Last week, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) hosted “Agriculture, Land Use, and Climate: Implications for African Development,” a panel discussion on agriculture’s essential current and future role in Africa’s development. As panelist Martin Bwyala of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) noted at the beginning of the discussion, 60 to 70 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa depends on agriculture or another form of direct land use for their livelihoods. “Africa’s foundation for sustainable growth lies in enhancing the productivity and sustainable use of its natural resources,” said Bwyala. The panel highlighted the adverse effects of unsustainable land use and climate change on Africans’ livelihoods, and examined the merits of potential solutions.

The panelists emphasized that governments and NGOs are better positioned to aid Africa today than ever before, and that the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) provides an important opportunity to do so. A joint venture by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and NEPAD, with the support of other agencies, CAADP is “a manifestation of African governments’ commitment to address issues of growth in the agricultural sector, rural development and food security,” FAO’s website explains. [w1] The panelists’ overwhelming consensus was that NGOs and governments can and should collaborate to pursue CAADP’s goals, which include: achieving an annual agricultural production growth rate of 6 percent; strengthening domestic and international markets for African agricultural products; spending at least 10 percent of annual public expenditure on agricultural investment; and expanding sustainable management of land and water resources.

Elaborating on CAADP’s goals, Arati Belle of the World Bank explained precisely what is at stake in increasing the sustainability of African agriculture. 485 million Africans are adversely affected by land degradation, which is not surprising, she said, considering that 30 percent of Africa’s GDP and 70 percent of its employment come from the agricultural sector. The goal of the TerrAfrica initiative, launched at the CAADP Partnership Forum, is to “scale up the effectiveness and efficiency of sustainable land management in sub-Saharan Africa.” The need for sustainable land management couldn’t be more urgent: On average, soil and nutrient loss cause a 3 percent annual reduction in African countries’ GDP, said Belle. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Belle warned that unless sustainable and adaptive solutions are implemented, declining crop productivity and increasing variability in precipitation over the course of this century are likely to exacerbate the agricultural sector’s woes.

Continuing this line of reasoning, WWF’s David Reed argued that agencies, governments, and companies involved in Africa “have to change the very base case of their investments, calculations, and thinking, particularly in the agricultural sector.” When thinking about the future of African agriculture, it is crucial to incorporate the impacts of the continent’s massive population growth, said Reed, because the 15 million sub-Saharan Africans who enter the labor market each year are likely to move predominantly into agriculture. It is important that NGOs help African countries take advantage of this influx of labor, Reed said, by promoting agro-forestry best practices, working with agricultural ministries, and encouraging more diverse production systems at the household and community levels.

The final panelist was Angel Elias-Daka of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), who used statistics—as well as anecdotes from his 20 years working in the wetlands of Zambia and Malawi—to shed light land degradation in Africa. Elias-Daka’s field experiences showed him that millions of people depend heavily on wetlands that—due to climate change and unsustainable use—are drying up and losing their biodiversity. He explained the link between COMESA’s work in the region and Africa’s agricultural production as follows: “If you promote trade and investment and people are able to trade their agricultural products, you are also going to promote agricultural production because people know they can trade their agricultural products easily.” Sustainable agricultural development will serve both the economic and the environmental needs of the continent, said Elias-Daka.

The Center for Global Development (CGD) recently launched a new interactive website highlighting the highest CO2-emitting power plants in the world. Carbon Monitoring for Action—CARMA for short—is a project of CGD’s Confronting Climate Change Initiative. The project also highlights clean power producers, reveals the largest power-producing plants, and hosts a blog. Some of the downloadable content is temporarily disabled, likely due to heavy web traffic. Nevertheless, a visit to CARMA is worth your time for the interactive map alone.

The unearthing of significant oil reserves in 100-mile long Lake Albert—shared by Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—has already led to violence, and the conflict could easily escalate further. Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil Corporation, which have drilled wells in the lake, recently estimated that it contains at least 1 billion barrels of oil. Uganda and the DRC both want the lion’s share of this treasure, and their competing ambitions have ignited violence in parts of the disputed Uganda-DRC border.

The November issue of International Affairs focuses on security issues in Africa, with several articles investigating the links among environment, population, and security.

Chatham House’s Nicholas Shaxson explores poverty and bad governance in oil-rich countries in the Gulf of Guinea. “Oil, corruption and the resource curse” builds on the author’s extensive research into the politics of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, including interviews with numerous key players.

“Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa,” by Oli Brown, Anne Hammill, and Robert McLeman, reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa. Climate change could precipitate socio-economic and political collapse, the authors say. However, good adaptation policies could help prevent environmental stresses from triggering conflict.

