In “The Climate Security Connection: What it Means for the Poor,” Joshua Busby (listen to ECSP podcast with Busby) discusses the security implications of climate change for the developing world. In this paper, written for “Development in the Balance: How Will the World’s Poor Cope With Climate Change?,” the fifth annual Brookings Blum Round Table, held earlier this month, Busby explains that “[d]eveloping countries are most vulnerable, partly as an accident of geography, but also because vulnerability is made worse by poverty, bad governance, and past conflict.”

Busby compares the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, which pounded Burma in May 2008, to that of an armed attack, describing both as causing “widespread suffering, destruction of infrastructure, mobilization of the military, and the movement of refugees.” In fact, between 1991 and 2005, natural disasters led to as many deaths as armed conflict, as Busby notes. The subsequent political battles around outside efforts to deliver aid “gave people around the world a visual image of the potential future,” says Busby, and offered a glimpse of “the security risks when affected countries lack the capacity or will to respond.”

The economic consequences of natural disasters can also be crippling. In absolute terms, the developed world suffers larger financial losses, but as a share of GDP, the damage to developing countries is far greater. Additionally, though the death toll of natural disasters continues to fall, the total number of affected people is on the rise, which means that many more people are relying on government services to regain their footing in the wake of natural disasters.

These consequences have long-term security implications for a world in which natural disasters are becoming more frequent and severe. “Post-disaster environments are going to be dangerous moments,” Busby predicts, “when mishandled or inadequate disaster response can give way to the kinds of lingering grievances that can motivate people to take up arms.” To prevent this, he advocates an international focus on adaptation and risk-reduction strategies, and cautions against narrowly focusing on the causal relationship linking climate change to violent conflict. By doing so, policymakers and practitioners overlook what Busby says is the more likely outcome, in which large-scale disasters sap government resources by creating humanitarian emergencies that require military mobilization in response. In “Gathering Storm – the humanitarian impact of climate change,” the UN’s Integrated Regional News Networks (IRIN) explores how climate change has altered the face of global humanitarian crises.

Offering a sharp critique of the reactive strategy of many governments, Busby suggests that a modest investment in prevention would be more efficient and more effective. A joint assessment by the World Bank and the U.S. Geological Survey, for example, found that a $40 billion investment in natural-disaster prevention could have prevented $280 billion in damages worldwide during the 1990s. The reactive approach also threatens to politicize the carefully guarded neutrality of aid workers and organizations; engender international friction where inadequate government response leads to international intervention; and sap government resources through costly responses to humanitarian crises.

Busby envisions a system where “the poor bear less of the brunt of half-hearted and partial reactive measures” in response to climate change. Noting Paul Collier’s finding in The Bottom Billion that past conflict is an accurate predictor of future poverty, Busby argues that reducing the potential for violence in post-disaster situations will improve development prospects for countries worldwide. An enlightened approach, emphasizing prevention over reaction, will not only insulate vulnerable regions from the immediate dangers of natural disasters, but will also protect them from more indirect, long-term threats to their prosperity and security.

Photo: Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were mobilized in response to the May 12th earthquake. As climate change makes natural disasters more frequent and more severe, this will likely become an increasingly common sight. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Alex and Jerry.

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Climate change, increasing population, and overuse of land, fisheries, and water supplies threaten to undermine development in Uganda, writes Pius Sawa for the Africa Science News Service. Olive Sentumbwe Mugisa, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) population and health advisor in Uganda, warns that Uganda’s economic growth is not keeping pace with its population growth, which is among the fastest in Africa, due to a fertility rate of 6.7 children per woman.

Native Ugandan Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka spoke about the interconnectedness of population, health, and environment issues in Uganda in two events at the Wilson Center in May of this year. Kalema-Zikusoka is the founder and director of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), which works to conserve the habitat of the endangered mountain gorilla by strengthening community health services and providing communities with information about the benefits of family planning.

Kalema-Zikusoka is also the author of an upcoming issue of Focus, the Environmental Change and Security Program’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. Her piece describes CTPH’s work in and around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, where it has found great success in addressing health, conservation, family planning, and livelihood issues in an integrated fashion.

Photo: Woman and children in southern Uganda. Courtesy of flickr user youngrobv.

Although it has been 14 years since violence devastated Rwanda, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is now preparing to conduct a Post-Conflict Assessment (PCA) of the country. As Rwanda Project Coordinator Hassan Partow explained, “UNEP does not initiate environmental assessment in any country, it only comes in when invited,” and Rwanda only recently requested that a PCA be conducted (see full list of PCAs here).

