Showing posts from category environment.
-
John May, Center for Global Development
‘People and the Planet’ Study Re-Introduces Demography to Sustainability Debate
›May 15, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by John May, appeared on the Center for Global Development’s Global Health Policy blog.
Population issues have been conspicuously absent from the discussions on the environmental sustainability of our globalized economy in the run-up to the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, which will take place in Brazil, June 20-22, under the auspices of the United Nations.
Fortunately, the new report, People and the Planet by the Royal Society, should help change this woefully shortsighted approach. The report demonstrates clearly and convincingly that demographic trends cannot be separated from consumption patterns, and that there is no chance to achieve a path of equitable and sustainable development without tackling population growth and consumption at the same time. In short, population and the environment cannot and should not be considered as two separate issues.
This strong and long overdue pitch to bring back the “p” word into the environmental debate is most welcome. In recent decades, international attention has shifted from rapid population growth to other urgent issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, humanitarian crises, climate change, and good governance. But reproductive health and voluntary family planning programs are still very much needed, especially in high fertility countries, and they require political leadership and long-term financial commitment. Broader access to family planning services will be needed to accelerate the decline of high fertility rates, particularly in countries where unmet needs for contraception are high.
Continue reading at the Center for Global Development.
Image Credit: People and the Planet cover, courtesy of the Royal Society. -
Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Environment and Security [Part Two]
›In the coming years, Nigeria’s cohort of unemployed youth has equal potential to “be converted into either a religious or a regional clash, as certain youths get opportunities and other youths do not,” said Pauline Baker, President Emeritus of the Fund for Peace, during the day-long “Nigeria Behind the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center on the April 25 (read part one here). [Video Below]
-
Roger-Mark De Souza, Climate and Development Knowledge Network
Population-Climate Dynamics: From Planet Under Pressure to Rio
›May 11, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Roger-Mark De Souza, appeared on the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).
In late May, I presented research on population and climate dynamics in hotspots at the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, in a session organized by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network. As we prepare for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, I reflect on the roles of population dynamics and climate-compatible development for ensuring a future where we can increase the resilience of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.- Improving our well-being and the future we can have is within our reach: We can take action to improve well-being through specific actions that can produce short term results. This is a key message encapsulated in the concept of climate-compatible development, reflected in many presentations and discussions that I heard at Planet Under Pressure. Even though others were not calling it “climate-compatible development,” the essence and the meaning behind the research was the same – small concrete discrete steps are possible, and taking action on population dynamics is one of them.
- Population is on the agenda: Population issues – growth, density, distribution, aging, gender – were a constant at Planet Under Pressure – and in more ways than just looking at population as a driver. It is clear that there is interest, and a need, to address population as a key component of climate-compatible development.
- But those concerns and issues must be location specific, and must be contextualized for the policy and programmatic environment: Population issues must be framed in the appropriate context – and must move beyond academic exploration. I attended one session where a paper presented an academic supposition of whether we should invest in consumption versus fertility reduction to produce short-term returns for climate, but the analysis was completely devoid of any political, policy, or programmatic truth-testing. We must factor in those considerations when making recommendations, if ultimately we are really looking to make the difference that we can.
Photo Credit: “Urbanization in Asia,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
Michael Kugelman, AfPak Channel
Pakistan’s Climate Change Challenge
›May 11, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffLast month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan’s environmental insecurity.
Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as “the world’s highest waste dump.” Much of this waste-generated from soldiers’ food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan’s chief water source.
Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan’s environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan’s United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan’s land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh’s environment minister said that millions of people across the province face “acute environmental threats.”
Continue reading on the AfPak Channel.
Sources: Daily Times, Dawn.com, Environment News Service, The Express Tribune, The New York Times, Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan.
Photo Credit: “Surveying damage in Pakistan,” courtesy of the U.S. Army.
-
A Northern View: Canada’s Climate Claims and Obligations
›Reneging on Kyoto, Keystone pipeline drama, pain at the pump, re-aligned Arctic sovereignty, melting outdoor hockey rinks – all these aspects of climate change are being discussed in Canada.
