Showing posts from category demography.
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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
›The latitudinal tenth parallel — located 700 miles above the equator — constitutes a “faith-based fault line” between Islam and Christianity, said Eliza Griswold at the launch of her latest book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam at the Wilson Center on September 16, 2010. The former Wilson Center public policy scholar traveled more than 9,000 miles to six countries along the line. One quarter of the world’s Muslim population lives north of the line, while one-fourth of the world’s Christian population lives south of it.
Religious Conflict and Environmental Peacemaking
The tenth parallel is vulnerable to intense religious conflicts, exacerbated by the imposition of colonial-era national borders. Griswold collected stories from tribal leaders, presidents, and missionaries that reveal subtle linkages between religious conflict, politics, and environmental change. “Every single religious conflict I saw had a worldly trigger, whether land, oil, or water,” she said, because these groups tend to self-identify along lines of religion, “even over any kind of ethnicity.”
In the town of Abiay, Sudan, Griswold described a fight “over who’s going to get that oil, and how they’re going to divide themselves. Religion comes in as an overlay, because the north pushes the people of the south farther south by saying, ‘Guess what? We need that land, and why? Because our Muslim people need that land for their cattle,’ but underneath that land runs a river of oil.”
But in these origins of conflict Griswold finds an avenue to peace: “Environmental challenges seem to work well in areas of religious conflict” as a neutral meeting ground, she said.
For example, in the Nigerian city Kaduna, where Christians and Muslims have clashed violently, two former mortal enemies and self-avowed fundamentalists work together to deprogram the youth they trained to protect their faith through violence. At the Interfaith Reconciliation Center, Pastor James (who lost an arm to a group of Muslims) and Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa use practical aspects of living to encourage interfaith dialogue. During Griswold’s visit, it was fuel-efficient cookstoves, “because that’s one of the things Christians and Muslims fight about…whether land, water, oil.”
Such concrete examples of environmental peacemaking offer future policy options for mitigating conflicts in other areas. “The tenth parallel is one of the most sensitive environmental zones in the world…so do I think it’s replicable? Absolutely,” said Griswold.
The Changing Demographics of Religion
Today, “four out of five of the world’s one billion Muslims don’t live in the Middle East; they live in Africa and they live in Asia. More than half of them live along the tenth parallel, and about half of the world’s two billion Christians also live along the tenth parallel,” sais Griswold.
She explained that the migration of Islam to Africa stopped along the tenth parallel because of the tsetse flies and the devastating sleeping sickness they carried.
Later, colonial-era European missionaries arrived, many with “the express purpose of stopping Islam from winning Africa, from spreading south of the tenth parallel,” she said. For example, Britain’s division of Sudan restricted Muslims to the north and Christians to the south, where missionaries developed and constructed the southern Sudanese state.
“Many of these places are failed states…and religion has come in largely to fill the gaps,” said Griswold. “The world is breaking down on tribal lines and religion is the largest tribe there is, more so than ethnicity, more so than other global markers.”
Based on population projections, Griswold pointed out that “the center of Christianity, in 2050 will be on the tenth parallel…in Muslim Nigeria.”
Historical Echoes
Historically, aid and development work along the tenth parallel “was not a secular enterprise,” Griswold said, since most of the aid workers were Christian missionaries. “So there is a very long history and a very strong association between the West and Christianity in many, many places,” she pointed out.
This history has long affected American foreign policy and perceptions of the United States abroad. According to Griswold, “foreign policy [has] come to reflect the interests of selective groups of Americans.” For that reason, “we really need to call for caution in how we allow ourselves to be represented and in the diversity of voices that get out there,” she advised.
For example, the evangelical preacher Franklin Graham met with Bashir in 2003 to ask for the right to proselytize in northern Sudan. In exchange, Bashir hoped to avoid being added to “the American ‘hit list’ after Afghanistan and Iraq,” reported Griswold. Graham told her that in response he took out a George W. Bush re-election pin and said, “Mr. President, I understand you’ll be talking to my president later today. Why don’t you tell him you’re his first voter here in the Sudan?”