In a May 2004 presentation at the Wilson Center, Pekka Haavisto, former chairman of UNEP’s Post-Conflict Assessment Unit (PCAU)—now called the Disasters and Conflicts Programme and headed by David Jensen—remarked that “the post-conflict situation is a unique opportunity to create something new.” Just as environmental issues can lead to conflicts, they can also hamper efforts to create lasting peace following conflict, making PCAs invaluable tools in rebuilding nations following conflict. Common post-conflict environmental challenges include hazardous waste, radioactive materials, deforestation, chemical fires, overcrowded refugee camps, and contaminated water supplies. PCAs assess these challenges and offer recommendations for addressing them.

The environment can also provide a platform for dialogue and cooperation, said Haavisto, citing the case of the Palestinian Territories, where water has long been a nexus of tension and where PCAU has worked since 2001. Israeli and Palestinian officials both support PCAU’s operations in the region, where it brokered an agreement on future environmental cooperation and is working toward reestablishing the Joint Environmental Expert Committee to coordinate sustainable development in the area. Haavisto also noted that UNEP’s PCA work in Iraq following the Gulf War resulted in the first official meeting between Iraq and Iran in nearly 30 years.

The 2007 Sudan PCA cautions that “Sudan is unlikely to see a lasting peace unless widespread and rapidly accelerating environmental degradation is urgently addressed.” The PCA underscored how environmental stresses—including desertification, land degradation, and decreasing rainfall—have contributed to economic desperation, which has been a key instigator of the violence plaguing the region. “It is clear,” said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, that “central to keeping the peace will be the way in which Sudan’s environment is rehabilitated and managed.” Sudan’s tragedy, he said, highlights “how issues such as uncontrolled depletion of natural resources like soils and forests allied to impacts like climate change can destabilize communities, even entire nations.” Yet promisingly, Sudan’s government recently established an environmental ministry, demonstrating how PCAs can spur governments to devote resources to environmental concerns by showing that they are integrally related to economic, health, and security issues.

Though PCAU has completed 18 PCAs since 1995 and has aided in the reconstruction of many countries, Haavisto acknowledged continuing difficulties in persuading governments to prioritize the environment. It has been an ongoing challenge, he said, to “convince different stakeholders that the environment is an important issue that needs to be dealt with immediately.” Yet as the above examples demonstrate, UNEP has achieved considerable accomplishments despite these difficulties.

“African elites have long had the perception that rapid population growth was not an issue because of the vastness of Africa, abundance of resources, relatively low population densities and, more recently, the threat of HIV/AIDS,” but as rapid population growth becomes a more urgent problem across the continent, that view is increasingly falling out of favor, said World Bank lead demographer John May in a recent interview with the African Press Organization. As governments work to improve their population programs, the World Bank is adopting “new demography” principles that examine age structures, dependency ratios, human capital investments, and the demographic dividend to craft cross-sectoral approaches to population policy.

Current demographic trends, the result of reduced infant and child mortality and slowly falling fertility rates, will double the population of Africa by 2036 if left unaddressed, said May. The security implications of this population growth are readily apparent. Rapid population growth has been identified as a factor in increasing resource scarcity and can help lead to conflict. In Sudan, for example, the pressures of overgrazing, desertification, ongoing drought, and escalating competition between pastoralist and agriculturalist communities have contributed to violence. Kenya presents a similar scenario: Rapid and uneven population growth led to land scarcity in the late 1980s, exacerbating latent political and ethnic tensions. The violent conflict that erupted between 1991 and 1993 was fueled in part by natural resource scarcity. More recently, insecure land tenure, shaky property rights, and competition over natural resources have triggered violence across East Africa. Population pressures also play a part, and some argue that demographically-induced land scarcity was at the heart of violence in Kenya earlier this year.

May lamented that far less attention has been paid to population than to humanitarian crises, good governance, and climate change—despite compelling evidence that population growth is likely to negatively impact the chances for peace. Sexual and reproductive health, for example, form 20 percent of the global disease burden, and there is compelling evidence that good reproductive health leads to poverty reduction. He reminds us that demographic issues are inextricably tied to larger development issues, and must be addressed together.

Some countries have successfully reduced fertility rates, May noted. In the 1960s, the Tunisian government introduced a program to reduce fertility rates through increased education for girls, government provision of family planning services, and legal reforms to increase the economic status of rural women and girls. Today, the country boasts a replacement-level fertility rate. Efforts to improve gender equity are highly effective in reducing unsustainable population growth: “It could be argued that the population issue in sub-Saharan Africa is in essence a gender issue,” said May, who argued that “[e]conomic and social development is of course the best contraceptive.”

“The task ahead is huge and difficult, however some concrete results have already been obtained,” said May. He offered a simple suggestion to governments wondering how to craft population policies: “let people, especially women, decide for themselves and…provide them with the means to exert their choices.”

