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Traffic Jam: Gender, Labor, Migration, and Trafficking in Dubai
›November 16, 2009 // By Calyn Ostrowski“All trafficking is not sex trafficking,” argued Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow Pardis Mahdavi, at a recent Middle East Program event. Drawing on her ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates, Mahdavi analyzed the policy implications of the latest Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The TIP report offers information on modern day slavery–human trafficking–and includes comprehensive data on policies and enforcement in 155 countries and territories.
The TIP report paradoxically hurts the people it tries to protect, claimed Mahdavi, by placing too much emphasis on sex trafficking and failing to take into consideration other types of abuse, such as those against men and migrant labor workers. Mahdavi pushed for a “breakthrough of the labeling and politicizing of sex traffickers as women and children,” which depicts women as passive and helpless, while excluding male victims.
According to Mahdavi, in Dubai, 80 percent of the population are migrant laborers. Often, these foreign workers do not trust the government to protect them against trafficking abuses, particularly if they are working in the host country illegally. Thus, civil society organizations, and not the state government, serve as the major source of protection and recourse for abused migrant workers. In the Persian Gulf region, Mahdavi argued that the “TIP report needs to be rewritten…to include increased labor inspectors and police training,” and called for the increased “accountability and transparency” of civil society organizations.
Mahdavi cautioned countries against using the TIP report to enact policies that make migration illegal. Tightening borders forces workers into the informal economy, she maintained, where it becomes difficult to track and protect these individuals.
Although the TIP report has weaknesses, it does pressure countries to act, as Mahdavi has witnessed in the United Arab Emirates, where it has provided opportunities for dialogue on the various aspects of trafficking. -
Pakistan’s Demographic Challenge Is Not Just Economic
›In a meeting with business leaders in Lahore in late October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pointedly warned of the potential economic impacts of Pakistan’s rapidly growing population: “There has to be…in any plan for your own economic future, a hard look at where you’re going to get the resources to meet these needs. You do have somewhere between 170 and 180 million people. Your population is projected to be about 300 million as the current birth rates, which are among the highest in the world, continue,” she said.
Pakistan is ranked 141 (out of 182 countries) in the Human Development Index. High rates of unemployment are compounded by low levels of education and human capital. Clinton noted that Pakistani women are more vulnerable to poverty; only 40 percent are literate, compared to 68 percent of men.
The Secretary’s emphasis on the need to provide adequate education, jobs, and resources to motivate economic growth and improve well-being is welcome. But demography also has important political consequences. U.S. policymakers and the Pakistani government should consider the impact of population dynamics on the country’s intensifying instability.
As Pakistan’s population grows rapidly, it is maintaining a very young age structure: in 2005, two-thirds of its population was younger than age 30. Research by Population Action International has shown that countries with very young age structures are three times as likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those with a more balanced age distribution.
The members of a “youth bulge” are not inherently dangerous, but when governments are unable to foster employment opportunities or the prospects of stability, a young age structure can serve to exacerbate the risks of conflict, as recently noted by John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in a speech on “A New Approach to Safeguarding Americans.”
As Secretary Clinton and her colleagues consider the complex barriers to achieving peace and stability for Pakistan’s people, their humanitarian and development strategies should include demographic issues. When couples are able to choose the number and timing of their children, very young age structures like Pakistan’s, can change.
Family planning and reproductive health services are fundamental human rights, but remain out of reach for many in Pakistan, where one-quarter of all married women (and 31 percent of the poorest) have an unmet need for family planning.
Greater access to family planning would lower fertility rates and increase the share of working-age adults in the population. In this transition, countries can harness the “demographic dividend”—a change that could turn Pakistan’s age structure into an economic opportunity.
However, funding from the United States—the world’s largest single donor for international family planning—has declined by one-third over the past 15 years. The foreign assistance funding priorities of the Obama administration should reflect this recognition of the linkages between population, development, and stability.
By addressing the high unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services of women in countries like Pakistan, the United States could help to create a more balanced age structure in future generations—and promote stability at the same time.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a research associate at Population Action International (PAI). She is the primary author of the 2007 PAI report The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World.. -
Ethiopia: A Holistic Approach to Community Development Blossoms Two Years After Taking Root
›November 12, 2009 // By Sean Peoples
As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the Furra Institute for the second annual General Assembly of the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE). -
The Youth Bulge Question
›Right now, Rich Cincotta is live on “PRB Discuss Online,” answering the question, “Does a Young Age Structure Thwart Democratic Governments?” He is responding to reader questions like “Do Democratic governments being overcome by poverty and high unemployment rates have a chance to succeed” and “Why do you think the mainstream demography community is so slow or unwilling to pick up the research questions you have pursued?” Read the transcript and Cincotta’s recent article on this topic, “Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and Transitions to Liberal Democracy.”