In the same vein, Griswold cautioned against perpetuating American ignorance of Muslim culture:We, especially in America, are extremely aware of this fight over who speaks for God. Because I think, when we see what’s happening on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or at Ground Zero, we’re looking at a struggle inside of a broader Christian context between Franklin Graham and Barack Obama over who a true Christian is. And Islam becomes the easiest bogeyman. The quickest way to whip up fear in followers is to create a shared enemy.
“The single most important finding of the book,” Griswold concluded, “was that the clashes within religions, the clashes between Christians and Christians, Muslims and Muslims, over who has the right to speak for God, are the most important and most overlooked religious conflicts going on today.”
Shawna Cuan is an intern with the Environmental Change and Security Program. Edited by Meaghan Parker.
Photo Credit: “Farmer Harvests Sorghum Seeds in Sudan,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Scarcity, Climate, Population, and Natural Resources
Integrated Analysis for Development and Security Policymakers
›Development, population, security, scarcity, climate, and natural resources: Increasingly, policymakers are realizing that the issues in this laundry list are inextricably linked. But how do policymakers break out of their institutional stovepipes to address these connections in an integrated way?
In an event hosted by the Environmental Change and Security Program on September 2, 2010, Alex Evans of New York University and Global Dashboard and Mathew Burrows of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) focused on the current state of integrated scarcity issues in the policymaking world.
A Developing Problem
“Why should we be worried with scarcity issues in the first place?” asked Evans. The crux of the problem, he said, is that people are simply consuming more across the board – particularly more energy, water, and food. In addition to general population growth, higher demand is driven by an expanding global middle class that is shifting to more Western-style diets and consuming more energy.
Globally, demand in key resources is outpacing supply:
You can’t address one of these scarcity issues without affecting another, argued Evans. In Haiti, for example, deforestation led to soil loss and erosion, thus degrading agricultural land. Deforestation also changed the country’s precipitation patterns. Together, these effects reduced food supplies even before the earthquake. Today, the UN estimates that more than 2.4 million people in Haiti are food-insecure.- Demand for oil is rising by a percentage point each year, and the International Energy Association has warned that investment is not keeping up;
- Demand for water will increase 32 percent by 2025, but one of the first impacts of climate change is expected to be less available water; and
- Demand for food will increase 50 percent by 2030, but food supplies are only growing by one percent annually.
Evans recommended that these concerns be better integrated into current development and aid efforts, focusing on five areas:
A New International System- Establishing land tenure and renewable resources;
- Exploring the overlaps between resilience and peacebuilding;
- Empowering women and stabilizing population growth;
- Improving agricultural investment; and
- Increasing general investment in the energy sector.
In addition to the physical dangers of scarcity, Evans pointed out that the perception of scarcity can drive what he sees as dangerous behavioral dynamics such as protectionism.
“Look at the way 30-plus countries slapped export restrictions on their exports of food in 2008,” said Evans. “It’s perceptions of scarcity driving irrational behavior, it’s fertile ground for panic and we need to factor that into our policymaking.” He called for a mechanism similar to NAFTA, which restricts sudden price changes, to help the global trade system become more resilient to changes in energy and food supplies.
Burrows pointed out that a big reason for the rising disparity between food, water, and energy demand and supply is the large “middle class” of emerging powers. “You are seeing this phenomenal change going on on the resource side, but at the same time, the international system is in great flux,” he said.
Scarcity will also affect the international legal system as well. “Of the world’s 263 transboundary river systems, 158 lack any kind of cooperative management framework,” said Evans, asking if they could be peacefully managed during times of scarcity. He offered another example: How will the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea handle coastlines that change with the climate? “We haven’t really begun to ‘stress test’ existing legal infrastructure, to look for these kinds of instances,” said Evans.
The biggest elephant in the “international room,” however, is how to settle the issue of carbon sharing, without which there can be little global cooperation on these issues that does not end in a zero-sum game, Evans said:For me the jury is still very much out on whether there are limits on growth per se, as a result of scarcity – I’m not convinced of that yet. But I think it is clear that there are obviously limits to how much carbon we can put in the atmosphere, how much oil there is, how much land and water is available, and so on. We can do a huge amount with efficiencies and new technologies, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think that efficiencies and new technologies get us off the hook all together from having to face up to the distributional questions, the questions of fair shares that arise in a world of limits.
Is Integrated Policymaking Possible?
