Earlier this week, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year effort sponsored by a number of UN organizations, released its final report (executive summary; summary for decision makers), which offers guidelines for improving the stability, sustainability, and equity of global food supply.

It was hard to tell which environmental adviser was representing which presidential candidate at a recent news conference sponsored by SEJ on climate change (watch; listen; read)—all three explicitly named it a security priority, and called for a mandatory cap and trade program and the development of new technology. (The question of whether to build new nuclear power plants revealed the only major difference: Clinton’s generally con, McCain is pro, and Obama falls somewhere in the middle.)

Clinton adviser and WilmerHale partner Todd Stern charged out of the gate first, deeming climate a “first-order national security issue” that is “going to exacerbate food security problems. It’s going to exacerbate water scarcity. It’s going to make desertification worse, increase resource competition, and produce, undoubtedly, large-scale migration and refugee problems and increase border tension.” Citing the CNA report, he called climate change a “threat multiplier for instability in volatile parts of the world.” He also quoted Sir Nicholas Stern’s claim that climate change has the potential to cause “economic disruption at a scale of the Great Depression and the wars of the last century.” Clinton will establish a National Energy Council (à la the National Security Council), form an “E8” of major emitters, and increase R&D; efforts—including creating a government agency for energy R&D; modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). No proposals, however, on how to mitigate the existing impacts on our current security situation.

Quoting McCain, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said climate change was “a serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenge.” Taking a harder security stance, Woolsey linked U.S. oil dependence to terrorism not only because it increases “our vulnerability to cutoffs, to terrorist attacks in Middle East” on energy infrastructure, but also because oil fuels oil fuels “Saudi Arabia’s spreading of its hateful Wahhabi doctrine, into madrasas and religious schools around the world”—and funds Iran’s belligerence as well. Unlike Clinton’s representative, Woolsey did not focus on environmental degradation’s links to conflict. He supports market-based incentives to encourage the commercialization of existing technologies—such as plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles, new lighter car body construction, alternative liquid fuels—that could end the “oil monopoly on transportation” and thus fight terrorism at same time. Somewhat cynically, he promoted this vastly oversimplified argument as a politically practical way to convince climate change skeptics to back mitigation efforts.

Like his boss, Obama’s representative Jason Grumet took a big-picture approach, telling the crowd that Obama “gets it”; he recognizes that energy “affects our national security in a dramatic way” and thus requires “dramatic change”—a fundamental transformation of our energy policies to “make us safe and secure.” However, he offered few specific details. Obama supports the development of clean coal (he’s from Illinois, putative site of the now-stalled FutureGen project) and advanced nuclear power, but says we must solve the existing problems with nuclear technology before beginning new development.

Meeting with world economic ministers in Washington, DC, this past weekend, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that IMF and World Bank officials “now need to devote 100 percent of our time” to ensuring political and democratic stability in the countries hit hardest by the global spike in food prices. He added that development gains made in the last five or ten years are in danger of being “totally destroyed.” Recent unrest in a number of developing countries—including Haiti, where the president was ousted last week, partially due to anger over food prices—underlines the urgency of this crisis.

Asian countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, which have spent the last decade working to strengthen their economies, may see their significant gains erased under this new economic strain. And they may be among the relatively lucky countries, with government ministries in place to provide subsidies and shield their populations from the worst effects of sky-high prices. In contrast, many sub-Saharan African countries have no safety net beyond reliance on international organizations like the World Food Program.

In many developing countries, where families typically spend between half and three-quarters of their total budget on food, World Bank President Robert Zoellick says that there “is no margin for survival.” Citizens in developing nations may abide corrupt governments while they are at least marginally able to feed their families, but when even that becomes impossible, “normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose,” reports Time magazine. “What Haiti’s riots show,” argued an op-ed in the Jamaica Gleaner, “is that there cannot be a secure democracy without food security.”