In “Human security and development in Africa,” Nana K. Poku, Neil Renwick, and Joao Gomes Porto note that Africa is unlikely to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal by the target year of 2015. Arguing that security and development are closely intertwined, they identify four critical developmental security issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis.

Finally, David Styan of Birkbeck College, London, examines the relationship between international migration and African economic security in his article “The security of Africans beyond borders: migration, remittances and London’s transnational entrepreneurs.”

For years, some experts have predicted that the depletion of global oil reserves—and the resulting rising price of oil—would make U.S. dependence on foreign oil economically untenable. Calls to address American energy consumption are nothing new. Yet technology has expanded the industry’s ability to find and extract oil: The National Petroleum Council estimates the total proven reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels—38 years of supply at current rates of consumption. It is likely that another trillion barrels of undiscovered oil exist, as well as 1.5 trillion barrels of “unconventional” reserves of heavy oil, according to the federally chartered advisory committee. As Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues in Foreign Policy magazine, “the world is simply not running out of oil. It is running into it.”

Recently, then, many advocates of oil independence have shifted from an economic argument, which has become hard to sustain at a time when governments are paying $98 a barrel for oil, to a security argument—although this is not to say that national security was not a concern at all previously. Besides the failure of alarmist predictions, two factors explain the shift from an economic to a security discourse: climate change and terrorism. The growing awareness of the causes and extent of climate change has tarnished the image of fossil fuels. According to a BBC poll, 50 percent of the world population favors higher taxes on fossil fuels.

Even more than climate change, however, it is the links between oil and terrorism that cause concern among policymakers. At a conference at the Brookings Institution, former CIA director James Woolsey argued that oil revenue often flows to Islamist regimes that finance madrassas, which educate the next generation of terrorists. Oil can be a source terrorism, but it can also be a target. Oil convoys are one of the main concerns of U.S. troops in Iraq, as they are frequently attacked by terrorists. In addition, the oil fields of the Niger Delta are often attacked by rebel groups.

In his book Freedom from Oil, David Sandalow, an expert on energy policy and climate change, explores what could happen if the next president prioritized oil independence– which he defines as reducing U.S. oil consumption to the point that imports are minimal. [For Sandalow’s response, read comments below.] He believes the transportation complex should be the target of future policies, and that biofuels and plug-in cars are part of the solution. Indeed, as Vaitheeswaran notes, “this year, two-thirds of U.S. oil consumption—and half of global oil consumption—will be sucked up by cars and trucks. Reinventing the car is the only serious way to wean the world off oil.”

Observers typically view the race to lay claim to territory in the Arctic as a competition for oil and gas resources or an exercise in national sovereignty. But for Russia, there could be a third reason to try to claim the North: identity. “The parallel with Stalin’s triumphalist propaganda campaign of ‘conquering the North’ launched in 1936-1939 on the background of severe internal repressions is too obvious to miss,” argues Pavel Baev, research professor at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), in “Russia’s Race for the Arctic and the New Geopolitics of the North Pole,” an occasional paper published by the Jamestown Foundation. According to Baev, Russia’s entire Arctic campaign—including the planting of the titanium flag on the sea floor and the flights of Tu-95MS strategic bombers over Arctic waters—is intended to bolster Russians’ nationalism.

Baev believes that oil alone cannot explain Russia’s actions in the Arctic. First, no one is sure just how extensive the Arctic’s oil reserves really are, because minimal exploratory drilling has been carried out. Moreover, Russia currently lacks the technology to develop offshore oil and gas fields in harsh conditions, and does not seem interested in developing that technology. “The underlying proposition for claiming exclusive economic rights for the seabed beyond the 80°N latitude is that 30-50 years from now hydrocarbons would still be in such high demand that production at enormous costs will be economically efficient. What follows logically is that Russia is not particularly worried about the climate change and has few thoughts about alternative energy sources,” writes Baev.

According to Baev, oil is a motivation for Moscow, but only in the long term. Oil reserves, combined with other strategic interests—such as maritime shipping routes, which have historically been a significant concern for Russia—pushed the Kremlin to take steps to assert Russia’s claims to significant Arctic territories. Three factors contributed to Russia’s Arctic strategy: a growing awareness of climate change; the goal of deterring other nations from asserting their claims to the territory; and a desire to strengthen Russians’ national pride. “Putin’s spin-masters have stumbled upon rather than invented the Arctic theme,” concludes Baev.

Last month, George Washington University’s School of Public Health hosted its annual “Mini-University”, a day-long conference showcasing novel approaches to improving global health.

The conference featured seventy presentations on topics including child marriage, monitoring and evaluation, fistula, urban health (with Wilson Center Global Health Initiative Senior Advisor Vic Barbiero), contraceptive security, male circumcision, XDR TB, nutrition, water and sanitation, gender, and the effects of the brain drain.