Government has come a long way towards addressing scarcity, said Burrows, but serious structural issues remain because there are too many established, vested interests at stake. Often, the tactical takes priority over the strategic: “A lot of these issues, by their very nature, are long-range in character,” he said. “In my experience there are more policymakers that are simply focused on the tactical [and] fewer that take these longer-range perspectives.” In addition, he pointed out that the divide between government and the scientific community continues to impede policymakers’ understanding of the technological options available.
On the positive side, Burrows highlighted improved work by government planning offices, particularly in the intelligence community and the military. “If you compare Global Trends 2020 and Global Trends 2025…you’ll see a huge difference in terms of how we dealt with climate change, environment, and the resource issues,” said Burrows of the NIC’s reports. He said that the intelligence community is performing more long-range analyses, and that other countries like China are now starting similar global trends analyses.
Despite the silo problem, the best solution may not be in creating new government agencies and closing down others, said Evans. “I think instead perhaps we need to see the challenge as more creating shared awareness, common analysis; a common sense of objectives among existing institutional configurations. I think we may find we get better rates of return on that,” he said.
While U.S. and other governments are only beginning to grasp these issues, Burrows praised NGOs and think tanks, which “have played such a big part… in creating those sorts of networks and inter-relationships” that have raised the profile of scarcity issues.
While the political space for dealing with these issues is not there yet, Evans argued that it will eventually emerge – most likely after some kind of shock, because “after sudden-onset crises, people are often, for a short time, prepared to think the unthinkable.”
An adequate response requires readying integrated approaches to address the integrated problem of scarcity. “It’s necessary to have the solutions, so when the crisis hits, you can have some action, and I think we are doing that legwork,” said Burrows.
Sources: International Energy Agency, MSNBC, UN. -
Syria: Beyond the Euphrates
›September 28, 2010 // By Russell SticklorThe Middle East is home to some of the fastest growing, most resource-scarce, and conflict-affected countries in the world. New Security Beat’s “Middle East at the Crossroads” series takes a look at the most challenging population, health, environment, and security issues facing the region.
Across the Middle East, sustained population growth has strained government institutions, natural resources, and the social fabric of entire societies. In Syria, these problems have been particularly acute.
With a total fertility rate of 3.3 children per woman and a population growth rate of 2.45 percent, the country is slated to swell from 22.5 million people to 28.6 million by 2025, and upward to 36.9 million by mid-century, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
“We have a population problem, no question,” acknowledged Syrian economist and former World Bank official Nabil Sukkar in a recent interview with Reuters. “Unless we cope with it, it could be a burden to our development.”
One of the biggest population problems threatening to derail Syria’s continued development is the scarcity of clean fresh water, which has troubling implications for both the security of the country and the region, since Syria shares key transboundary waterways, like the Euphrates River, with neighbors Iraq and Turkey.
As Syria grows more crowded, can Damascus find a way to encourage more efficient management and sustainable use of the country’s water? Or is greater conflict over the resource at home and in the neighborhood inevitable?
From Water Rich to Water Scarce
Historically, Syria has enjoyed plentiful groundwater resources and water from a number of rivers. Even today, Syria typically receives more annual precipitation per capita than seven other Arab nations, placing Syria 13th on a list of 20 released by the UN Development Programme’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report.
However, rapid demographic change, coupled with a series of severe droughts since 2006, has made life considerably more difficult for many Syrians. According to the UN, erratic rainfall in recent years has reduced Syria’s surface water supplies, inducing crop failures and livestock losses, and nudging millions — especially those involved in subsistence farming — into “extreme poverty.” In particular, wheat production has been hit hard, weakening the country’s food security and pushing farmers to migrate to urban centers.
Heading Underground
To cope with the drought, large- and small-scale farmers alike have increased their reliance on groundwater. But in a country where 90 percent of all water withdrawals are used for agriculture, Syria’s efforts are placing a huge strain on its aquifer health. And despite appearances, it’s not just the drought: Syria’s groundwater depletion problems have spanned decades, mirroring its population growth.
According to Syria’s National Agricultural Policy Center (NAPC), the number of wells tapping aquifers nationwide is thought to have swelled from just over 135,000 in 1999 to more than 213,000 in 2007. The rampant pumping — much of it illegal — has caused groundwater levels to plummet in many parts of the country, and raised significant concerns about the water quality in remaining aquifer stocks.