India’s Punjab region faces a host of troubles: In the last 10 years, 100,000 of India’s desperate farmers—many of them Punjabi—have been driven to suicide by their inability to repay loans; half a century of heavy fertilizer use in Punjab has led to soaring cancer rates; water tables in the region sink as much as 100 feet per year, the result of decades of rice production in a naturally dry area; overwatering has brought salts to the soil’s surface, making large tracts of land unusable; and by some accounts, 40 percent of Punjab’s youth and nearly half of its agricultural workforce are addicted to heroin. In a series of reports from Punjab published in Slate magazine, Mira Kamdar argues that the economic, security, and environmental problems facing India can ultimately be traced back some 40 years to the policies of the Green Revolution. The drive to feed India’s rapidly growing population put enormous pressure on Punjab’s land and left consideration for sustainability on the back burner, according to Kamdar, who argues that these issues now threaten to paralyze India’s agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution alleviated the chronic famines that historically plagued India. Hybrid seed varieties, extensive irrigation schemes, and the heavy-handed use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides transformed Punjab into an agricultural powerhouse. It comprises only 1.5 percent of India’s territory, but it produces 60 percent of the country’s wheat and 45 percent of its rice. Yet Kamdar wonders whether India will be able to “feed a growing population in the face of environmental collapse and growing political instability fueled by scarcity.”

With little hope for economic stability, Punjab’s youth are increasingly turning to the drug trade for income, and Punjab’s impoverished citizens, many of whom feel exploited and left behind by the Indian government, are attractive recruits for separatist groups. “Conditions affecting the livelihood of the majority of people in poor countries [or regions] are at the heart of the internal violence” so often found there, according to a report from the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO).

Due to the effects of climate change, the 400 million additional people projected to live in India by 2080 may have to make do with a nearly 40 percent decline in agricultural production during the same period, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Current policies will do little to alleviate the pressures colliding in Punjab. The government—as well as the World Bank, international agriculture corporations, and Indian companies—favors privately funded, large-scale industrial operations. Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s minister of finance, is focused on developing India’s agricultural capacity, and is not terribly concerned with the consequences for the environment, security, or human health. Small-scale farming is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Many countries face the challenge of feeding a growing population with diminishing output, and find doing so in an ecologically responsible manner difficult. Ultimately, though, the case of India shows that increasing output at such dramatic cost to human and environmental health is unsustainable, as it quickly creates complex and intractable problems of its own.

Photo: Punjabi farmers transport fertilizer from a nearby village. Courtesy of Flickr user Aman Tur.

The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) officially launched its 2008 World Population Data Sheet yesterday at the National Press Club. The 2008 Data Sheet features key population, health, environmental, and economic indicators for more than 200 countries. New in this year’s edition, co-authored by Carl Haub and Mary Mederios Kent, are data on percent of population in urban areas, number of vehicles per 100,000 people, and percent of population with access to improved drinking water.

Several findings highlight the significant health inequalities between wealthy and poor countries. For example, while around 1 in 6,000 women in developed countries dies from pregnancy-related causes, in the 50 least-developed countries, the risk is an astonishing 1 in 22. Because maternal mortality is generally seen as a proxy for the general state of a country’s health care system, these statistics point to alarming systemic health care failings in many of the world’s least-developed countries.

The 2008 World Population Data Sheet also highlights disparities between developed and developing countries in population growth rate trends; as wealthier countries’ populations stagnate or even begin to decline, the populations of the world’s poorest countries continue to grow at a rapid clip. PRB president Bill Butz noted that “[n]early all of the world population growth is now concentrated in the world’s poorer countries,” and that “[e]ven the small amount of overall growth in the wealthier nations will largely result from immigration.” As Kent pointed out at yesterday’s press conference, the United States is the major exception to this trend, because most of its population growth over the next several decades will come from natural increase.

Unfortunately, the countries with the least access to improved water sources—and therefore some of the highest rates of diarrheal disease and child malnutrition—have among the world’s fastest-growing populations. For instance, in Ethiopia, which has a total fertility rate of 5.3 births per woman, only 42 percent of the population has access to an improved water source, and in Afghanistan, which has a total fertility rate of 6.8, the figure is a mere 22 percent.

Fertility rates worldwide have been on the decline for many years, the result of a steady decrease in desired family size. But more often than not, fertility rates have not fallen as quickly as desired family size, as access to contraceptives has not kept pace with increasing demand. Consequently, more than 75 million pregnancies each year are unintended, finds “Fertility Regulation Behaviors and Their Costs: Contraception and Unintended Pregnancies in Africa and Eastern Europe & Central Asia,” a World Bank discussion paper surveying decades of research from Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. One fifth of these pregnancies end in induced abortion, fully half of which are classified as unsafe, meaning they are not attended by a properly trained health care worker or in an environment that conforms to minimum medical standards.

The costs of unsafe abortion are tremendous, financially and in terms of human lives. Approximately 67,000 women die annually from complications resulting from unsafe abortion, leaving more than 200,000 children motherless. Sexual and reproductive health issues constitute 20 percent of the global disease burden, and produce additional “direct and indirect costs to the individual woman, the woman’s household, the country’s health system and society as a whole.”

