Earlier this week, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year effort sponsored by a number of UN organizations, released its final report (executive summary; summary for decision makers), which offers guidelines for improving the stability, sustainability, and equity of global food supply.

The Brookings Institution recently released the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, which finds that extreme poverty and recent experience with conflict correlate strongly with state weakness or failure. Topping the index are Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq, all current or recent hosts to severe conflict. The report, co-authored by Brookings Senior Fellow Susan E. Rice and Center for Global Development (CGD) Research Fellow Stewart Patrick, is intended to serve as a tool for policymakers.

Rather than focusing exclusively on a single measure of performance or attempting to sharpen the often-murky distinction between “effectiveness” and “legitimacy,” as many rankings do, Rice and Patrick evaluate every developing country across 20 indicators—each a proxy for a core state function—in four “baskets” of government performance (economic, political, security, and social welfare).

Eight countries appear in the top (i.e., worst) 10 of both the Brookings index and the well-known Failed States Index published annually in Foreign Policy magazine. However, Rice and Patrick employ—uniquely, they say—fully transparent metrics, introduce policy prescriptions, and assess a broader-than-usual swath of government performance in the hopes of creating a more precise and practical description of current circumstances.

Since September 11, 2001, the security community has paid increasing attention to the threats that weak or failed states pose to the United States. The 2002 National Security Strategy asserted that weak and failing states “pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states.” A 2004 Christian Science Monitor op-ed by two CGD experts on weak states declared that “where poor states lose control, it’s often Americans who pay the price.” Weak or failed states are susceptible to “a host of transnational security threats,” argue Rice and Patrick, “including terrorism, weapons proliferation, organized crime, infectious disease, environmental degradation, and civil conflicts that spill over borders.”

Tucked in with the report’s policy implications is a recommendation that the United States support multi-sector aid programs that simultaneously address security issues and other drivers of state weakness, including lack of access to water and sanitation. The Environmental Change and Security Program recently hosted a panel discussion exploring the efficacy of a multi-sector approach to development.

The theme of this year’s World Health Day, observed on April 7, was “Protecting Health From Climate Change.” This World Health Organization report outlines many of the links between climate change and human health.

Kenya’s post-election strife has decimated its once-thriving nature tourism industry, reports Reuters. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people has driven up demand for bush meat, and in the absence of tourism revenues, reserves can no longer afford to pay rangers to protect the wildlife.

Per capita water availability in the Middle East and North Africa will be halved by 2050, estimates the World Bank, so it is critical for governments to address growing water scarcity now, including making agriculture—which accounts for 85 percent of total water use in the region—more water-efficient.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a film about sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), premiered yesterday on HBO. GBV is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in the war-torn eastern provinces of the DRC, where untold numbers of women and girls—likely in the hundreds of thousands—have been raped, mutilated, and abused. GBV encompasses rape, sexual mutilation, and abduction into sexual slavery, and is often worsened by war and civil strife.

The Wilson Center’s Africa Program and Environmental Change and Security Program, in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, recently hosted a discussion on GBV in the DRC. Kristin Kim Bart, a gender-based violence program officer at the International Rescue Committee, delivered a powerful presentation that outlined the nature and scope of the problem and offered suggestions for how to address it. She explained, “This rape is not about sexual desire—it is about the domination and decimation of the woman, her family, and entire community. And we have seen that it works as strategy of war again and again, and today in DRC.”

GBV can have severe health consequences, including traumatic fistula, severed limbs, transmission of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, and unwanted pregnancy, but “it is the social and psychological consequences of sexual violence that are sometimes the hardest to overcome,” said Kim Bart. “Survivors are stigmatized, shunned, rejected by their families and communities, and blamed for the violence they suffered.”

Despite this bleak picture, there is hope for women and girls who have suffered from GBV. NGOs like CARE and the International Rescue Committee have become increasingly active in providing health, psychological, and economic assistance to survivors, and governments and other donors have begun to make funding these services a higher priority. In addition, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) recently introduced the International Violence Against Women Act, which would make the prevention of violence against women a key priority in U.S. foreign assistance.