And demand continues to rise: NAPC reports that the amount of land irrigated by groundwater soared from roughly 650,000 hectares in 1985 to 1.4 million hectares in 2005, a trend that has only accelerated in the face of recent rainfall shortages.
Drawing down aquifers is worrisome as long as withdrawals outpace natural recharge. Some, known as “fossil aquifers,” lack natural inputs or outlets and will never refill — once drained, these aquifers are gone for good.
Avoiding the Hard Choices
For decades, Damascus did little to acknowledge or address the country’s growing problem of aquifer overuse. Government officials shied away from implementing robust policies that would have metered, taxed, or even simply monitored groundwater usage. In lieu of encouraging water-use conservation in the agricultural sector, Syria’s water managers instead focused on manipulating supply, by constructing dams or proposing plans to shuttle water between river basins. In doing so, they largely avoided imposing water austerity measures that almost certainly would have proven politically unpopular.
Belatedly, some efforts to mitigate Syria’s water issues are now underway. The country’s 2005 water-use code called for the licensing of all the country’s wells, threatening fines or prison terms for those caught illegally pumping groundwater. In 2008, Damascus took its campaign one step further, eliminating diesel subsidies that once facilitated groundwater removal.
But while these efforts have had some positive effect on groundwater-use trends nationwide, they could undermine stability in the short term. Illegal wells facilitate crop growth in many areas and help employ thousands in the agricultural sector, so shutting them down could heighten regional unemployment, and further weaken the country’s food security.
There Goes the Neighborhood?
With the future of Syria’s groundwater uncertain, there has been speculation that these internal water tensions might increase competition with neighboring countries for transboundary surface waters. The two countries most inextricably linked to Syria’s water crunch are Iraq and Turkey, who share the Euphrates with Syria.
Syria pulls roughly 85 percent of its water from the Euphrates, making the river a vital strategic resource. Yet water availability has historically been subject to the whims of Turkey, which controls the Euphrates’ headwaters.
Meanwhile, Iraq, which lies downstream of Syria, is also heavily dependant on the river. Understandably, as all three countries have seen their populations grow in recent decades, so too have tensions over controlling and sharing the Euphrates’ flow.
Despite Turkey’s long-standing resistance to international water-sharing pacts and penchant for large-scale hydroelectric projects, a new round of water diplomacy may help ease future tensions over the river. A recently created joint institute — backed by Iraq, Syria, and Turkey — is designed to provide a forum for the three countries to share data and policy ideas. Academics and water experts from the three countries will collaborate on efficient management, share best practices, and create a comprehensive map of the region’s water supplies.
The institute may be only a small step, but its emphasis on transparency is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. For Syria — sandwiched between two much larger countries — better communication with its neighbors is not only smart, but necessary to avoid conflict. But that won’t solve the country’s serious water scarcity problem. Leaders in Damascus should also continue to encourage conservation and more efficient use of water to stretch supplies to meet the needs of their growing population.
Sources: BBC, Global Arab Network, IRIN, Mideastnews.com, National Agricultural Policy Centre (Syria), Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, Syria Ministry of Agriculture, Syria Today
Photo Credit: “Euphrates and the Dig House Dura Europos,” courtesy of flickr user Verity Cridland. -
Women, Water and Conflict as Development Priorities Plus Some Geoengineering Context
›September 24, 2010 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoHere are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.
• NYU’s Richard Gowan dissects UK development minister Andrew Mitchell’s encouraging speech identifying conflict-affected states as special DFID priorities. Gowan pulls out highlights from the speech and parses NGO reaction to it on Global Dashboard.
• Council on Foreign Relations’ Isobel Coleman provides five practical suggestions for tapping into women as the “new global growth engine,” on Forbes.
• The Aspen Institute announced its Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health this week. Their goal: meeting unmet demand for family planning services by 2015 on the MDG schedule. That is over 200,000,000 women who want services but do not have access.
• I’m heartened to see the U.S. Senate pass the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act. Hoping the House will follow suit. Last time Congress passed legislation on water, sanitation, and health priorities, the 2005 Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support.
