Showing posts by Wilson Center Staff.
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Christina Larson, Yale Environment 360
Gauging the Impact of Warming On Asia’s Life-Giving Monsoons
›August 21, 2012 // By Wilson Center Staff
The original version of this article, by Christina Larson, appeared on Yale Environment 360.
Bouncing along bad roads in a jeep through central Mongolia, with bright blue skies and high clouds overhead, we drive for miles through a treeless landscape, passing only dry grasslands dotted with cattle and white yurts. But as we head north – myself, two U.S. scientists, and one Mongolian forestry expert – we begin to notice Siberian pine and larch growing on the northern slopes of rolling hills, but not the southern slopes, and at some elevations, but not others. In water-scarce Mongolia, as my travel companion Neil Pederson of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explained, the precarious growth of trees is limited by temperature and moisture availability; small variations – northern slopes are slightly cooler and wetter – can make all the difference.
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Michael Kugelman, Dawn
Silence Surrounds Pakistan’s Most Serious Threats
›August 18, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on Dawn.
There’s been much discussion lately about the “water kit,” a mysterious contraption that a purported Pakistani engineer insists will enable cars to use water as fuel.
Yet missing from this debate is a basic but critical fact: Pakistan is dangerously water-deficient. Per capita availability hovers just above the scarcity threshold of 1,000 cubic meters. In several decades, availability could plummet to 550 cubic meters.
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PSA: We’re Hiring Two Program Assistants!
›August 8, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP is seeking two Program Assistants to support event planning and outreach/communications on environmental, population, health, security, and development issues. Come help bring together scholars, policymakers, the media, and practitioners through events, research, publications, multimedia content, and our award-winning blog, New Security Beat. -
Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times
A World Without AIDS, Still Worlds Away
›August 6, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Lawrence K. Altman, appeared on The New York Times.
Is the world on the verge of ending the AIDS epidemic and creating an AIDS-free generation, even though a cure and a vaccine are still distant hopes?Yes, roared enthusiasts among the nearly 24,000 participants at the 19th International AIDS Conference here last week. Their hopes are based on the extraordinary scientific gains made since the conference was last held in the United States, 22 years ago, when an AIDS diagnosis was a sure death sentence.
Among those gains: antiretroviral drug combinations for women to prevent infection of their newborns; drugs to treat and prevent infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among adults; and evidence that voluntary male circumcision can reduce the risk of female-to-male transmission by 50 to 60 percent.
Today, HIV has become a chronic disease that, if treated appropriately, can be held at bay in a newly infected young adult for decades — if the patient adheres to the rigid daily drug regimen.
Continue reading on The New York Times.
Lawrence K. Altman is a senior scholar for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s United States Studies Program.
Photo Credit: “Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton speaks at the International AIDS Conference,” courtesy of Roxana Bravo/World Bank. -
Michael Kugelman, Sustainable Security
The Global Land Rush: Catalyst for Resource-Driven Conflict?
›July 31, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on SustainableSecurity.org.
On May 11, the UN approved new international rules to govern how land is acquired abroad. These Voluntary Guidelines (VGs), the outcome of several years of protracted negotiations, are a response to growing global concern that nations and private investors are seizing large swaths of overseas agricultural land owned or used by small farmers and local communities for food, medicinal, or livelihood purposes. FAO head Jose Graziano da Silva describes the VGs as “a starting point that will help improve the often dire situation of the hungry and poor.”
It’s hard to quibble with the intent of the guidelines. They call for, among other things, protecting the land rights of local communities; promoting gender equality in land title acquisition; and offering legal assistance during land disputes.
Unfortunately, however, any utility deriving from the VGs will be strictly normative. As their name states explicitly, they are purely optional. A toothless set of non-obligatory rules will prove no match for a strategy that is striking both for its scale and for the tremendous power of its executioners.
Oxfam estimates that nearly 230 million hectares of land (an area equivalent to the size of Western Europe) have been sold or leased since 2001 (with most of these transactions occurring since 2008). According to GRAIN, a global land rights NGO, more than two million hectares were subjected to transactions during the first four months of 2012 alone. One of the largest proposed deals – an attempt by South Korea’s Daewoo corporation to acquire 1.3 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar – failed back in 2009. Still, even larger investments are being planned today, including a Brazilian effort to acquire a whopping six million hectares of land in Mozambique to produce corn and soy (Mozambique offered a concession last year).
Continue reading on SustainableSecurity.org.
Sources: BBC, Food and Agriculture Organization, GRAIN, MercoPress, Oxfam, Reuters.
Photo Credit: “Garde armé,” courtesy of flickr user Planète à vendre. -
Fiona Harvey, The Guardian
Re|Source 2012 Conference: Global Fight for Natural Resources “Has Only Just Begun”
›July 18, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Fiona Harvey, appeared in The Guardian.
