“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.”

Global climate change is extremely complex, and the potential responses to it are equally complicated, involving efforts to both mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. These efforts will require domestic, regional, and global leadership—and, most certainly, U.S. leadership. The Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest producer of greenhouse gases within the U.S. federal government and will therefore need to be heavily involved in any U.S. response to climate change. Typically, the DoD explores future U.S. national security interests and strategy in congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs). However, the current QDR (2007) does not address climate change, so I have taken the liberty of crafting an article, “Climate Change, National Security, and the Quadrennial Defense Review: Avoiding the Perfect Storm,” that addresses climate change in a QDR-like manner. If you want the DoD’s attention, you must speak their language.

The 2007 QDR groups potential international security challenges into four broad categories: traditional, irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic. Traditional challenges to U.S. interests require employing military forces in conventional activities to prevent military competition and conflict. Irregular challenges to U.S. national security can come from state and non-state actors employing asymmetric tactics (such as terrorism or insurgency) to counter U.S. strengths. Disruptive challenges include situations where competitors employ revolutionary technologies or methods that might counter or negate current U.S. military advantages. Finally, as defined by the March 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, catastrophic challenges encompass terrorists or rogue states employing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or other methods producing WMD-like effects against U.S. interests. In my article, I classify several climate change-driven security threats into the four categories employed by the QDR. If several of these threats happened concurrently, they could create a “perfect storm” with cataclysmic results.

The DoD can help avert this perfect storm, but to do so, it must act quickly, decisively, and comprehensively to achieve what I call “sustainable security.” This involves integrating the democratic peace theory with the core principles of sustainability. Let me briefly explain these two ideas. The democratic peace theory is based on the presumption that democracies do not fight with each other because they share certain pacifying characteristics (e.g., democratic governments, membership in international organizations, economic interdependence) that encourage them to resolve conflicts peacefully. The core principles of sustainability have been described as the 3 Es: equity, economics, and environment. However, I have modified them for my argument; my modified 3 Es are: social/ecological equity, ecological economics, and environmental security. (Additional detail on how the DoD can work toward sustainable security is provided in my article.)

U.S.—including DoD—efforts to achieve sustainable security will enhance “freedom, justice, and human dignity” around the world, “grow the community of democracies,” increase global stability, prosperity, and security, and make it possible for the international community to “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable” consequences of climate change. Some may consider my proposal a pipe dream. But in solving the biggest security threat of them all, dreaming big is not a luxury—it is a necessity.

John T. Ackerman is an assistant professor of national security studies at the Air Command and Staff College (ACSC), Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and the research course director for the ACSC Department of Distance Learning. The opinions expressed in this article are solely his own and do not reflect the positions of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, or ACSC.

“Washington must awaken to the broader economic and security implications of climate change,” writes Scott G. Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, in an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that explores the consequences of a melting Arctic. “Being green,” emphasizes Borgerson, “is no longer a slogan just for Greenpeace supporters and campus activists; foreign policy hawks must also view the environment as part of the national security calculus.”

The Population Reference Bureau recently published several new resources on global family planning, including a data sheet on worldwide family planning and an article by James Gribble examining trends and patterns in family planning in West Africa. Gribble also recently co-authored an article on the successes and failures of Peru’s family planning policy, particularly among the poor.

An article published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife (subscription required) found that crop destruction by wildlife in three villages in northeastern Tanzania significantly reduced both food security and household income. The article recommends implementing several incentives—including microcredit for non-agricultural activities—for conservation.

A report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Global Strategy Institute examines the future of water and energy in an increasingly urbanized Asia, with a particular focus on China.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a summary of the proceedings at the first African Water Week, which took place March 26-28, 2008.

Integrated population-health-environment (PHE) development programs can often produce greater improvements—at lower total cost—than multiple programs that each target only one sector. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko recently interviewed Lori Hunter, an associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, about her work evaluating integrated PHE programs with colleague John Pielemeier. In the following ECSP podcast, Hunter discusses the challenges associated with encouraging men’s involvement in family planning, implementing integrated development projects on the ground, and designing projects that are sensitive to local residents’ livelihoods and other priority needs.