculture and oil industries compete for diminished supplies of water for irrigation and energy production, the winner is the oil industry.
- The energy vector in the United States points strongly to more fossil fuel consumption, not less.
- All new energy technologies except wind and solar PV will require increased freshwater withdrawals.
Jeffrey J. Fulgham of General Electric addressed the potential solutions to the tight water-energy nexus, focusing on water demand, water pricing, and the use of new technologies. According to Fulgham, smarter policies coupled with the implementation of new low-flow irrigation technology could potentially reduce the use of water for agriculture by 50 percent. Applying the same “reduce before we produce” principle to energy production could achieve significant water-use reductions in that sector as well, he said.
From General Electric’s perspective, the next five to ten years will produce significant leaps in water technology that, if combined with efficient water use, appropriate valuation of water, and more holistic policies, will be key in avoiding an impending water Choke Point.
The speakers said that the trends identified in “Choke Point U.S.” could have serious implications not just for the United States, but also for freshwater supplies around the world. In August, Circle of Blue joined with the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum to develop “Choke Point: China,” — a companion to the “Choke Point: U.S.” study — which will produce front-line research, reporting, and analysis about one of China’s most important resource competitions.
Peter Marsters is a Program Assistant with the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: “Hoover Dam overlook,” courtesy of flickr user Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton. -
Ethiopian Case Study Illustrates Shortcomings of “Land Grab” Debate
›The lines have been drawn in the “land grab” debate: Will foreign investors displace small, local land-holders, damaging the environment with exploitive practices? Or will a combination of infrastructure investment and employment opportunities lead to a virtuous development cycle?
Recent reports suggest that the former is more likely than the latter (e.g., see the Oakland Institute, GRAIN, and the Food and Agriculture Organization). In each case, the proposed antidote is the typical wish-list: Boost institutional capacity to ensure that agreements are honored, environmental and labor regulations are observed, and local populations are given a stake in the process.
While it incorporates a broader swath of data and country case studies, the recent World Bank report, “Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Results?” largely recycles this tired diagnosis, as noted recently by Michael Kugelman on The New Security Beat.
But the two months we spent in the Amhara and Oromia regions of Ethiopia, surveying smallholders and profiling large-scale commercial farms, left us with a different impression. After completing 1,200 pages of surveys on smallholder livelihood strategies and farm management practices with 120 local farmers, as well as six profiles of private investors’ farms, we identified several key points that these reports missed.
Strong Laws Don’t Always Scare Investors Away
The World Bank report focuses on the belief that countries with weak institutions attract predatory investors, who use lack of oversight to their advantage by exploiting local populations, abusing regulations, etc. Ethiopia, however, has high institutional capacity relative to other African nations, yet still receives enormous land investment.
Every commercial farm we profiled received yearly visits from multiple regional and federal agencies investigating regulatory compliance. Moreover, two of the farms had been sold to their current owners because the previous business ventures failed to observe the terms of their business proposals. These terms included bringing certain amounts of foreign exchange into the country and hitting export targets.
Ethiopia attracts investors for other reasons. Official documents tout the diversity of its micro-climates, but we suspect investors are more likely drawn by a lease rate roughly 100x lower per hectare than the African average.
Given the emphasis on boosting institutional capacity as a means to ensure positive development outcomes, it’s too bad that the World Bank didn’t choose to conduct one of its case studies on Ethiopian commercial farms. Such a study could provide grounds for discussing what investment governed by stronger institutions would look like.
An Incomplete Paradigm
The potential for population displacement (with or without compensation), job creation, and infrastructure development is a well known and well studied paradigm. The World Bank report investigates the occurrence of these phenomena in its case studies, and the results are unsurprising: Sometimes things go OK and sometimes they go badly. This same story emerges in studies of foreign investments of all stripes: logging, oil and natural gas extraction, precious mineral mining, among others.
A more inventive analysis of land grabs could yield meaningful findings, however. Investors and smallholders are engaged in the same activity — farming — and in the case of cereal farms, they are producing the same crops. The resulting overlap allows for a multitude of creative interactions between smallholders and investors that should receive more attention.