The global battle for natural resources – from food and water to energy and precious metals – is only beginning, and will intensify to proportions that could mean enormous upheavals for every country, leading academics and business figures told a conference in Oxford on Thursday.
Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, who convened the two-day Re|Source 2012 conference, told The Guardian: “We are nowhere near realizing the full impact of this yet. We have seen the first indications – rising food prices, pressure on water supplies, a land grab by some countries for mining rights and fertile agricultural land, and rising prices for energy and for key resources [such as] metals. But we need to do far more to deal with these problems before they become even more acute, and we are not doing enough yet.”
Countries that are not prepared for this rapid change will soon – perhaps irrevocably – lose out, with serious damage to their economies and way of life, the conference was told.
Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, said that the free market would not necessarily provide the best solution to sharing out the world’s resources. Governments would need to step in, he said, to ensure that people had access to the basics of life, and that the interests of businesses and the financial markets did not win out over more fundamental human needs.
Continue reading on The Guardian.
Photo Credit: “Aerial view of the Jonah natural gas field, upper Green River valley, Wyoming, 2001,” courtesy of flickr user SkyTruth and Peter Aengst/The Wilderness Society. -
Ingrid Schulze, Mongabay
Local Experts Needed to Protect Congo Basin Rainforests Amid Conflict, Development Challenges
›July 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ingrid Schulze, appeared on Mongabay.
This summer, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is expected to approve a new higher education strategy which the country has developed with the World Bank and other international donors. The shape of this educational reform initiative will be critical to Congo’s future in many ways. It could finally offer Congo’s long-suffering people a route into the 21st century. It will also help determine the future of the DRC’s forests.
Nearly half of the Congo Basin’s remaining rainforest is in the DRC – yet the critical role of Congolese experts in forestry, agricultural science, wildlife management and other rural sciences in protecting this forest is not widely recognized.As one Congolese graduate student observed, the DRC has a “void” in agricultural and forestry research. Due to years of war and decades of economic crisis and mismanagement, most of Congo’s colleges and universities are severely underfunded and in disrepair. The country is short of experts who can investigate the ecology and economic potential of Congo’s forests and their biota, and provide an objective basis for setting priorities for protection and use of forest resources. While universities in Kinshasa and Kisangani do have some internationally funded programs to increase the number of biologists and other specialists, the number of graduates is nowhere near what is needed. Foreign scientists and consultants are not a substitute for Congolese experts.
Moreover, competent rural science graduates who can advise local farmers, communities and administrators on forestry, sustainable agriculture, wildlife management, and rural development issues are also desperately needed. The DRC’s national agricultural extension service, which should be integral to this process, has been broken for decades. A 1990 USAID report described it as underfunded, without the means to provide farmers with proven crop varieties and advice on agricultural practices, and tasked more with imposing particular crops on farmers and collecting taxes than helping them. There is little evidence that this has changed significantly since the end of the Congo war in 2003.
Continue reading on Mongabay.
Image Credit: Depths of Forest, courtesy of flickr user Bobulix. Congo Basin map, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Imagico. -
Nancy Lindborg, The Huffington Post
Chronic Crisis in the Sahel Calls for a New Approach
›July 10, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Nancy Lindborg, appeared on The Huffington Post.
It is the lean season in the Sahel, a spine of arid and dry lands that runs from Senegal to Chad in western Africa, and once again we are seeing the devastating images of children gaunt with hunger. This is a region that faces high childhood malnutrition and underdevelopment even under the best of circumstances so one poor harvest can push millions of the most vulnerable into severe risk. In the aftermath of poor rains, and with food prices stubbornly stuck on high since the food crisis of 2008, some 18.7 million people across eight affected countries in the Sahel are at risk of food insecurity this year alone. At least eight million people are already in need of emergency assistance.
At USAID, we are determined to get ahead of these kinds of chronic crises. We know that millions of Africans living in the dry lands of the Horn and Sahel regions need new solutions. Last year, the worst drought in 60 years ravaged the Horn of Africa, driving 13.3 million people into crisis. And this summer, families in the Sahel are feeling the peril of depleting food supplies, high food prices, and rising malnutrition.
We can’t prevent what appears to be increasing cycles of drought, but we can and are working to create better solutions and build greater resilience among the most vulnerable.
Every crisis is complex, and the Sahel is no exception. A regional drought has been overlaid with instability stemming from the coup in Mali and conflict in the northern part of that country where armed militant groups have forced the suspension of critical relief operations. More than 184,000 refugees have fled to communities in neighboring countries that are already deeply stressed from drought. Though still functioning, local and regional markets have been disrupted, driving food prices even higher. And as of mid-June, swarms of locusts from southern Algeria and Libya had arrived in northern Mali and Niger; now expected to move southward, these infestations could result in crop destruction exacerbating an already worsening situation.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Image Credit: West African medium-term food security outlook, courtesy of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
Nancy Lindborg is the assistant administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
