Showing posts from category food security.
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International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Ethiopia Provides Model for Improving Climate, Other Data Services in Africa
›The original version of this article appeared on the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).
In developed countries, we are accustomed to having access to long and detailed records on weather and climate conditions, demographics, disease incidence, and many other types of data. Decisionmakers use this information for a variety of societal benefits: they spot trends, fine-tune public health systems, and optimize crop yields, for example. Researchers use it to test hypotheses, make forecasts, and tweak projections from computer models. What’s more, much of these data are just a mouse click away, for anyone to access for free (see examples for climate and health).
Across much of Africa, however, it’s a different story. By most measures, Africa is the most “data poor” region in the world. Wars and revolutions, natural and manmade disasters, extreme poverty, and unmaintained infrastructure, have left massive gaps in socioeconomic and environmental data sets. Reliable records of temperature, rainfall, and other climate variables are scarce or nonexistent. If they do exist, they’re usually deemed as proprietary and users must pay to get access. This is not an inconsequential matter. Without readily available, reliable data, policy makers’ ability to make smart, well-informed decisions is hobbled.
The problem of data access persisted even in Ethiopia, regarded as having one of the better meteorological services on the continent. Thanks to the recent efforts of Tufa Dinku, a climate scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the situation has improved considerably.
Continue reading on IRI.
Video Credit: Overview of Ethiopia Climate Maprooms, courtesy of IRI. -
USAID’s New Climate Strategy Outlines Adaptation, Mitigation Priorities, Places Heavy Emphasis on Integration
›February 29, 2012 // By Kathleen MogelgaardIn January, the U.S. Agency for International Development released its long-awaited climate change strategy. Climate Change & Development: Clean Resilient Growth provides a blueprint for addressing climate change through development assistance programs and operations. In addition to objectives around mitigation and adaptation, the strategy also outlines a third objective: improving overall operational integration.
The five-year strategy has a clear, succinct goal: “to enable countries to accelerate their transition to climate-resilient low emission sustainable economic development.” Developed by a USAID task force with input from multiple U.S. agencies and NGOs, the document paints a picture of the threats climate change poses for development – calling it “among the greatest global challenges of our generation” – and commits the agency to addressing both the causes of climate change and the impacts it will have on communities in countries around the world.
These statements are noteworthy in a fiscal climate that has put development assistance under renewed scrutiny and in a political environment where progress on climate change legislation seems unlikely.
Not Just Challenges, But Opportunities
To make the case for prioritizing action on climate change, the strategy cites climate change’s likely impact on agricultural productivity and fisheries, which will threaten USAID’s food security goals. It also illustrates the ways in which climate change could exacerbate humanitarian crises and notes work done by the U.S. military and intelligence community in identifying climate change as a “threat multiplier” (or “accelerant of instability” as the Quadrennial Defense Review puts it) with implications for national security.
Targeted efforts to address climate change, though, could consolidate development gains and result in technology “leap-frogging” that will support broader development goals. And, noting that aggregate emissions from developing countries are now larger than those from developed countries, the strategy asserts that assisting the development and deployment of clean technologies “greatly expands opportunities to export U.S. technology and creates ‘green jobs.’”
In addition to providing a rationale for action, the strategy provides new insights on how USAID will prioritize its efforts on climate change mitigation and adaptation. It provides a clear directive for the integration of climate change into the agency’s broader development work in areas such as food security, good governance, and global health– a strong and encouraging signal for those interested in cross-sectoral planning and programs.
Priorities Outlined, Tough Choices Ahead
President Obama’s Global Climate Change Initiative, revealed in 2010, focuses efforts around three pillars: clean energy, sustainable landscapes, and adaptation. USAID’s climate strategy fleshes out these three areas, identifying “intermediate results” and indicators of success – such as the development of Low Emission Development Strategies in 20 partner countries, greenhouse gas sequestration through improved ecosystem management, and increasing the number of institutions capable of adaptation planning and response.
In laying out ambitious objectives, however, the authors of the strategy acknowledge constrained fiscal realities. The strategy stops short of identifying an ideal budget to support the activities it describes, though it does refer to the U.S. pledge to join other developed countries in providing $30 billion in “fast start financing” in the period of 2010 to 2012 and, for those USAID country missions that will be receiving adaptation and mitigation funding, establishes “floors” of $3 million and $5 million, respectively.
The final section of the strategy lists over thirty countries and regions that have already been prioritized for programs, including Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Malawi, and Peru. But “we are unable to work in every country at risk from climate change impacts or with the potential for low carbon sustainable growth,” the strategy asserts. An annex includes selection criteria to guide further funding decisions, including emission reduction potential, high exposure to physical climate change impacts, a suitable enabling environment, coordination with other donors, and diplomatic and geographic considerations.