However, Canadians, as potential citizens of the next energy superpower, need a more comprehensive and enriching debate. Climate change adaptation measures, at home and abroad, are inevitable, but the issue has largely been ignored by the federal government thus far.
To many Americans, it may seem that Canada has equated energy production with national prosperity, but Canadians are increasingly concerned about the human security and eco-justice implications of ongoing climate change as well. Lack of leadership at the federal level on Kyoto-related energy efficiency and emissions mitigation has been partially offset by actions at the provincial and municipal levels, but climate change is occurring now and it demands a coordinated response from the federal government, the only political apparatus capable of channeling the resources necessary for making a solid contribution to global climate change adaptation.
A moderate predictive scenario suggests that the regional impacts of climate change will be very expensive: the UN projects the global Green Climate Fund will require up to $100 billion a year by 2020. Water stress – too little, too much, or the perception of either – may be the most common theme. Coastal flooding, shoreline erosion, glacier retreat, chronic water shortages, loss of biodiversity and habitat, increased spread of invasive species, extreme weather events; taking preventive action against these (beyond the obvious call for reduced emissions) will be prohibitively expensive for most communities around the globe, including the coastal and northern regions of Canada.
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification has become a conduit for the argument that drought and land degradation related to climate change justifies southern demands for northern investment in initiatives in Africa and elsewhere. As a high emissions per capita nation, Canada has an obligation to contribute to such international efforts.
But I also don’t see why the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north should be denied claims as permafrost thaws and ice-cover vital for subsistence hunting disappears. Citizens of small island states, to whom adaptation may well mean the abandonment of their homeland, have charged willful ignorance or purposeful negligence of their plight; so too might riparian communities along Canada’s many ocean shorelines, lakes, and rivers. Farmers, fishers, First Nations communities: all will need to adapt. We need to start seriously planning ahead to meet climate change scenarios, instead of burying the issue under the tar sands.
Of course, people will adapt to shifting conditions; such is the imperative of survival. And there are many ingenious ways this will materialize. Indeed many mitigation and adaptation strategies blend together as hybrids today. Building more effective alternative energy systems can be seen as much as responses to climate change as preventive measures and involve both public and private sector funding, for example.
However, paying for adaptation is another matter, and here it is vital in my view to stress the potential role of infrastructure spending by the federal government. Much of Canada’s current fiscal restraint is indeed a welcome development if the government cuts back on waste and redundancy, but not if it serves as a veil for sacrificing principles of eco-justice – the idea that those who made the least contributions to and benefit the least from environmental problems should not bear disproportionately higher risks.
Of course there will be nasty disputes ahead about the accounting, accountability, legitimacy, and purpose of climate change adaptation funding for Canada, in or out of the UNFCCC process, but let me draw just a few general conclusions at this stage:- There is an ethical imperative to contribute to international adaptation funding, perhaps just as great an imperative as traditional efforts to help former colonized countries. It’s not just about money, at least not directly: Canadian technical, policy, and financial expertise should be harnessed for this purpose as well.
- Unlike in other policy areas, there is no way to unload or pass the buck on climate change adaptation efforts: they demand the utilization of centralized resources redistributed throughout the country and through multilateral funding mechanisms.
- Adaptation funding should not, however, supplant more traditional emergency, humanitarian, or environmental funding. It should be seen as a supplement, albeit one with increasing importance, but not as a new form of dependency or gold-rush of aid-with-obligations opportunities. The current government is right to worry about accountability issues.
- But accountability goes both ways: we need at least to get the accounting and communications right on this, thus the need for open dialogue and ongoing consultation. Killing the well-respected National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, which consulted various Canadian stakeholders on key environmental questions, was not a good start.
Peter Stoett is the Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-U.S. Relations at the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute and professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University, Montreal.
Sources: CBC, The Catholic Register, The Huffington Post, International Institute for Sustainable Development, UNFCCC.