Two of the investors we interviewed used these creative interactions to promote their business plans to regional development authorities. One farm sold certified seed to local farmers; another imported an irrigation system new to the region and plans to introduce it to the broader community. They each rented farm equipment to smallholders and held demonstration days to discuss farming techniques and new crop types with community members. One had already introduced new crops to the adjacent village via an “outgrowing” scheme and was exporting smallholder products from the farm, thus diversifying livelihoods for local farming households.
These are, of course, anecdotal accounts. But they suggest a broader point: More attention must be given to “secondary” benefits like technology and knowledge transfers, outgrowing or renting schemes, and informal interactions. Given the unique attributes of large-scale commercial investment in the agricultural sector, which continues to provide most Ethiopians’ livelihoods, these secondary benefits are the mechanism through which livelihoods seem most likely to be transformed. In this case, the preoccupation with displacement, formal compensation, jobs created, and infrastructure development only leads to generalized and ineffective analysis.
Our smallholder surveys and commercial farm profiles point to one conclusion: The commercial farms in our sample that engaged most fully in those creative interactions will generate substantial benefits for local populations over the next 5-10 years (quantitative analysis to be published in our final report this spring). The particular interactions taking place between these smallholders and commercial farms directly alleviate the primary constraints to smallholder livelihoods identified by our survey, such as lack of mechanization, lack of access to inputs, and inability to generate cash through sale of crops.
It’s far from clear that the World Bank analysis would have captured this reality in Ethiopia given its limited focus. Ideas like outgrowing receive scant attention, and are usually only discussed in hypothetical terms or in parentheticals – a trend the World Bank report unfortunately continued.
Incorporate Case Studies and Put Livelihoods First
So while our limited analysis may not enable us to speak broadly about the effects of commercial farming, we can offer two observations.
First, the creative arrangements that accompany the introduction of commercial farming must be front and center of any study. The study should be grounded in an understanding of the livelihood constraints faced by local populations, followed by an analysis of the types of interactions between commercial farms and smallholders that may affect those constraints, including not only traditional effects, such as displacement and employment, but also atypical impacts, such as improved seed distribution and technology demonstration.
Second, since Ethiopia has enough institutional capacity to be selective when choosing commercial investors (and to ensure they adhere to the terms), it embodies a number of principles the promoted by the World Bank report. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi views large-scale private farms as one piece of a broader commercialization effort to revolutionize smallholder agriculture, as described in the government’s development plan, PASDEP. This effort is in keeping with the report’s basic recommendation that host governments ensure that investment is compatible with domestic needs.
Understanding the phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions should be at the top of the international research agenda. The effects on livelihood security and food security (in both developed and developing countries), as well as the potential contributions to resource conflicts, place such land deals among the most consequential recent trends in the international arena.
We believe a new framework must be brought to the analysis of land grabs. To effectively implement this framework, important but overlooked cases, such as we found in Ethiopia, should be included in future studies.
Nathan Yaffe and Laura Dismore are students at Carleton College, who just returned from researching commercial farming in Ethiopia. They can be reached at yaffen@carleton.edu and dismorel@carleton.edu.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “P8060261,” courtesy of flickr user Ben Jarman. -
Google Data Maps Development Indicators
›If you have not had the (purely wonky) pleasure of playing with Google’s Public Data Explorer, do yourself a favor and direct your browser there now.
Born from Hans Rosling’s Gapminder, Google’s data explorer currently allows the user to choose from 24 different data sets, including information from the World Bank, U.S. Census Bureau, Eurostat, and Energy Information Agency. Users can then customize the dataset’s variables, save their work, and even embed the resulting chart, “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view,” as the Gapminder site puts it.
The example dataset above uses development indicators from the World Bank to show areas of the world where high fertility rate and heavy reliance on subsistence agriculture have persisted over time. It’s worth noting that many of the countries in the upper right of the graph are also where we find persistent conflict, and, if one accepts the predictions that Africa will see some of the most profound effects of climate change, they also face real risk of continuing instability as declining crop yields threaten livelihoods and population growth continues.
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