“Integration” Central to Strategy
The concept of integration figures prominently throughout the 27-page document. For those of us working in the large and growing space where the global challenges of climate change, food security, health, livelihoods, and governance overlap, this attention is heartening. While it may sometimes seem simply fashionable to pay lip service to the idea of “breaking out of stovepipes,” the strategy identifies concrete ways to incentivize integration.
“Integration of climate change into USAID’s development portfolio will not happen organically,” the strategy says. “Rather, it requires leadership, knowledge and incentives to encourage agency employees to seek innovative ways to integrate climate change into programs with other goals and to become more flexible in use of funding streams and administrative processes.”
To this end, USAID plans to launch a group of pilot activities. USAID missions must submit pilot program proposals, and selected programs will emphasize integration of top priorities within the agency’s development portfolio (including Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative). Among other criteria, pilots must demonstrate buy-in from multiple levels of leadership, and will be selected based on their potential to generate integration lessons and tools over the next several years.
This kind of integration – the blending of key priorities from multiple sectors, the value of documented lessons and tools, the important role of champions in fostering an enabling environment – mirrors work carried out by USAID’s own population, health, and environment (PHE) portfolio. To date, USAID’s PHE programs have not been designed to address climate challenges specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly they aren’t named specifically in the strategy. But those preparing and evaluating integration pilot proposals may gain useful insights on cross-sectoral integration from a closer look at the accumulated knowledge of more than 10 years of PHE experience.
Population Dynamics Recognized, But Opportunities Not Considered
Though not a focus of the strategy, population growth is acknowledged as a stressor – alongside unplanned urbanization, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and poverty – that exacerbates growing challenges in disaster risk reduction and efforts to secure a safe and sufficient water supply.
Research has shown that different global population growth scenarios will have significant implications for emissions growth. New analysis indicates that the fastest growing populations are among the most vulnerable to climate change and that in these areas, there is frequently high unmet need for family planning. And we have also clearly seen that in many parts of the world, women’s health and well-being are increasingly intertwined with the effects of changing climate and access to reproductive health services.
In its limited mention of population as a challenge, however, the strategy misses the chance to identify it also as an opportunity. Addressing the linked challenges of population growth and climate change offers an opportunity to recommit the resources required to assist of the hundreds of millions of women around the world with ongoing unmet need for family planning.
The strategy’s emphasis on integration would seem to be an open door to such opportunities.
Integrated, cross-sectoral collaboration that truly fosters a transition to climate-resilient, low-emission sustainable economic development will acknowledge both the challenge presented by rapid population growth and the opportunities that can emerge from expanding family planning access to women worldwide. But for this to happen, cross-sectoral communication will need to become more commonplace. Demographers and reproductive health specialists will need to engage in dialogues on climate change, and climate specialists will need both opportunities and incentives to listen. USAID’s new climate change integration pilots could provide a new platform for this rare but powerful cross-sectoral action.
Kathleen Mogelgaard is a writer and analyst on population and the environment, and a consultant for the Environmental Change and Security Program.
Sources: FastStartFinance.org, International Energy Agency, Maplecroft, Population Action International, The White House, U.S. Department of Defense, USAID.
Photo Credit: “Displaced Darfuris Farm in Rainy Season,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
The Sahel’s Complex Vulnerability to Food Crises
›February 24, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“Across the Sahel region of western Africa, a combination of drought, poverty, high grain prices, environmental degradation, and chronic underdevelopment is expected to plunge millions of people into a new food and nutrition crisis this year,” according to a UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) statement from February 10. The coming “lean season” is predicted to be the third food crisis in less than a decade and highlights a set of glaring vulnerabilities in a region facing severe long-term threats to health, livelihoods, and security. However, as international agencies call for funding to mount yet another emergency response, serious concerns are being raised about what is (or isn’t) being done to address the root causes of vulnerability.
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Kaitlin Shilling: Climate Conflict and Export Crops in Sub-Saharan Africa
›“There’s been a tremendous amount of work done on looking for a climate signal for civil conflict, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and a lot of this work draws a very clear and simple path – if it rains more, or if it rains less, there will be more or less conflict,” says Stanford University’s Kaitlin Shilling in this short video interview. Unfortunately, that straightforward research does little in the way of helping policymakers: “the only way to change the agricultural outputs due to climate change is to change climate change, reduce climate change, or stop it,” she says, “and we’re not really good at that part.”
Shilling moderated a panel at last month’s National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment on climate-conflict research. Agricultural export crops – cotton, coffee, cocoa, tea, vanilla – represent one area where policymakers might be able to intervene to prevent climate-driven conflict, says Shilling. Though not as important from a food security perspective, “these crops are really important” for sub-Saharan economies, as well as for “government revenues, which [are] closely related to government capacity.”
