Showing posts by Schuyler Null.
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Conflict Minerals in the DRC: Still Fighting Over the Dodd-Frank Act, One Year Later
›August 11, 2011 // By Schuyler Null
One year after the Dodd-Frank Act passed Congress with a provision that was aimed at preventing the sourcing of “conflict minerals” by SEC-registered companies, backlash seems to be growing over the impact of the measure, particularly on artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
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Top 10 Posts for July 2011
›July was a great month for NSB: we launched the blog anew with a new design and better functionality, with the aim of making content better organized, easier to find, and just plain nicer looking. We also continued to see some great traffic on a number of posts, including Richard Cincotta’s dive into Tunisia’s demographics and the Mr. Y “National Strategic Narrative” launch at the Wilson Center.
Newcomers to the top 10 (according to unique pageviews) were posts on the Nature article detailing rare earth finds in the Pacific, the role of water in “land grabs,” profiles on the climate-vulnerability of the Philippines and an ecological tourism outfit in Cambodia, and Geoff’s look at the UN Security Council’s debate about the security threat of climate change.
1. Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us
2. In Search of a New Security Narrative: The National Conversation at the Wilson Center
3. Rare Earths No More? Mineral Discoveries a Potential Game-Changer for East Asia
4. India’s Maoists: South Asia’s “Other” Insurgency
5. In the Rush for Land, Is it All About the Water?
6. Beat on the Ground: Ecological Tourism and Development in Chi Phat, Cambodia
7. Consumption and Global Growth: How Much Does Population Contribute to Carbon Emissions?
8. Life on the Edge: Climate Change and Reproductive Health in the Philippines
9. World Population Day 2011: The Year of Seven Billion
10. Eye on Environmental Security: UN Security Council Debates Climate Change -
World Population Day 2011: The Year of Seven Billion
›July 11, 2011 // By Schuyler NullThe UN Population Fund established World Population Day as a day of awareness about global population in 1987. As we approach seven billion just 24 years later, the UN is kicking off their 7 Billion Actions campaign, designed to raise awareness about the resource, health, and environmental challenges raised by our numbers. Population and its more detailed cousin-indicator, demography, impact the world in a great many ways – from contributing to resource scarcity and environmental destruction to creating social imbalances that can lead to civil instability.
Check out a few of New Security Beat’s most recent stories on population to get a sense of why it’s such an important but oft-simplified and misunderstood indicator and where it matters most.
Photo Credit: “World population,” courtesy of flickr user Arenamontanus.- One in Three People Will Live in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2100, Says UN
- Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections, Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
- Tunisia Predicted: Demography and the Probability of Liberal Democracy in the Greater Middle East
- Watch: Demographic Security 101 With Elizabeth Leahy Madsen
- Yemen Beyond the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions
- Guest Contributor Michael Kugelman: Pakistan’s Population Bomb Defused?
- Dot-Mom: USAID Egypt’s Health and Population Legacy Review
- Watch: Eric Kaufmann on How Demography Is Enhancing Religious Fundamentalism
- Consumption and Global Growth: How Much Does Population Contribute to Carbon Emissions?
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Rare Earths No More? Mineral Discoveries a Potential Game-Changer for East Asia
›July 7, 2011 // By Schuyler NullDiscoveries announced in a journal article over the weekend may prove a game-changer for global rare earth supplies and recent diplomatic maneuvering in East Asia between China, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. A team of researchers from Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology published findings in Nature Geoscience that indicate vast underwater reserves of rare earth minerals are scattered across a huge swath of the Pacific, including south and east of Japan. The U.S. Geological survey estimates current global reserves of rare earth minerals at about 110 million tons; Yasuhiro Kato, the lead author of the Japanese team, told Reuters that the sites surveyed could contain an additional 80 to 100 billion metric tons (yes, with a “b”) of the valuable resources.
The authors write that an “area of just one square kilometer, surrounding one of the sampling sites, could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements.” The team collected data from 78 sites in total, with the largest concentrations centered east of the Hawaiian and Polynesian islands (see a map of the surveyed areas here).