A few of the presentations looked at the relationships between conflict and health. One notable presentation (see #12) looked at the transition from relief to development in post-conflict states, examining best practices for strengthening health systems in these settings. Drawing on examples from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, the presenters discussed what the health priorities should be, how to execute them, and acknowledged the difficulty in accomplishing these tasks in such difficult environments.

The population, health, and environment (PHE) field was on display as well. Along with Johns Hopkins Ph.D. student Yung-Ting Kung, I (ECSP Program Associate Gib Clarke) presented “Is the whole better than the sum of its parts? Operations research design and initial evidence from integrated population and environment projects.” I offered background on integrated PHE programs, as well as a PHE case-study from the Philippines, I-POPCoRM. Kung’s presentation reported findings from statistical analysis of the Madagascar Environmental Health Project, with the goal of determining whether family planning and conservation outcomes are significantly better when services are delivered in an integrated PHE program than when they are delivered in isolation.

Though the conference sought to inform graduate students of the variety of new approaches being developed, the number of seasoned professionals present indicated that many members of the public health field recognize the importance of innovation. That monitoring and evaluation was emphasized throughout the day, and that many time-tested programs were on display as well, however, showed that in many cases new energy and commitment—not new technology or strategies—is what is needed.

Today marked the release of The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, a report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). This morning’s launch of the report featured commentary by a few of the report’s many high-profile contributors, including John Podesta, who served as former President Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Fuerth, who served as former Vice President Gore’s national security adviser, and James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA.

The Age of Consequences analyzes the effects three different climate scenarios could have on foreign policy and national security: an expected scenario (based on a 1.3ºC average global temperature increase by 2040); a severe scenario (a 2.6ºC increase by 2040); and a catastrophic scenario (a 5.6ºC increase by 2100). Leaders and policymakers must strive to understand and plan for the potential geopolitical impacts of climate change, said the report’s authors, despite inherent uncertainty regarding the precise severity and timing of those impacts.

Podesta described the expected scenario—which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) medium-range scenario—as the “best we can hope for, the least we should be prepared for.” This least-dramatic scenario still anticipates a plethora of effects stemming from climate change, including a sharp rise in internal and international migration, the spread of infectious diseases, and growing tensions over the distribution of dwindling natural resources. Podesta emphasized that leaders must prepare for climate impacts to interact with one another and cause cascading geopolitical implications. For better or worse, he said, the United States is already viewed as the world’s first responder to natural disasters, and even under the mildest climate scenario, the American military’s disaster response role can be expected to grow.

While presenting the severe climate scenario, Fuerth reminded the Washington policymaker audience that extreme nonlinear environmental changes will likely generate dramatic institutional changes with far-reaching geopolitical implications—but that the trigger point for these changes is always hard to predict. He also argued that the United States and other wealthy countries have a responsibility to take action to mitigate climate change’s harmful global effects. Inaction by the United States over the next 30 years in the face of severe climate change impacts in the developing world would be akin to “kicking people away from the lifeboats,” he said. The report emphasizes that poorer countries will be disproportionally affected by climate change under all scenarios, in part because they lack the resources to cope with changing conditions. However, even for developed countries, says the report’s Executive Summary, the “collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life.”

Woolsey emphasized that a catastrophic climate scenario would seriously threaten both ecosystems and infrastructure systems. The debate should not become mired in whether catastrophic climate events may occur in 2050 or 2100, said Woolsey—just as it is useless for a heavy smoker to debate whether he will contract lung cancer at age 49 or 53. As a society, he argued, we are effectively “smoking six packs a day.”

Woolsey stressed that both the “treehugger” interested only in reducing carbon emissions and the “hawk” interested only in security vulnerabilities want many of the same things. For instance, they both wish to move away from a carbon-based economy—the treehugger to mitigate climate change, and the hawk to reduce the nation’s dependency on unstable overseas regimes and its energy infrastructure’s vulnerability to terrorist attack. Woolsey will expand on this coincidence of interests with a future publication featuring an imagined conversation between the ghosts of “treehugger” John Muir and “hawk” General George Patton.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko, who attended this morning’s briefing, noted, “The Age of Consequences is an important report that brings together a wide range of experts and succeeds at bolstering the significance of climate change as a serious long-term security concern.” Dabelko believes the next steps are “deriving specific action items for a range of actors from this report” and from similar reports, including the April 2007 CNA Military Advisory Board report, the forthcoming Council on Foreign Relations report by Joshua Busby, and the National Intelligence Council’s National Intelligence Estimate, which is expected in early 2008.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko contributed to this report.