The authors of Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future, a report by the Asia Society, argue that population growth, urbanization, and climate change are converging to make water an important security issue in Asia. The authors argue for including water in policy and development discussions, but warn against “securitizing” the issue.

“Recently, the Defense Department warned that lack of Chinese transparency and dialogue between the Chinese and US militaries could lead to dangerous miscalculations on both sides. The tense confrontation between a US Naval survey vessel and five Chinese ships in the South China Sea in March echoed the rather serious 2001 Hainan Island incident, which was characterized by mutual suspicion and public acrimony. That event affected US-China relations for years.

To avoid further incidents, the Defense Department desires ‘deeper, broader, more high-level contacts with the Chinese,’ said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell. The White House issued a statement stressing the ‘importance of raising the level and frequency of the US-China military-to-military dialogue,’ and President Obama quickly laid the groundwork by meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao in London and agreeing to work to improve military-to-military relations.

One such way to begin military dialogue between the United States and China is by using environmental issues.

Environmental collaboration is unlikely to hit politically sensitive buttons, and thus offers great potential to deepen dialogue and cooperation. Military-to-military dialogue can facilitate the sharing of best practices on a range of environmental security issues.”

To read the rest of this op-ed, co-authored by ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and Kent Hughes Butts, director of the National Security Issues Branch of the Center for Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College, please visit the Christian Science Monitor.

A graphic published recently in Le Monde reveals that companies from South Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the top purchasers of foreign farmland. These corporations from water-strapped, land-starved, and/or densely populated countries often make bargain-basement deals with unsavory African and Asian governments—or even warlords—to increase their own profits and their home nations’ food security.

A case in point: The International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for human-rights abuses has not deterred Saudi Arabia’s Hail Agricultural Development Co. from developing 9,200 hectares of land in Sudan or the UAE from investing in agricultural projects in several Sudanese provinces, including a 17,000-hectare farm for wheat and corn.

As previous New Security Beat posts have pointed out, allowing foreign governments to purchase land could threaten food security within the host country, and around the world. The heads of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development raised eyebrows last weekend when they suggested that these deals could be “win-win” situations, if done right.

These business ventures can also have serious political consequences: Several months ago, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on increasing population growth and limited arable land in its homeland, South Korean conglomerate Daewoo signed a deal to buy more than half of the arable land in Madagascar to grow grain and palm oil. Widespread anger at the terms of the deal—from which the island’s people would gain little—contributed to then-President Marc Ravalomanana’s unpopularity. After weeks of riots, Ravalomanana was ousted by Andry Rajoelina, who immediately axed the deal. “In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,” Rajoelina told BBC News.

Yet although Rajoelina’s actions may seem to have preserved Madagascar’s land for its people, the coup he launched has spurred unprecedented destruction of this land, in the form of deforestation. The breakdown of authority that accompanied the coup spread into Madagascar’s protected areas, where groups of thugs have been illegally felling valuable trees at a rapid rate since the coup. This environmental destruction is particularly tragic for a country like Madagascar, which possesses some of the richest biodiversity on the planet and relies heavily on ecotourism for jobs and economic growth.

Next month, a Wilson Center event will explore some of the motivations, patterns, and implications of this rush for farmland. Five Wilson Center programs are co-sponsoring this event—demonstrating the global, cross-sectoral implications of this issue.

Photo: Deforestation in Madagascar. Courtesy of Flickr user World Resources Institute Staff and Jonathan Talbot.

“The Arctic could slide into a new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a new ‘great game’ among the global powers,” argue Paul Berkman and Oran Young, two researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Science. “However, the environment provides a physical and a conceptual framework to link government interests in the Arctic Ocean, as well as a template for addressing transboundary security risks cooperatively.” In the Washington Times, Paula Dobriansky, former U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, argues that the Antarctic Treaty offers lessons for dealing with competing territorial claims in the Arctic.

While it is now widely acknowledged that environmental change, including climate change, could severely undermine security in the developing world, the implications for the developed world are just starting to be discussed. A sort of “developed-country complacency syndrome” has led many to assume that the main security problems for a country like the United States, such as waves of refugees or the need to intervene when other nations face disasters or conflicts, would be imported from abroad. Unfortunately, the United States is likely to face some fairly severe “Made in the USA” problems, as well.