• Colby historian Jim Fleming, writing in Slate, puts the increasing fascination with geoengineering as a climate response “option” in some sobering historical context. “Weather as a Weapon: The Troubling History of Geoengineering” is the short read. Tune in to hear Jim present the book length version, Fixing the Sky, at the Wilson Center, October 6th at 10:30 am EST.
Follow Geoff Dabelko (@geoffdabelko) and The New Security Beat (@NewSecurityBeat) on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates. -
Alex Evans on Resource Scarcity and Global Consumption
›“Why should we be concerned with scarcity issues?” asks New York University’s Alex Evans. Beyond general population growth, there is also an expanding global middle class that is shifting to more Western diets and consuming more energy, he explains. The net result is that demand for food, water, oil, and land is outpacing supply. These scarcity issues should be grouped together, argues Evans, because you can’t address one without affecting the others.
The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes. -
Israel and Lebanon: New Natural Gas Riches in the Levant
›September 17, 2010 // By Russell SticklorThe Middle East is home to some of the fastest growing, most resource-scarce, and conflict-affected countries in the world. New Security Beat’s “Middle East at the Crossroads” series takes a look at the most challenging population, health, environment, and security issues facing the region.
It doesn’t take much to get Israel and Lebanon at each other’s throats these days, given that the two neighbors engaged in a significant war in 2006. That conflict remains an open wound, as the two sides remain technically at war to this day. Periodic cross-border flare-ups — most recently over the cutting down of a tree on their shared border, which left one Israeli and three Lebanese dead — show neither side has to be pushed far to trigger an outbreak of violence.
In recent months, a new wrinkle — and a new source of potential conflict — has been added to bilateral relations, with the discovery of significant natural gas reserves under Mediterranean waters off both countries’ coasts. The find has sparked a scramble from Beirut and Jerusalem, as the two energy-hungry nations look to capitalize on the deposits and exploit the reserves. For both Israel and Lebanon, developing the natural gas potential of this swath of the eastern Mediterranean could augment energy supply, and even pave the way to a greener energy future. But fears of a military stand-off over the resource lurk just around the corner, given that much of the extractable natural gas in question lies under contested waters.
Maritime Border Undefined
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the recoverable amount of natural gas reserves, which lie in an area known as the Levant Basin Province, to be 122 trillion cubic feet (tcf). While not a huge find by global standards — the world consumed 110 tcf of natural gas in 2008 — the discovery is a potential game-changer in terms of the energy security of both Israel and Lebanon. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2007 Israel produced only four percent of the total energy it consumed, while Lebanon generated just three percent of the energy it used. With the natural gas bonanza, not only would the two countries become more self-sufficient in meeting their own domestic energy needs, there is also speculation they could even one day become natural gas exporters.
The question that is only now beginning to be addressed is who controls what. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, every coastal country has an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) that extends 200 miles off its shoreline. But in certain bodies of water, EEZ territorial claims have overlapped, with one of those areas disputed being the Mediterranean.
At this point, much of the known reserves appear to lie firmly in Israeli territorial waters, one of the reasons Israel has outpaced Lebanon in moving to drill for the resource. But Lebanese leaders — long concerned about the prospect of Israel infringing upon Lebanon’s sovereignty — have sounded the alarm, claiming that a substantial amount of the reserves may lie in Lebanese territorial waters. Further complicating matters is the fact that the two countries’ maritime border has remained unfixed since the end of the 2006 war, meaning that each country could have a legitimate claim that the other is trespassing on its sovereign territory in pursuit of the gas.
Hinting at a Physical Confrontation
The stakes appear high. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Ali Hamdan, an assistant to Lebanese Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, issued a strong-worded statement on potential Israeli drilling in disputed waters. “Lebanon fears that Israel, based on its history of occupying our lands and stealing our water, will drill in Lebanon’s waters and steal its natural resources,” Hamdan asserted. “Lebanon strongly warns Israel from drilling its natural gas. It will not tolerate violations of its sovereignty.”
In recent weeks, the Lebanese government has also taken steps to secure what it can, announcing plans to start doling out contracts for underwater exploration of the Levant Basin Province’s natural gas and oil reserves. Beirut is also putting together documents outlining what it considers to be the actual Israeli-Lebanese maritime border, which it plans to submit to the UN Security Council for consideration.