Resource Relationships
The discovery could prove crucial for Japan, as it has been seeking alternative sources of rare earth minerals after an embargo earlier this year by China, which controls 97 percent of the world’s current supply. The embargo (which China denied) was imposed in October of last year after the Japanese navy arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat, which was alleged to be encroaching on Japanese territorial waters. China’s response increased tensions across the region and produced a flurry of warnings in Washington over the security of U.S. supplies.
Although the embargo was later lifted, Japan and Vietnam reached an agreement for development of Vietnamese mines in November. The tensions sparked by the encounter also spread to the South China Sea where Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino forces have stepped up their jockeying over disputed and resource-rich waters to the highest levels in years. Vietnamese and Chinese naval forces recently held mirror exercises, and Filipino officials invoked a 1950-era defense pact with the United States. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai told reporters in June: “I believe the individual countries are actually playing with fire, and I hope the fire will not be drawn to the United States.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called concerns over navigability and Chinese insistence on bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) negotiations in the South China Sea a matter of “national interest” for the United States last year.
The Japanese team’s discovery has the potential to significantly impact the power dynamics behind these tensions. China has used its rare earth monopoly to pressure Japan and the United States, which in turn may have also helped embolden its recent more aggressive maritime policies. If the new rare earth discoveries prove viable, that calculus could change considerably.However serious questions remain: Many of the discoveries lie outside of established exclusive economic zones, so who has the rights to mine them? They’re also between 11,500 and 20,000 feet below the surface – how long before we have the technologies to extract them at an industrial scale? And how safe – both for humans and the environment – will those processes be? Aboveground rare earth mines are some of the most damaging to the environment – part of the claimed reason China curbed overall exports earlier this year, which drove up global prices and drew the ire of the World Trade Organization.
For more on the importance of rare earth minerals to the defense and electronics industries, see New Security Beat’s “Rare Earth: A New Roadblock for Sustainable Energy?” and “Reading Radar: The Mineral Security of the United States.” For more on the exclusive economic zones map, see “Eye on Environmental Security: Natural Resource Frontiers at Sea;” and on the South China Sea and what it reveals about future diplomatic fault lines between the United States and China, see “U.S. v. China: The Global Battle for Hearts Minds and Resources.”
Sources: Asia Sentinel, The Atlantic, BBC, Government Accounting Office, Nature Geoscience, The New York Times, Reuters, Tech News Daily, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “USS Mustin underway in the Pacific Ocean,” courtesy of flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery, and “Exclusive Economic Zone,” used with permission courtesy of Theo Deutinger and TD Architects. -
Consumption and Global Growth: How Much Does Population Contribute to Carbon Emissions?
›July 6, 2011 // By Schuyler NullWhen discussing long-term population trends on this blog, we’ve mainly focused on demography’s interaction with social and economic development, the environment, conflict, and general state stability. In the context of climate change, population also plays a major role, but as Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research put it at last year’s Society of Environmental Journalists conference, population is neither a silver bullet nor a red herring in the climate problem. Though it plays a major role, population is not the largest driver of global greenhouse gases emissions – consumption is.
In Prosperity Without Growth, first published by the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission and later by EarthScan as a book, economist Tim Jackson writes that it is “delusional” to rely on capitalism to transition to a “sustainable economy.” Because a capitalist economy is so reliant on consumption and constant growth, he concludes that it is not possible for it to limit greenhouse gas emissions to only 450 parts per million by 2050.
It’s worth noting that the UN has updated its population projections since Jackson’s original article. The medium variant projection for average annual population growth between now and 2050 is now about 0.75 percent (up from 0.70). The high variant projection bumps that growth rate up to 1.08 percent and the low down to 0.40 percent.
Either way, though population may play a major role in the development of certain regions, it plays a much smaller role in global CO2 emissions. In a fairly exhaustive post, Andrew Pendleton from Political Climate breaks down the math of Jackson’s most interesting conclusions and questions, including the role of population. He writes that the larger question is what will happen with consumption levels and technological advances:The argument goes like this. Growth (or decline) in emissions depend by definition on the product of three things: population growth (numbers of people), growth in income per person ($/person), and on the carbon intensity of economic activity (kgCO2/$). This last measure depends crucially on technology, and shows how far growth has been “decoupled” from carbon emissions. If population growth and economic growth are both positive, then carbon intensity must shrink at a faster rate than the other two if we are to slash emissions sufficiently.