But “the effects of climate change on those crops are less well understood,” Shilling says. How they relate to “government revenues and how those relate to civil conflict is an area that I spend a lot of time doing research on.”
By “understand[ing] the mechanisms that underlie the potential relationship between climate and conflict, we can start identifying interventions that make sense to reduce the vulnerability of people to conflict and help them to adapt to the coming climate change.” -
Championing Women’s Rights and Population Issues in Kenya With the ‘Reject’
›“We find that politicians play around with [population] numbers when it comes to the common man and the common woman,” says Jane Godia in this short video interview. Godia writes for Reject, an African Woman and Child Feature Service biweekly news publication that won a Global Media Award from the Population Institute for its issue on family planning and politics in Kenya.
Godia says that politicians “use these numbers for their gain, they tell women not to use family planning because they want more children so that…they can have more voters, but nobody thinks about if this woman will be able to feed these children, if this family will be able to have their next meal, or even accommodation, or even land to till.”
The Reject’s name comes from the paper’s early practice of running stories – often about underserved groups, like women, children, and the poor – that had been rejected from mainstream publications. Population and environment issues have been highlighted since the first issue came out in September 2009, when “we were talking about families moving on to Mount Kenya…to look for pasture and water for their animals,” says Godia.
“When there’s no water and when there’s no food, people migrate,” she says. “And when people are migrating they’re moving with their animals, they’re moving with their families, and they end up going to places” that eventually become overcrowded and resource-stressed, sometimes introducing the same problems that led people to migrate in the first place. -
‘Marketplace’ and ‘NewsHour’ Highlight Population, Health, and Environment Program in the Philippines
›The Danajon reef is the only double barrier reef in the Philippines, “one of the richest marine biodiversity hot spots in the world,” and it’s being devastated as the country’s exploding population depends on its waters for their food and livelihoods, reported Sam Eaton in a recent two-part series on population, health, and environment issues in the Philippines broadcast last month for American Public Media’s Marketplace and the PBS NewsHour.
The report is part of joint project called Food for 9 Billion, with Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting, APM, and PBS. Previous reports examined food security in East Africa and Egypt.
The Philippines “import more rice than any other country on the planet,” said Eaton. The “highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia” as well as dwindling natural resources – nearly 100 million people live in a land area the size of Arizona – have created a cycle of poverty. The first step to breaking that cycle, he said, is improving access to family planning.
Growing Families, Growing Poverty
The Canayong family, living on the edge of a garbage dump in a Manila slum, offers a vivid example of what poverty means in the Philippines. Clarissa Canayong has had 14 children – 4 died from measles and dengue fever, the remaining 10 spend their days alongside Clarissa, sifting through the dump for things they need and things they can sell. At the end of a good day, the family has earned around $7 to survive on. All in all, Clarissa’s “inability to provide enough food, and to pay for her children’s education, all but guarantees she and her family will remain poor,” said Eaton.
The archipelago adds about two million people every year, putting population on track to double in size sometime around 2080. “And that’s only if something is done to close the birth control gap,” said Eaton, as those projections build in an expectation that growth will slow.
“As cities all across the country expand, the displaced often end up migrating to urban slums,” he said. “Population growth among poor Filipinos is twice the national average,” meaning that once a family enters poverty, they end up in a cycle “that’s nearly impossible to break.”
The Difference Family Planning Can Make
If Clarissa had had access to family planning, she told Eaton, she would have wanted to have only two children. In Humayhumay, where residents have access to a community-based family planning distribution program started by PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc., families have that luxury of choice.
Working through local partners, the PATH Foundation identifies and trains community-based vendors to sell contraception – both pills and condoms, said Dr. Joan Castro, who began the program in Humayhumay. The idea is to make buying contraceptives “as easy as buying soft drinks or matches.”
Both Jason Bostero, a farmer and fisherman in Humayhuay, and his wife, Crisna, grew up in large families – so large, in Crisna’s case, that “sometimes, we would only eat once a day because we were so poor. We couldn’t go to school. I did not finish school because there were just so many of us,” she told Eaton.
Now that they have access to contraceptives, a smaller family size means their income is “just right” to feed everyone three times a day. For the community as a whole, smaller family sizes mean that the nearby fish stocks that provide the community with food and income have a chance to replenish themselves in the absence of overfishing.
“In just six years since the program was first established here,” reported Eaton, “family sizes have plummeted from as many as 12 children to a maximum of about 4 today.”
Exception to the Rule
Humayhumay is an exception to the rule in the Philippines. There is no state funding for birth control in the country, and over the past few years, major international donors like USAID and the United Nations have ended their family planning work in the country. More than a quarter of poor Filipinos have no access to any type of family planning service, and more than half of all pregnancies are unintended, said Eaton.