In Africa, post-abortion care can consume up to half of obstetrics and gynecology department budgets. The cost of this care is often much higher than the patient’s monthly salary. The authors report that “comprehensive family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce unsafe abortion in Nigeria would cost only a quarter of what is being spent in direct costs to treat post-abortion complications.” This point is taken up by author Margaret E. Greene is the latest issue of FOCUS, ECSP’s series of occasional papers featuring Wilson Center speakers. She writes that “[r]obust, compelling evidence linking good reproductive health to poverty reduction,” as is offered in the World Bank report, will “support efforts to include it in country-level poverty reduction strategies and in the allocation of international poverty reduction funding.”

This situation repeats itself across the globe. In Central Asia and Eastern Europe, induced abortion is “the principal method of birth control,” due to the expense of importing Western contraceptives, the medical community’s stigma against oral contraceptives, and the availability of abortion result. In Russia, government concerns about low fertility led the government to dismantle its sex-education curriculum and to carry out widespread layoffs in the government-controlled offices of contraceptive manufacturers.

Without exception, the case studies in this discussion paper find significant financial benefit to increasing modern contraceptive availability. Inadequate access is “an important barrier,” the authors write, discounting the argument that the contraceptives are there and people simply don’t use them. DHS surveys worldwide find that cost has prohibited contraceptive use for fewer than 2 percent of the estimated 137 million women with an unmet need. Women have decided, it seems, that the costs of childbearing far outweigh those of contraceptives.

“It is imperative,” the authors write, “that policies and programs address the need for contraception globally – for all population groups but with special emphasis on those who are most disadvantaged.” Community insurance schemes to reduce out-of-pocket payments can help accomplish this. Other ideas include increased subsidies for basic health services and adjusted user fee policies. The report also urges expanded and improved provision of contraceptive information and services, as well as improved training for health care providers. The problem is not a lack of good ideas and policies, but a lack of political will.

Senegal’s southernmost region, Casamance, has been the site of outright or latent conflict for some 40 years. Even before Senegal gained independence, there were calls for independence from the region. Separatist agitation in the region was inflamed during the 1970s by an influx of unemployed migrants from Senegal’s drought-stricken northern regions, seeking a part of “the greatest [economic] potential in all of Senegal.” Beginning in 1983, calls for independence soon led to armed conflict between southern separatist groups and the Senegalese government.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Senegal worked to support a peaceful resolution to the conflict by bolstering infrastructure and providing jobs. One USAID-funded program, undertaken in partnership with EnterpriseWorks Worldwide in 2001, aimed to modernize Casamance’s cashew-processing industry to strengthen the region’s war-torn economy. While cashew exports can bring in significant revenue, the region lacked the infrastructure to produce high-quality nuts for export. Processed cashews can bring in seven to 10 times the price of raw nuts. Today, 90 percent of the 15,000 metric tons of cashews Senegal produces each year come from Casamance.

Sadly, violence in the Casamance region has welled up again in earnest. The peaceful conclusion that many had hoped for following the peace accord of 2004 failed to materialize, and instead, the Senegalese army and Movement for Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) rebels both maintain a large presence in the region.

The USAID-funded expansion of cashew production in Casamance may be having an unintended, and profoundly negative, consequence, reports IRIN News: Skyrocketing cashew prices are “lining the pockets of armed rebels.” Cashews remain a central feature of this conflict in other ways, as well. Earlier this year, more than a dozen villagers attempting to harvest nuts were rewarded by having their ears cut off with machetes by rebels patrolling the area.

MFDC member Damien Manga disputes claims that rebel groups are financed by revenue from cashew exports. He says that while rebels do sell the nuts, the profits finance living expenses only, not weapons purchases. “We collect cashew nuts to sell like everyone else…Some say [selling] cashews…enables us to buy weapons. This is false…it is only our leaders who buy our weapons.” Instead, Manga places blame for violence around the cashew orchards squarely on the shoulders of the Senegalese military. Senegalese military spokesman Lieutenant Malamine Camare refutes this claim, saying that the army’s mission is “to ensure the safety of people and goods in this region. We never engage in profit-making activities, and we execute our mission by the rules.”

Because certain resources and activities are so frequently linked to conflict – diamonds and oil, for example – the role of agriculture is often ignored. As authors Alec Crawford and Oli Brown argue in a new publication discussed in this New Security Beat post, any resource can be exploited to further conflict. Earlier this year, ECSP hosted the “New Horizons at the Nexus of Conflict, Natural Resources, and Health” event series exploring the interaction between human health, natural resources, and conflict.

Photo: A cashew seller in the Gambia. Courtesy of Flickr user Javier D.