For instance, as the economic stimulus package is rolled out, the United States is entering a historic period of new infrastructure construction. From a security perspective, this could help maintain stability, or it could be a disaster. What might make the difference is assessing how potential sites could be affected by environmental change. Transportation systems, defensive capabilities, agriculture, power generation, water supply, and more are all designed for the specific parameters of their physical environments—or, more often, the physical environments of the Victorian, Depression-era, or post-WWII periods in which they were originally built. That is why unplanned environmental change almost always has negative impacts.

In the case of a change in precipitation patterns, for example, drainage systems, reservoirs, and hydrological installations can all fail not because they were poorly engineered, but because they were engineered for different conditions. We are literally not designed for environmental change.
Current environmental impact assessments look almost exclusively at a structure’s impact on the environment. These assessments must now be expanded to include the other half of the equation: the impact of a changing environment on the structure. These sorts of “dual” assessments are essential. To put it bluntly, there is no point in building a zero-emissions house in a current or soon-to-be flood zone. However, this is exactly the sort of thing that is being proposed in areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast. We can avoid this by requiring these “dual” assessments when applying for insurance, planning permission, and/or government support.

Just as physical infrastructure is poorly prepared to deal with environmental change, so, too, is legal infrastructure. Very few regulations, international laws, and subsidies incorporate the effects of environmental change. At best, this renders them inadequate; at worst, it can create new vulnerabilities.

For instance, the U.S. government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) can inadvertently contribute to putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way. When private insurers deem areas too risky to be eligible for coverage, the NFIP can step in and insure them, making it possible to build in areas that are current flood zones, as well as areas that may become ones as climate change causes sea levels to rise and storm surges to increase. Already in some areas the same homes have had to be rebuilt multiple times, in part with cash infusions from the NFIP.

There are other examples of developed-world agreements that may cause more damage than they prevent:

• Water-sharing agreements, especially those based on a set amount of water, rather than percentage of actual flow, will become problematic as water levels alter dramatically.
• Fisheries-sharing agreements will be thrown into chaos as fish shift to other regions due to climate change and overfishing.
• Hydropower-sharing agreements will be a major problem, both for precipitation-fed systems and glacier regions, where there will be above-average flows as the glaciers melt, followed by droughts once the glaciers disappear.

Legislation, agreements, and subsidies that do not account for environmental change can create artificial and unnecessary vulnerabilities at a time when the world is facing real physical challenges. It is imperative to assess existing and new legal frameworks in order to determine whether they create strengths or vulnerabilities. If they are found to create vulnerabilities, they must be adapted or abandoned.

Two of the things the developed world prides itself on—its physical and legal infrastructures—are both highly vulnerable to environmental change. However, the stimulus packages and the reassessment of global, regional, and national agreements caused by the financial crisis offer a valuable opportunity to ensure that the structures and mechanisms we are counting on to maintain our security do not end up undermining it.

Photo: Members of the Coast Guard Sector Ohio Valley Disaster Response Team and the Miami-Dade Urban Search and Rescue Team mark a house to show it has been searched for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, revealed the vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure to natural disasters. Climate change could make hurricanes and other natural disasters more frequent and severe. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Tidewater Muse and Petty Officer Robert M. Reed.

Cleo Paskal is an associate fellow in Chatham House’s Energy, Environment, and Development Programme. She is the author of UK National Security and Environmental Change.

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Last Friday, China announced plans to become the world’s largest producer of electric cars. The Chinese government will invest $1.46 billion in consumer subsidies for electric cars, just as Washington is plowing $25 billion into flagging Detroit automakers. With doubts looming about China’s enthusiasm for the tough upcoming Copenhagen climate negotiations, and with China set to displace the United States as the country with the largest auto fleet by 2025, this commitment to electric cars has vast implications for climate change, energy, and global geopolitics.

China is already the third-largest car producer and the second-largest car market in the world. If China could electrify its entire auto fleet by 2020, it could cut annual oil consumption by 130 million tons, reducing dependence on foreign oil by 20-30 percent more than if it were to adopt high-efficiency combustion vehicles. This would go a long way toward easing global competition for oil. It would also effectively eliminate the number-one source of air pollution in major Chinese cities, relieving a huge environmental health burden. Reports indicate that residents of at least 400 Chinese cities will face significant health hazards—including brain damage, respiratory problems and infections, lung cancer, and emphysema—from airborne sulfur by 2010 if auto pollution is not brought under control.