“The silver lining of this is that conflict opens a door to address and discuss what is usually a totally taboo subject,” said Kim Bart in an email to the New Security Beat. “And with the proper resources and technical expertise, we see small changes resulting from our work over time. We have witnessed communities begin to recognize the violence women and girls are facing [and] local health professionals treating survivors with care and compassion.”

The Pacific Institute recently released an updated Water Conflict Chronology, which documents instances of conflict over water from 3000 B.C. through the present.

In an article on the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovations, Saleem Ali of the University of Vermont argues that commentators should not have been so quick to blame the recent violence in Chad on oil, as civil strife in the country predates the discovery of oil by several decades. If oil revenues were managed transparently, he suggests, they could significantly improve stability and quality of life in Chad.

Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute highlights recent population trends—such as declining global fertility but a growing global population—and emphasizes the difficulty of accurately predicting future ones in the latest edition of Vital Signs.

Video, presentations, and photos—as well as an agenda and list of participants—from last week’s NATO Security Science Forum on Environmental Security are now available online.

A senior wildlife official with the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) was arrested this week amid charges that he organized the executions of up to 10 endangered mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park last year. The official is also accused of cutting down protected trees to convert them into charcoal. WildlifeDirect, a wildlife conservation NGO that works in the park, suggested that Mashagiro had orchestrated the killings of the gorillas to distract rangers from the charcoal production, which was destroying the gorillas’ habitat, and to discourage the rangers from protecting the gorillas.

Last month, the New Security Beat reported on a new agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Rwanda to protect the mountain gorillas’ rapidly diminishing habitat. The initiative was one of the few promising developments for the gorillas over the past several months.

In early March, rebels who had taken control of the park’s Gorilla Sector—home to half of the world’s approximately 720 gorillas—threatened to kill any park ranger who attempted to enter it. According to local officials, the rebels have set up a parallel gorilla administration in the sector, charging tourist groups to view the gorillas. The park rangers had hoped they would be permitted to enter the Gorilla Sector following a January 2008 peace agreement between the Congolese government and the rebel groups, but the rebels have continued to forbid them from returning to the area.

New research suggests that strengthening local natural resource management (NRM) can also improve governance and reduce the risk of violent conflict. Community involvement in governing natural resources is vital to successful conflict prevention, however. In this ECSP podcast, Masego Madzwamuse of the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) Region of Southern Africa office describes how IUCN’s Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) Support Programme in Botswana helps communities manage their own rangeland, forests, and water. Illustrating NRM-governance-conflict connections in a different part of the world, David Bray of Florida International University recounts his work in two adjacent watersheds in Guerrero, Mexico—one where strong community-led NRM helped prevent conflict, and another where weak community institutions contributed to violent situations.

“The relationship between natural resources and violent conflict is shaped to a large extent by the quality of the governance of those resources, which in turn is a correlate of good governance in general,” says In Control of Natural Wealth? Governing the resource-conflict dynamic, a report by the Bonn International Center for Conversion. “Furthermore, our results confirm the assumption that good (resource) governance increases state stability and, in countries that had experienced violent conflict, the duration of peace.”

Peri-Urban Water Conflicts: Supporting dialogue and negotiation, a report by the Netherlands’ IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, explores water conflicts on the outskirts of three developing country cities: Cochabamba, Bolivia; Chennai, India; and São Paolo, Brazil.

“Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goals: Recognizing Population, Health, and Environment Linkages in Rural Madagascar,” published in Medscape General Medicine, evaluates Madagascar’s progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals and discusses how the government’s plans for the country’s development address the linkages between poverty, population, health, and environment.

According to a study carried out by Michael Ross of UCLA, vast oil wealth tends to diminish women’s rights. “Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions,” writes Ross.

The Economist reports on the global effects of China’s growing hunger for natural resources—including oil, copper, grain, and timber. “Some non-governmental organisations worry that Chinese firms will ignore basic legal, environmental and labour standards in their rush to secure resources, leaving a trail of corruption, pollution and exploitation in their wake.”