“The natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, as population pressures mount in the Arab countries,” says the 2009 Arab Human Development Report, which was published this week by the UN Development Programme. A launch event in Washington, DC, features New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Wilson Center scholar Robin Wright.

A special issue of IHDP Update focuses on “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” a synthesis report tied to the recent GECHS conference. Articles by GECHS members, including Karen O’Brien and Alexander Lopez, address water and sanitation, the global financial crisis, poverty, and transborder environmental governance in Latin America.

An op-ed by Stanley Weiss in the New York Times argues that the best way to bring water–and peace–to the Middle East is to ship it from Turkey. A response by Gabriel Eckstein in the International Water Law Project blog argues that “transporting water from Turkey to where it is needed will require negotiations of Herculean proportion.”

CoCooN, a new international program sponsored by The Netherlands on conflict and cooperation over natural resources, recently posted two powerpoint presentations explaining its goals and the matchmaking workshops it will hold in Addis Ababa, Bogota, and Hanoi. The deadline for applications is August 5.

Two new IFPRI research papers focus on the consequences of climate change for poor farmers in Africa and provide policymakers with adaptation strategies. “Economywide Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa” analyzes two possible options for the region. “Soil and Water Conservation Technologies: A Buffer Against Production Risk in the Face of Climate Change?” investigates the impact of different soil and water conservation technologies on the variance of crop production in Ethiopia.

“A warming planet will spread disease, shrink water resources, and deplete crops, creating conditions that produce more famine and more conflict,” said President Barack Obama in Accra, Ghana, on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. “All of us–particularly the developed world–have a responsibility to slow these trends–through mitigation, and by changing the way that we use energy. But we can also work with Africans to turn this crisis into opportunity,” he went on to say.

The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) released “Eliminating World Poverty: Building Our Common Future,” a white paper setting its goals for poverty alleviation and sustainable development, including improving climate change adaptation and reproductive health services in developing countries.

In Foreign Policy, Richard Cincotta compares Iran’s youth bulge and democratic reform movement with the experience of China 20 years ago, concluding that the conservative government’s ruthless response will impede the development of durable liberal democracy.

The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that global warming is exacerbating the spread of mosquito-borne dengue fever in the Americas. Harvard’s Dr. Paul Epstein recently discussed similar incidences of climate change-related disease proliferation at the Wilson Center.

In “Well Oiled: Oil and Human Rights in Equatorial Guinea,” Human Rights Watch “details how the dictatorship under President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country’s people.”

Climate change will have serious impacts on fragile states. To effectively address the potential for instability, the climate community must communicate and collaborate with the development and peacebuilding communities.

In an interview recorded in Washington, Dan Smith of International Alert makes the case for extending this dialogue: “This is not just an environmental issue, not just a development issue, it’s not just a peace and conflict issue, if we don’t understand the connectivity and the interactions between all of these categories, we’re going to get it wrong.”

In the run-up to December’s Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, the idea of REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, is gaining greater currency as a way to bring forests into climate mitigation efforts. Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne finds the principle of compensating states or communities for reducing deforestation sound. Yet he cautions that the devil is in the details when it comes to implementation. Barnett stresses that deforestation’s diverse causes is an initial challenge in designing effective responses. And to whom should payments be made? Should they go to national governments that may or may not share those resources with communities affected by the restrictions on forest use?

A study published in Conservation Letters finds that emphasizing the ways the environment benefits the world’s poor “is a substantial improvement over dollar-based, ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor” and “offers great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.”

The second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Simon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”

More than 150 experts from around the world are assembled this week in Oslo, Norway, for the capstone conference of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project. The conference features a mix of researchers and policymakers, who are debating the practical impacts of bringing a focus on people more firmly into discussions of global environmental change.