Photo Credit: “City, Suburb, Ocean, Mountain,” courtesy of flickr user ecstaticist (Evan Leeson). -
Taming Hunger in Ethiopia: The Role of Population Dynamics
›May 4, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur
Ethiopia has been deemed a population-climate “hotspot” – a place where rapid growth and a changing climate pose grave threats to food security and human well-being.
-
Avoiding Adding Insult to Injury in Climate Adaptation Efforts
›Climate change is expected to produce winners and losers – for example, melting ice-caps may open up new economic opportunities for Greenland at the same time as sea-level rise threatens Asia’s bourgeoning coastal mega-cities. The same can be said about plans to address climate change, from both the mitigation and adaptation perspectives. A special issue of Global Environmental Change, “Adding Insult to Injury: Climate Change, Social Stratification, and the Inequalities of Intervention,” takes on this topic, with two case studies providing particularly compelling evidence.Betsy Beymer-Farris and Thomas Bassett argue in their contribution, “The REDD Menace: Resurgent Protectionism in Tanzania’s Mangrove Forests,” that efforts to ensure REDD readiness in Tanzania have placed local communities at risk of forced evictions, shattered livelihoods, and persecution by both the state and conservation community. Contrary to dominant narratives that “portray local resources users, the Warufiji, in negative terms as recent migrants who are destroying the mangrove forests,” the authors say that they in fact depend upon “allow[ing] the mangroves to regenerate naturally while preparing new rice fields.” “To carbon traders, however, an uninhabited forest greatly simplifies the logistical tasks of monitoring and paying for ecosystem services,” assert the authors. This has resulted in declaration of local communities as squatters, illegally invading the forest. Government officials have repeatedly voiced threats of eviction. As well as increasing the potential for social tension, the study concludes that, “it is difficult to reconcile Tanzania REDD’s participatory and benefit sharing goals with the rhetoric, practices, and plans of the Tanzanian state.”In “Accessing Adaptation: Multiple Stressors on Livelihoods in the Bolivian Highlands Under a Changing Climate,” Julia McDowell and Jeremy Hess present evidence about how specifically-tailored adaptations to climate change risk increasing vulnerability to a complex web of other, less obvious stressors. The study draws evidence from the livelihoods of historically marginalized indigenous farmers in highland Bolivia. The authors, who see “adaptation as part of ongoing livelihoods strategies,” use the case to “explore the tradeoffs that households make when adjustments to one stressor compromise the ability to adjust to another.” For instance, socio-economic stressors have forced many farmers to more closely couple their livelihoods with the market economy by growing more cash crops, intensifying land use, participating in off-farm laboring, and relying on irrigated agriculture. However, the shift to more market-orientated livelihoods has also increased their sensitivity to climatic stress. “As stressors compounded, the ability to mobilize assets became constrained, making adaptation choices highly interdependent, and sometimes contradictory,” the authors write. Avoiding these sorts of lose-lose situations, requires “ensuring sustained access to assets, rather than designing interventions solely to protect against a specific stressor.” -
Richard Matthew: Responsive Peacebuilding Includes the Environment and Natural Resources
›April 30, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“After 20 years of peacebuilding experimentation, one of the good signs is that the countries receiving this [peacebuilding] attention…more and more are shaping the process,” said Professor Richard Matthew, director of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine.
Peacebuilding is shifting, he said, from internationals going in with pre-existing conceptions of “what you need for stability and development, what will make you attractive to investors, what will make your people secure,” to instead sitting down and talking with stakeholders about “what types of capacity do you need, and how can we support you in acquiring those.”
Along with the shift towards more responsive peacebuilding has come an elevated interested in the environment and natural resources. For people living in the peacebuilding countries themselves, “there was never any doubt that water and forest and access to minerals and so on were critical to their future,” said Matthew, but Western and Northern countries often thought of it as a “second tier issue that you might get to once people were safe, and the government was functioning, and the economy was up and running again.”
Matthew co-authored the 2009 UNEP report, From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, which examined environmental factors all along the conflict continuum – from inception to peacebuilding. Successful peacebuilding, the report argues, requires that “environmental drivers are managed, that tensions are defused, and that natural assets are used sustainably to support stability and development in the long term.”