Pendleton also brings up the prickly question of global inequity and how that impacts Jackson’s long-term assumptions:
Jackson calculates that to reach the 450 ppm stabilization target, carbon emissions would have to fall from today’s levels at an average rate of 4.9 percent a year every year to 2050. So overall, carbon intensity has to fall enough to get emissions down by that amount and offset population and income growth. Between now and 2050, population is expected to grow at an average of 0.7 percent and Jackson first considers an extrapolation of the rate of global economic growth since 1990 – 1.4 percent a year – into the future. Thus, to reach the target, carbon intensity will have to fall at an average rate of 4.9 + 0.7 + 1.4 = 7.0 percent a year every year between now and 2050. This is about 10 times the historic rate since 1990.
Pause at this stage, and take note that if there were no further economic growth, carbon intensity would still have to fall at a rate of 4.9 + 0.7 = 5.6 percent, or about eight times the rate over the last 20 years. To his credit, Jackson acknowledges this – as he puts it, decoupling is vital, with or without growth. Decoupling will require both huge innovation and investment in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technologies. One question, to which we’ll return later, is whether and how you can get this if there is no economic growth.But Jackson doesn’t stop there. He goes on to point out that taking historical economic growth as a basis for the future means you accept a very unequal world. If we are serious about fairness, and poor countries catching up with rich countries, then the challenge is much, much bigger. In a scenario where all countries enjoy an income comparable with the European Union average by 2050 (taking into account 2.0 percent annual growth in that average between now and 2050 as well), then the numbers for the required rate of decoupling look like this: 4.9 percent a year cut in carbon emissions + 0.7 percent a year to offset population growth + 5.6 percent a year to offset economic growth = 11.2 percent per year, or about 15 times the historical rate.
To further complicate how population figures into all this, Brian O’Neill’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” shows that urbanization and aging trends will have differential – and potentially offsetting – impacts on carbon emissions. Aging, particularly in industrialized countries, will reduce carbon emissions by up to 20 percent in the long term. On the other hand, urbanization, particularly in developing countries, could increase emissions by 25 percent.
What do you think? Is infinite growth possible? If so, how do you reconcile that with its effects on “spaceship Earth?” Do you rely on technology to improve efficiency? Do you call it a loss and hope the benefits of growth are worth it?
Sources: Political Climate, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Prosperity Without Growth (Jackson). -
Watch: Demographic Security 101 With Elizabeth Leahy Madsen
›June 27, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“Today we are in an era of unprecedented demographic divergence, with population trends moving simultaneously in different directions. Some countries are beginning to experience population decline, while others continue to grow rapidly,” says Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, formerly the senior research associate at Population Action International (PAI). In this primer video from ECSP, Madsen explains how global demographic trends affect economic development, national security, and foreign policy.
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One in Three People Will Live in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2100, Says UN
›June 8, 2011 // By Schuyler NullBetween now and 2100, three out of every four people added to world population will live in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s what the medium variant of the UN’s world population projections estimates.* As we noted in our previous post on the latest UN numbers, Nigeria leads sub-Saharan growth, but other countries will also grow by major multiples: Tanzania and Somalia will be 7 times larger; Malawi more than 8 times; and Niger, to grow to more than 10 times its current population.
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Watch: Younger Generation Will Prioritize Health, Education, Human Rights, Says Frederick Burkle
›June 7, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“Unfortunately, in the last two decades, when globalization became the mantra, it was primarily an economic mantra,” said Frederick Burkle, a senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and senior public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. “The mantra was, ‘if you can improve the economy,” he said, “health, education, everything will follow.’”
“With the financial crisis, that proved not to be true,” Burkle said, and as a result, net expenditures in health and education have declined and the private sector, unfortunately, has not filled the gap.
“We really need to redefine globalization,” Burkle said. “And certainly economics will be there…but health, education, and human rights need to be just as dominant as the economics.”
Burke said he expects a gradual realignment of global priorities to come as younger generations come into decision-making roles. “They don’t have political clout right now,” he said, “but when they do…I think we’re going to see all these aspects that I mentioned – even the humanitarian profession becoming a career – accelerated.”