For its part, Israel has pledged that it will be drilling for natural gas only in waters under its control. At the same time, however, the country has refused to back down to Lebanese threats against its natural gas development activities and infrastructure, warning that it will not hesitate to meet force with force. The posturing reveals how strategically important the exploitation of the gas reserves is for both countries. With Lebanon’s population expected to grow by some 400,000 between 2010 and 2025, and Israel’s population projected to grow by 1.8 million in the same time period, there is an acute awareness in both Beirut and Jerusalem that energy demand will be rising in the near future.
A “Bridge Fuel” to a Cleaner Energy Future?
Despite the very real conflict potential of the new natural gas find, the presence of significant reserves in the eastern Mediterranean has also been the cause for limited optimism. In addition to helping ease the oil- and coal-dependence of Israel, Lebanon, and their neighbors, the heightened integration of natural gas into the region’s energy infrastructure may help substantially cut down on carbon emissions, since natural gas is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel. (In 2008, Israel and Lebanon pumped 70.21 metric tons and 14.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, respectively, owing largely to their heavy reliance on coal and petroleum.)
Natural gas is also a versatile energy source for electricity production that can be used by the region’s households, businesses, and factories alike. As a result, not only could natural gas’s rising profile in Israel and Lebanon’s respective energy portfolios help improve air quality, it could also accelerate the development of low-polluting, natural gas–fueled automobiles and public transit.
But even given such environmental benefits, the environmental picture is not all rosy. The underwater extraction of natural gas poses potentially severe risks to the maritime environment, one of the reasons that Israelis living in the northern part of the country have steadfastly opposed any potential drilling. (Another source of local residents’ concern has been that the physical infrastructure needed to harvest, store, and later distribute natural gas overland could prove a highly attractive target for Hezbollah-linked militants based in Lebanon.)
In the end, drilling for natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean by both Israel and Lebanon will undoubtedly move forward. The real question is whether given the controversy already unleashed by the Levant Basin Province reserves, Israel and Lebanon will eventually find it in their own enlightened self-interests to strike an accord on developing the region’s natural gas — or instead unleash missiles to protect what they consider rightfully theirs.
Sources: Center for American Progress, Earth Times, National Public Radio, New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington Post, Yalibnan.com.
Photo Credit: “UNIFIL Vessel Patrols Lebanese Coast,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Joseph Speidel on Population, the Environment, and Growth
›“If we could do something about unintended pregnancies – which are about 80 million a year – we could dramatically reduce population growth,” and reduce pressure on the environment, says Joseph Speidel in this short analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Speidel discusses the connections between population, health, and environment issues, and offers solutions for the way forward.
The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes. -
Climate Science, Military and Gender Roles, and the Tibetan Plateau
›September 14, 2010 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoHere are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.
• Need a break from the raging debate set off by Halvard Buhaug’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences quantitative-based critique of climate and African civil war linkages (or lack thereof)? Check out some of the correlations Cullen Hendrix and Idean Salehyan of University of North Texas find in their piece “After the Rain: Rainfall Variability, Hydro-Meteorological Disasters, and Social Conflict in Africa.”
• A German military think tank report worries about the economic and political implications of peak oil over a relatively short time frame.
• Militaries’ humanitarian responses to extreme weather events rather than actual shooting wars are the focus of “The Coming Conflicts of Climate Change,” by U.S. Navy Foreign Area Officer Michael Baker. Baker is writing for the Council on Foreign Relations as one of their International Affairs Fellows.
• Oxfam America and IUCN staff experts call for greater consideration of different gender roles in addressing climate change. UN climate institutions are targeted in the IPS story.
• Journalist Steve Solomon highlights the high politics of transboundary water in Asia with a piece in Forbes. China’s control of the Tibetan water tower with massive dam building amps up the pressure in South and Southeast Asia.
• Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann’s book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? breaks down relative population growth rates between the religious and the secular. One is high, one is below replacement level. So far the book is only published in Europe but you can get it from Amazon UK.
• The highly respected science journal Nature editorializes against the rising tide of loud anti-science demagoguery. Strong words on the U.S. political context.
Follow Geoff Dabelko (@geoffdabelko) and The New Security Beat (@NewSecurityBeat) on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates.