A new World Bank working paper, “Breaking the Waves? Does Education Mediate the Relationship Between Youth Bulges and Political Violence?” by Bilal Barakat and Henrik Urdal finds “evidence that large, young male population bulges are more likely to increase the risk of conflict in societies where male secondary education is low”–particularly in low and middle-income countries. Mardy Shualy of Foreign Policy’s blog suggests policymakers do the math to compare the costs of secondary education to the economic toll of war and civil conflict. -
Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It?
›November 9, 2009 // By Dan Asin“There’s a correlation between CO2 and population. And it’s that we live in a world of more people, more money and more things, and that all distills down to the need for more energy,” said Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, at a Wilson Center event on the media’s coverage of climate change and population, co-sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists and the International Reporting Project.
“Thinking about population and trends in population is a vital reality check for assessing policies you hear about on global warming,” said New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, who joined Dimick and Nation Web Editor Emily Douglas via video conference. “When you start to think about that number—nine billion—a lot of cheery suppositions or assertions you’ve heard about how we’re going to de-carbonize the world without too much effort…[get] challenged in a hurry,” he said.
The Inconvenient Truth of Population
Despite these strong connections, the mainstream media has been reluctant to write about population growth, which Revkin called the “ultimate incremental story.”
“We, I think, are guilty to some extent, in the media, of not paying adequate attention to this part of the whole issue,” he said, partly because there is the perception that “we kind of solved that problem. But, again, just run those numbers: Nine billion people does not solve the climate problem and it has to be considered in every stage of assessing solutions to the climate problem.”
“We need to talk about it so we understand this issue at a level beyond more people means more emissions,” said Douglas. Other factors like levels of consumption, urbanization, and household structure make the population-emissions relationship complex and difficult to explain.
Revkin added that “consumption is even a tougher story to get at in print, because we’re a medium that advertises consumption, among other things.”
The Population-Energy Challenge
One-quarter of the world’s population lacks access to electricity. “We are in this sortof double-vise, trying to constrain our own [energy] demand while also trying to provide the opportunities for people who have little to none,” said Dimick.
With fossil fuels currently providing 80 percent of global energy, and with energy demand estimated to increase dramatically to meet the needs of 2.3 billion more people by 2050, the “scale of the challenge before us . . . is immense,” he said. “To think that we’re somehow simply going to go to solar and wind—I think we’re deluding ourselves.”
Nevertheless, Dimick insisted on the need “to de-carbonize at a tremendous scale.” He proposed sustainably addressing energy needs by improving energy efficiency, expanding mass transit systems, changing land use, and considering nuclear power.
Reproductive Health Is Key
Douglas, who previously edited the RH Reality Check blog, emphasized that population issues go far beyond climate change. “I’m encouraging us to look at population not only from the perspective of the environment, but also from the perspective of individual women and their human rights, their right to determine the number and spacing of their children, and not purely to depress fertility rates in service of mitigating climate change,” she said.According to Douglas, each year 60 million pregnancies—one-third of the global total—are unintended, and 200 million women worldwide have an unmet need for contraception. Family planning programs are “cheap to employ and deploy, and women and societies want them anyway,” said Douglas. A few recent studies have argued that universal access to family planning could be one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And not just mitigation, but adaptation as well: “Women with access to reproductive health services are healthier and they’re better able to deal with the impacts of climate change,” she said. “Poorer countries are going to need adaptation strategies, and one of those strategies is to allow women to better determine the size of their families.”
However, “many political leaders–not only on the right—don’t like reproductive health programs,” said Douglas. Disagreements over abortion and birth control are part of the problem, as well as past instances of coercive contraceptive methods in some developing countries.
Douglas cited a Population Action International survey that “found that 41 countries identified population growth as a factor that makes them more vulnerable to climate change, but only two of those countries proposed programs that address reproductive health.”
Douglas decried the “significant gap between political leaders’ understanding that population growth makes it more difficult for them to respond to climate change, and political leaders being able to muster the political will that will empower women to better control their own fertility.”
Close-Up on the Most Vulnerable
“We also can’t talk about this as though all people added to the world population produce greenhouse gases in equal measure,” said Douglas. “The world’s richest half billion people, that’s 7 percent of the global population, are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.”
Revkin urged reporters to use a “close-up lens” when examining population trends impact on climate—especially in “areas of the world where there are significant risks that could be amplified by human-driven climate change, like urban severe flooding and severe rains, like we saw in Manila recently.”