Family planning has long been a contentious issue in the country. Eaton spoke to Congressman Walden Bello, who has spent more than a decade trying to pass legislation to establish universal access to birth control and improve other family planning and reproductive services. The Catholic Church, said Bello, is a powerful (80 percent of Filipinos are Catholic) and consistent opponent. In October 2010, the Church went so far as to threaten President Benigno Aquino with excommunication after he voiced support for access to contraception.
Rather than limit population growth, the Church argues the country should increase food production. But land is limited, rice imports are already the highest in the world, and, “according to the World Bank, every major species of fish here shows signs of severe overfishing,” said Eaton.
Looking Forward and Abroad
Eaton pointed to the Philippines’ neighbors as examples to emulate: “A long history of government-supported family planning has…paved the way for Thailand to become one of the world’s biggest rice exporters” and helped to cut back poverty in the country, said Eaton.
Indonesia too, he pointed out, has largely avoided the population growth-resource depletion-poverty cycle, thanks in part to a state- and faith-backed family planning program. (As Elizabeth Leahy Madsen wrote in a recent New Security Beat post, the decision of Indonesia’s religious leaders to throw their support behind family planning in the 1960s was a key factor in success there.)
Considering the obstacles, the Philippines face an uphill battle before family planning services become similarly universal. But the political tides may already be turning: last April, the President said he would support the reproductive health legislation even if it meant excommunication.
Meanwhile, PATH Foundation’s Castro is hopeful that Humayhumay’s success story will lay the seeds for widespread public support for family planning. “The vision of the project is in this community you see more children educated who are able to become leaders and speak out for themselves in the future and be able to become stewards of their own sexuality and the future environment,” said Castro. “This is the legacy.”
Sources: BBC, Bloomberg News, Catholic News Agency, The Guardian, Population Reference Bureau, TIME Magazine, US Agency for International Development, U.S. Catholic. -
Kim Lovell, Sierra Club
Pop at COP: Population and Family Planning at the UN Climate Negotiations
›February 8, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Kim Lovell, appeared on the Sierra Club’s activist network.
“Population, development, and climate should be a single discussion,” explained Jacques van Zuydam of South Africa’s National Population Unit. Van Zuydam, speaking to a sparsely filled room at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Durban last month, centers his work around the concept that climate matters because people matter.
Given the focus on the Green Climate Fund, climate change adaptation, and the effects of sea-level rise and changing weather patterns on some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, it would have made sense for discussions about population to play a central role at the 17th Conference of Parties (COP-17). Yet despite these obvious links – and lead negotiator Jonathan Pershing’s admission to the U.S. youth delegation that population plays a central role when discussing climate impacts – the issue gained little traction in the formal negotiations.
Pershing said he considers population “too controversial” to play a role in the international climate talks, and recommended raising the issue elsewhere. But where better to talk about the need for increased access to voluntary family planning services than among a group of world leaders considering solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change?
As Brian O’Neill and his colleagues at the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained in a 2010 paper, meeting the unmet need for contraceptive services worldwide could reduce emissions in 2050 by 1.4 to 2.5 billion tons of carbon per year, or 16 to 29 percent of the emissions reductions necessary to avoid dangerous changes to our climate. And beyond the potential effects on carbon, increasing access to education and family planning resources will have a huge impact on the ability of women and families to adapt to the effects of climate change that are already altering weather patterns, water availability, and agricultural production around the globe.
Continue reading at Sierra Club.
Sources: Amplify.
Image Credit: UNFCCC/Climate Change Information Center of Armenia. -
Ryan Britton: Addressing Population in Science Media for ‘EarthSky’
›“What we do is educate the general public and advocate on behalf of science to the general public,” said EarthSky Managing Partner Ryan Britton in this interview with ECSP. “Ultimately we try to bring science to people who don’t normally get science information.”
Part of that effort is addressing population dynamics – growth, aging, youth, food security, etc. – which is often a challenging subject. EarthSky’s coverage over the last year included a series of radio shows on global food security and the “year of seven billion,” which won them a second Global Media Award from the Population Institute in January (alongside New Security Beat!).
EarthSky productions appear on television, radio, online, and in multiple languages. “For us, it’s about getting science out to the general public as best we can,” said Britton.
In terms of population-related issues, he said, allocation of resources, how growing population is affecting ecology and biodiversity, and the effects of climate change are all topics on their radar. “But we do it within the lens of talking about humanity and our continued prosperity,” Britton said. “That’s important for people to hear – what are the solutions, how are we going to get through this, how are we going to be OK? And so those are the questions we’ll keep asking.”
