U.S. President George W. Bush signed a $550 billion appropriations bill into law on December 20, 2007, which included $300 million to improve water and sanitation in the developing world under the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. Inter Press Service investigates the dangers of fetching water in Malawi, which include crocodiles and cholera.

On December 26, 2007, the Chinese government issued “Energy Conditions and Policies,” a white paper outlining the country’s energy use and plans. The government maintains that China’s history of greenhouse gas emissions gives it the right to grow its economy on fossil fuels, as did most of today’s developed countries, but also pledges China’s strong commitment to renewable energy sources.

Pope Benedict XVI called for better environmental stewardship in his Christmas homily this year, delivered during the traditional Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to The New York Times, “He expanded on the theme [of environmental protection] briefly by saying that an 11th-century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, had spoken ‘in an almost prophetic way’ as he ‘described a vision of what we witness today as a polluted world whose future is at risk.’”

Along with other experts, Fred Meyerson, a professor of demography, ecology, and environmental policy at the University of Rhode Island—and a former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar—is currently participating in an online discussion of population and climate change for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on nuclear proliferation and other global security threats.

The World Bank recently released a Poverty Assessment Report for Yemen, which it produced with assistance from the UN Development Programme and the government of Yemen. IRIN News summarizes the findings.

“We are indeed at a cooperation versus conflict nexus,” said Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, at a December 11 meeting sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute. Huebert was joined by fellow Arctic expert Michael Byers, the academic director of the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, in a discussion of the potential security threats introduced by a rapidly melting Arctic.

Globalization and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century: Still searching for a Christmas gift for that serious reader on your list? Consider this comprehensive 1,148-page volume on the dual challenges of post-Cold War security: globalization and environmental degradation. Edited by Hans Günter Brauch, the book contains an unusual section examining security’s philosophical, ethical, and religious contexts, as well as more traditional sections on theories of security and the relationships between environment, security, peace, and development. You can see the table of contents here.

Landon Lecture (Kansas State University): U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for a significant expansion of the United States’ non-military instruments of power. “What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security—diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development….We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years,” said Gates.

“Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history”: Lead authors David Zhang and Peter Brecke argue that during the pre-industrial era, climate change was frequently responsible for war, famine, and population decline. “The findings [of our analysis] suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” write the authors in this article, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“War and the Environment”: This month’s World Watch Magazine cover story explores the ecological effects of violent conflicts around the world. “Several recent wars in varied environments and different parts of the world reveal that the ecological consequences of war often remain written in the landscape for many years. But the story is not always straightforward or clear. Instead, the landscape is like a palimpsest—a parchment written on, scraped clean, and then written over again—on which the ecological effects of war may be overlain by postwar regeneration or development,” writes Sarah Deweerdt.

UN World Youth Report 2007: According to this report, opportunities for the 1.2 billion young people aged 15-24 have expanded in recent years. However, this cohort, especially in developing countries, still faces significant challenges, including overcoming poverty and attaining adequate education and health care.

Climate change could increase instability in the Middle East, says “Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security,” a new report by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME). Written in preparation for this month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, the report focuses on how climate change could harm the region’s already-scarce water supply. Climate change’s likely impacts on water in the Middle East include reduced precipitation and resulting water shortages; more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods; and rising sea levels.

“The water crisis in Central Asia is due to the way water has been allocated and managed; it is not a crisis of quantity but of distribution,” asserts Jeremy Allouche, a visiting fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, in “The governance of Central Asian waters: national interests versus regional cooperation,” available in the latest issue of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research’s Disarmament Forum.

The shrinking of the Aral Sea, which began in the 1960s, first drew international attention to the region’s water issues. The Aral Sea has been an ecological disaster, but Central Asia now has another, equally serious hydrological problem: how to divide the region’s limited water among competing countries that need it for irrigation, hydropower, and other uses. Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Krygystan have had largely hostile relations over water distribution since they achieved independence in 1992, and these tensions could boil over into violent conflict unless the countries can implement a functional regional water agreement.

Allouche offers a concise, lucid overview of the challenges of the region’s post-independence water governance system, including analyses of how the water policies of Central Asia’s major players (which also include Afghanistan, China, and Russia) affect regional tensions over water.

The United States and Israel could garner more meaningful engagement from Syria in the Middle East peace process by proposing the creation of a peace park in the disputed Golan Heights area, say University of Vermont Associate Professor Saleem Ali, a recent speaker at the Wilson Center, and Rabbi Michael Cohen of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel in “Salvaging Peace with Syria,” available on the Carnegie Council’s “Policy Innovations” website. Noting that transboundary conservation areas have helped resolve past conflicts—as with the Cordillera del Cóndor Transboundary Protected Area, established between Peru and Ecuador in 1995—the authors argue that a Golan Heights peace park should be on the agenda at tomorrow’s Middle East peace conference in Annapolis.

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.

Major environmental challenges—including land degradation and desertification, pollution, and climate change—demand swift, concerted global action, say the authors of Global Environmental Outlook: Environment for Development (GEO-4), which was recently published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Assessing the state of the Earth’s atmosphere, land, water, and biodiversity, the 572-page report finds that as the global population grows and consumes increasing amounts of natural resources, it threatens the health of essential ecological assets ranging from fish stocks to fertile land to freshwater. GEO-4 identifies the most pressing environmental issues confronting each region of the world, and offers policymakers specific recommendations for responding to these challenges.

For the first time, the assessment includes explicit analysis of the linkages between the environment and conflict. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko served as one of the lead authors of Chapter 7, “Vulnerability of People and the Environment: Challenges and Opportunities,” which explores the relationship between environmental change and security using the concept of human vulnerability. The authors emphasize that the poor are the most susceptible to the stresses caused by degraded environments, and suffer disproportionately from land degradation, water contamination and scarcity, and increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters.

“A combination of environmental change, resource capture and population growth decreases the per capita availability of natural resources, and can threaten well-being for large segments of societies, particularly the poorest who depend on these natural resources for survival. The resulting social effects—migration, intensified unsustainable behavior and social sub-grouping—strain the state’s ability to meet its citizens’ demands, and can contribute to violent outcomes,” write the authors. They recommend reducing people’s vulnerability to environmental and socio-economic changes by bolstering the resource rights of local people; promoting sustainable livelihoods; improving communities’ natural disaster coping capabilities; and empowering women and other historically disadvantaged groups. They also urge the integration of environmental considerations into broader development activities, so that development will be sustainable and will help, not harm, a country’s poorest members.

UNEP has spearheaded a range of efforts analyzing environment, conflict, and security connections. Its Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch (PCDMB) conducts scientific assessments of environmental conditions in conflict and post-conflict settings. The Woodrow Wilson Center recently hosted the U.S. launch of PCDMB’s June 2007 Sudan Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment. In 2003, UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA) took a broader look at the links between environment and conflict with the publication of Understanding Environment, Conflict, and Cooperation.