With rapid urbanization in the developing world, “you have to look at places where you have hugely increased numbers of people moving essentially into harm’s way—or being born in harm’s way, if you’re talking about sub-Saharan Africa,” said Revkin.
A Thought Experiment
“What if the whole world were equal in emissions?” Revkin asked. Suppose advanced industrial countries, such as the United States, reduce their annual emissions intensity from 20 tons of CO2 per person to 10 tons. At the same time, suppose rapidly developing countries, such as India, reach the same emissions intensity. In a world with nine billion people that equates to 90 billion tons—“three times today’s current annual emissions of CO2,” he said.
“Probably the single most concrete and substantive thing a young American could to do to lower a carbon footprint is not turning of the lights or driving a Prius, but having fewer children,” said Revkin. “Eventually, should you get credit—if we’re going to become carbon-centric—for having a one child family when you could’ve had two or three? Obviously it’s just a thought experiment, but it raises some interesting questions.”
Drafted by Daniel Asin and Meaghan Parker
Edited by Meaghan Parker -
Today: International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict
›November 6, 2009 // By Sajid Anwar“There can be no durable peace if the natural resources that sustain livelihoods are damaged or destroyed,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his message today, the 9th annual International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict. He called for “Member States to clarify and expand international law on environmental protection in times of war.”
Coinciding with this year’s observance, the United Nations Environment Programme, along with the Environmental Law Institute, released “Protecting the Environment During Armed Conflict: An Inventory and Analysis of International Law,” which finds serious gaps and weaknesses in international law and offers 12 recommendations for the UN and policymakers.
“Destroying and damaging the natural assets and ecological infrastructure of a country or community should be an issue of highest humanitarian concern,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner in a UNEP press release.
Earlier this year, Steiner spoke at the Wilson Center to launch From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment. In a recent ECSP video interview, UNEP’s David Jensen spoke about how post-conflict resource management can be a platform for economic recovery and cooperation. -
VIDEO: David Jensen on UNEP and Natural Resource Management After Conflict
›November 5, 2009 // By Sajid Anwar“We don’t do the gloom-and-doom scenarios anymore,” says David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, in a video interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko. “We focus on the opportunities provided by resource management. We focus much more on how they can support economic recovery, how they support livelihoods, how environment can be a platform for cooperation.”
When conducting its post-conflict environmental assessments, UNEP looks for “entry points using specific hotspots or specific sites that people can really understand and see the linkage between environment and conflict, or between their livelihoods and natural resources,” says Jensen. “We always try to be in the field and demonstrate the value of better resource management” for post-conflict recovery. -
Climate-Security Gets “To the Point” Today
›Today’s episode of NPR’s “To the Point” with Warren Olney will focus on “Global Warming and the Geo-Political Map,” seeking to answer the question, “What are the risks to natural resources, immigration, and political stability worldwide?”
As one of the four panelists, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko will draw on his recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and ECSP’s climate-security resources.
Climate security has been heating up the media for the last few months, although most news coverage has been rather thin. That’s understandable, given the complexity of the drivers involved, and the crushing constraints on environmental reporters’ time and budgets these days. But climate security is a politically powerful argument, one which advocates from all over the political spectrum have increasingly adopting, and it deserves a more thorough, thoughtful treatment.
“Come to Attention,” a panel at this year’s SEJ annual conference (audio) moderated by ClimateWire’s Lisa Friedman, delved into some of the finer points of this often oversimplified connection. As part of the panel, Dabelko outlined seven cautions to keep in mind and suggestions for improving coverage of the difficult link.
While Grist’s Robert McClure jokingly called the session “doom and gloom without the sense of humor,” Dabelko ended on a positive note, pointing out that by coming together to battle climate change, countries may build bridges to peace, rather than war–particularly if the militaries cooperate in the fight.
In a recent op-ed, Dabelko and the U.S. Army War College’s Kent Butts argue that climate could be one of the most productive avenues for improving military relations with China, suggesting that “U.S. and Chinese militaries should jointly assess the security implications of climate change that concern both sides: rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, uncertain migration scenarios, and instability in resource-rich regions.”
“To the Point” airs live online at 3 PM EST. In the Washington, DC, area listen to it at 10 PM EST tonight on WAMU 88.5.
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As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the 
of double-vise, trying to constrain our own [energy] demand while also trying to provide the opportunities for people who have little to none,” said Dimick.
According to Douglas, each year 60 million pregnancies—one-third of the global total—are unintended, and 