The Brookings Institution recently released the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, which finds that extreme poverty and recent experience with conflict correlate strongly with state weakness or failure. Topping the index are Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq, all current or recent hosts to severe conflict. The report, co-authored by Brookings Senior Fellow Susan E. Rice and Center for Global Development (CGD) Research Fellow Stewart Patrick, is intended to serve as a tool for policymakers.

Rather than focusing exclusively on a single measure of performance or attempting to sharpen the often-murky distinction between “effectiveness” and “legitimacy,” as many rankings do, Rice and Patrick evaluate every developing country across 20 indicators—each a proxy for a core state function—in four “baskets” of government performance (economic, political, security, and social welfare).

Eight countries appear in the top (i.e., worst) 10 of both the Brookings index and the well-known Failed States Index published annually in Foreign Policy magazine. However, Rice and Patrick employ—uniquely, they say—fully transparent metrics, introduce policy prescriptions, and assess a broader-than-usual swath of government performance in the hopes of creating a more precise and practical description of current circumstances.

Since September 11, 2001, the security community has paid increasing attention to the threats that weak or failed states pose to the United States. The 2002 National Security Strategy asserted that weak and failing states “pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states.” A 2004 Christian Science Monitor op-ed by two CGD experts on weak states declared that “where poor states lose control, it’s often Americans who pay the price.” Weak or failed states are susceptible to “a host of transnational security threats,” argue Rice and Patrick, “including terrorism, weapons proliferation, organized crime, infectious disease, environmental degradation, and civil conflicts that spill over borders.”

Tucked in with the report’s policy implications is a recommendation that the United States support multi-sector aid programs that simultaneously address security issues and other drivers of state weakness, including lack of access to water and sanitation. The Environmental Change and Security Program recently hosted a panel discussion exploring the efficacy of a multi-sector approach to development.

“A changing climate has been a feature of life in West Africa for thousands of years,” explain Oli Brown and Alec Crawford of the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Assessing the security implications of climate change for West Africa: Country case studies of Ghana and Burkina Faso. “Ghanaians and Burkinabes have not been passive recipients of climate change in the past and have developed many ingenious ways of adapting to their climate. Some analysts suggest that the inherent adaptability of the Sahelian peoples is one of their greatest assets. Nevertheless, this adaptability has been severely tested in the last few decades.”

Brown and Crawford identify several ways in which climate change could challenge economic and political stability in West Africa in general and Burkina Faso and Ghana in particular. They wrote their report after consulting with local agronomists, hydrologists, development specialists, and other experts. Responsibly, Brown and Crawford have deliberately narrowed the report’s focus from climate change’s potential security implications (which they acknowledge includes an extremely broad range of events) to climate change’s potential threats to 1) economic and 2) political stability.

In Ghana, climate variability is expected to aggravate five preexisting challenges: the north-south social divide (with poverty more pronounced in the rural north); the sharing of water between the north and the south (with the north using water primarily for agriculture and the south primarily for energy); the management of regional water sources; border security; and economic stability (if changes in climate reduced the profitability of cocoa production). Four main challenges were identified in Burkina Faso: food security; water availability; relations between pastoral and agricultural communities; and internal migration.

Non-climate factors—including governance, regional relations, and income distribution—play a significant role in determining a society’s vulnerability to climate-induced insecurity. Brown and Crawford emphasize that only extremely high levels of climate change will pose insurmountable challenges to economic and political stability in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which have both enjoyed relative peace over the past decade.

For more on climate change and security in West Africa, see Anthony Nyong’s article in ECSP Report 12.

The theme of this year’s World Health Day, observed on April 7, was “Protecting Health From Climate Change.” This World Health Organization report outlines many of the links between climate change and human health.

Kenya’s post-election strife has decimated its once-thriving nature tourism industry, reports Reuters. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people has driven up demand for bush meat, and in the absence of tourism revenues, reserves can no longer afford to pay rangers to protect the wildlife.