As these subsidies and other policies (including next year’s nation-wide adoption of EURO IV emissions standards) demonstrate, the Chinese government is committed to reducing cars’ impact in China, and the country is poised to be a global leader in electric cars. China’s battery-company-turned-automaker BYD (which Warren Buffet is apparently investing in) will release the first zero-emission vehicle, the F3e, in late 2009. The plug-in, dual-fuel F3 was the top-selling car in China last year, selling for $22,000. In a report released last month, McKinsey & Company found electric vehicles the best option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from China’s transportation sector. China’s low labor costs, fast-growing auto market, and successful battery manufacturers make it a candidate for world leadership in electric-vehicle production, especially as no clear leader already exists.

The greatest obstacles to electric vehicles taking off in China are the costs—both to the government and the consumer—and the current lack of support infrastructure, including battery-charging and replacement stations. Installing support infrastructure could cost 5–10 billion RMB by 2020, not to mention the costs of further research and development to improve the safety and speed of batteries and cars, as well as the cost of consumer subsidies.

However, the China Environment Forum reports that many new car owners in China display a surprising indifference to the price of a prospective vehicle, preferring to save longer in order to afford a better car rather than settling for the first car they can afford or buying a used car. An interesting cost-effective alternative is the electric bike, which China vehicle emissions expert Vance Wagner notes “should be given high priority as an urban sustainable transportation solution [as they] provide much greater urban mobility than buses, with comparable environmental impact.”

Further research on the health and environmental impacts of electric vehicles is needed before large-scale adoption. There are many concerns, for example, about how to safely recycle car batteries without causing lead pollution. Additionally, having cars run on electricity will reduce air pollution, but will also place a huge burden on China’s already-strained power sector, which experiences energy shortfalls every year. Making the entire vehicle fleet dependent on the power sector would require a major expansion of regulatory and generating capacity. It could also raise questions of environmental justice, as rural communities with little access to health care—but in close proximity to coal-fired power plants, from which China derives 80 percent of its electricity—would bear the pollution burden of city driving. Although most experts and officials agree that electrifying China’s vehicle fleet is the best option in terms of environmental health, energy security, and climate change, additional research into the cumulative impacts of electric vehicles is necessary.

Photo: Smog blankets the eastern Chinese city of Jinan. Courtesy of Flickr user Sam_BB.

By China Environment Forum Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

Integrated population-health-environment (PHE) programs “are very cost-effective ways” to develop “community capacity—to strengthen their know-how, and bring…in some additional appropriate technologies” to promote livelihoods, says Leona D’Agnes in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof aptly describes the connections between poverty and lack of access to family planning in a recent op-ed, using a Haitian woman named Nahomie as an example. He rightly argues that we won’t be able to end poverty until women are able to choose how many children to have. He also notes that relative funding levels for family planning have decreased in recent decades, and that development professionals’ attention has shifted to other issues. Yet 201 million women around the world still have an unmet need for family planning.

One of the few off notes in Kristof’s article, I think, is his portrayal of family planning as a difficult, challenging intervention. Of course, it is more complicated than simply giving birth control pills to women and condoms to men. But community health workers with little formal education have been successfully trained to deliver family-planning services to remote communities in developing countries.

While I recognize he has space limitations, Kristof neglected to mention that in Haiti, poverty and lack of access to family planning are linked to severe environmental degradation and natural disasters. A 2006 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) report found that “the root causes of environmental disaster in Haiti are acute poverty, rapid population growth, and unplanned urbanization.” To meet their daily needs, the rapidly growing population resorts to unsustainable agricultural and energy practices that deforest and erode the countryside—or move to increasingly crowded cities.

At a Wilson Center presentation in August 2006, USAID’s Rochelle Rainey reported that 40 percent of Haitian women wished to use contraception but did not have access to it. Modern contraceptive methods are used by only 23 percent of the population, contributing to a total fertility rate of 4.9 children per woman. As Ronald Toussaint, a Haitian biodiversity specialist, said: “If we don’t address population issues, it is like the Creole phrase, ‘wash your hands and then rub them in the dirt.’”

Photo: Children in Haiti. Courtesy of Flickr user Billtacular.