Per capita water availability in the Middle East and North Africa will be halved by 2050, estimates the World Bank, so it is critical for governments to address growing water scarcity now, including making agriculture—which accounts for 85 percent of total water use in the region—more water-efficient.

Indigenous groups from 11 countries met in Manaus, Brazil, last week to develop a plan by which developing countries would be compensated for preserving designated forested areas. The plan, officially known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), could be an important step in distributing both the costs and benefits of tropical forest preservation. It could be a significant boon to indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazon, where native groups have permanent rights to 21 percent of the territory—some 49 million acres. An international carbon-trading plan has been on the table since last year’s climate conference in Bali, and this recent meeting demonstrates indigenous peoples’ commitment to keeping their collective knowledge, voice, and needs on the table.

The vast experience of indigenous people in adapting to changing climates “will not be sufficient—they also need better access to other information and tools,” says Gonzalo Oviedo, a contributing author for the IUCN report Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and Climate. Indigenous groups are often most vulnerable to climate change’s impacts, but their expertise in adapting to climate change has long been overlooked by policymakers. These oversights could prove disastrous, the report warns, as the adverse effects of climate change may overwhelm their capacity to adapt, especially given the marginalization of many indigenous communities. The report describes an “urgent need to help indigenous peoples living in tropical forests to prepare for different climate change scenarios.”

Indigenous groups have already seen the effects of climate change. The frequency of forest fires has increased in Borneo, the Congo basin, and vast tracts of the Southern Amazon basin, while indigenous communities in the Arctic have been affected by changes in the “migration patterns, health, and range of animals” on which they depend for their livelihoods. The IUCN report cautions that while plans like REDD are steps in the right direction, they may benefit corporations and large landowners as much as or more than indigenous peoples.

To address the heavy burdens that climate change will place on indigenous communities, the report makes a number of recommendations, including:

• Actively involving indigenous communities in formulating policies to protect their rights and entitlements;
• Supporting further research of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable cultures;
• Promoting collaboration between indigenous peoples and scientists; and
• Raising awareness of traditional adaptation and mitigation strategies.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a film about sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), premiered yesterday on HBO. GBV is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in the war-torn eastern provinces of the DRC, where untold numbers of women and girls—likely in the hundreds of thousands—have been raped, mutilated, and abused. GBV encompasses rape, sexual mutilation, and abduction into sexual slavery, and is often worsened by war and civil strife.

The Wilson Center’s Africa Program and Environmental Change and Security Program, in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, recently hosted a discussion on GBV in the DRC. Kristin Kim Bart, a gender-based violence program officer at the International Rescue Committee, delivered a powerful presentation that outlined the nature and scope of the problem and offered suggestions for how to address it. She explained, “This rape is not about sexual desire—it is about the domination and decimation of the woman, her family, and entire community. And we have seen that it works as strategy of war again and again, and today in DRC.”

GBV can have severe health consequences, including traumatic fistula, severed limbs, transmission of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, and unwanted pregnancy, but “it is the social and psychological consequences of sexual violence that are sometimes the hardest to overcome,” said Kim Bart. “Survivors are stigmatized, shunned, rejected by their families and communities, and blamed for the violence they suffered.”

Despite this bleak picture, there is hope for women and girls who have suffered from GBV. NGOs like CARE and the International Rescue Committee have become increasingly active in providing health, psychological, and economic assistance to survivors, and governments and other donors have begun to make funding these services a higher priority. In addition, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) recently introduced the International Violence Against Women Act, which would make the prevention of violence against women a key priority in U.S. foreign assistance.

“The silver lining of this is that conflict opens a door to address and discuss what is usually a totally taboo subject,” said Kim Bart in an email to the New Security Beat. “And with the proper resources and technical expertise, we see small changes resulting from our work over time. We have witnessed communities begin to recognize the violence women and girls are facing [and] local health professionals treating survivors with care and compassion.”