Showing posts from category video.
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John Donnelly, Global Post
A Call for Young People to “Get Angry” About Global Warming
›January 18, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on Global Post.
The elder called on the younger generation to speak up.
At a session on climate change and family planning Thursday, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said that she keeps hoping that more young people will demand action on global warming.
“Maybe there’s a need to link the more thoughtful aspects of the Occupy movement with this, to get some of that more radical thinking,” she said. “As younger people increasingly understand the issues, I would say, ‘get angry’ so that we feel the need to do something more urgent. Let us know this is your future and for goodness sake it is absolutely urgent.”
She spoke at a session called “The Road to Rio: Climate Change, Population and Sustainability,” part of the Aspen Institute’s “7 Billion: Conversations that Matter” roundtable series (watch above). The discussion, organized by Aspen Global Health and Development, focused on strategies leading up to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Summit in June – as well as what should be happening beyond Rio.
Continue reading on Global Post.
Video Credit: The Aspen Institute. -
Jon Barnett: Should Climate Change Be Addressed by the UN Security Council?
›For a small island state like Tuvalu, climate change is an enormous security issue and they have told the UN Security Council as much, said Jon Barnett, professor of resource management and geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. But, despite debate in 2007 and 2011, the Council has been unable to reach agreement on whether climate change is an international security issue or not.
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Jon Barnett: Climate Adaptation Not Just Building Infrastructure, But Expanding Options
›“I think it’s appropriate to think about [climate change] adaptation or investments in adaptation as investments to open up the range of choices available to people to deal with an uncertain future,” said Jon Barnett, associate professor of geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. “In some circumstances it might be appropriate to build infrastructure and hard options where we’re very certain about the nature of the risk…but in other cases, expanding the range of choices and freedoms and opportunities that people have to deal with climate change in the future is perhaps the better strategy.”
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Do High Food Prices Cause Social Unrest?
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In March 2011, a senior Brookings Institution official wrote that “the crux of the food price challenge is about price volatility, rather than high prices per se” and that “[i]t is the rapid and unpredictable changes in food prices that wreak havoc on markets, politics, and social stability.”
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Three New Reports Highlight Ongoing Significance of Youth Demographics in Global Trends
›January 2, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenAmidst world population reaching seven billion and last year’s Arab Spring, which in some nations is continuing into this winter, it can be easy to miss emerging pieces of research that tell us something relatively objective about youth and instability. Three new studies give practitioners and policymakers a stronger foundation of evidence to highlight the challenges and opportunities facing the world’s largest generation of young people.
Results of a recent UNICEF staff survey indicate that the people responsible for the UN’s efforts targeting children and youth are seriously concerned about demographic and economic dynamics. Asked to review a list of 20 “global trends,” UNICEF staff rated “growing disparities” and “youth bulge and youth unemployment” as the most significant to children. The results, which the agency will soon publish in a paper on “The Next Generation and Global Trends,” also indicate that staff members feel that UNICEF has a strong capacity to influence the future of these trends.
UNICEF’s recent “Child Outlook” report on global trends discusses the issues highlighted in the survey. The report notes that although many countries are moving toward middle-income status, poverty rates remain stubbornly high, indicating that economic development does not benefit all equally. Income and consumption in such countries tend to be concentrated among the wealthiest households. “While many families will prosper, others are being left behind,” the report explains.
“Tensions and discouragement arising from youth unemployment, combined with higher food prices and fiscal contractions, may have contributed to increased civil unrest, protests, and political instability,” UNICEF asserts. In many developing countries, the number of young people entering the labor market far surpasses the number of available jobs. Although some youth are not working because they are enrolled in secondary or tertiary education, low rates of youth participation in the workforce often are not a matter of choice. Young people, especially those with low levels of education and from poorer families, are often unable to find secure, decent jobs. More than one-quarter of all young people with jobs worldwide live below the poverty line of $1.25 per day.
Economic Pressures on Youth in East Africa
Two other research projects – one published, one still underway – provide additional context to the combination of demographic and economic challenges that face the world’s young people. In the first, part of a recent special U.S. Institute of Peace series on South Sudan, Stephanie Schwartz and Wilson Center fellow Marc Sommers probe the expectations of and obstacles faced by youth in the newly created country.
According to the incipient government’s statistics agency, 72 percent of South Sudan’s population is younger than 30, which places it among the 20 youngest age structures in the world. Only 40 percent of youth ages 15 to 24 are literate, and nearly 80 percent of households depend on agriculture for their income. Based on interviews conducted with urban and rural youth in three areas of South Sudan, the authors find that the pressure of paying rising dowry costs is the most salient issue facing young men, while young women are treated as economic assets with no influence in their own future. The authors’ research suggests that “some young men join armed gangs, at least in part, because they believe it will help them pay dowries.”
Although many young people in South Sudan aspire to the stability of government work, the limited number of jobs and shortage of relevant skills inhibit their aspirations. With an underdeveloped private sector, few opportunities for training, and nepotistic practices in hiring, there is little work for those living in towns and urban areas beyond manual labor and selling goods. The authors recommend that education and job training be expanded, with a focus on equitable access among young people from varied geographic backgrounds.
Across the border in northern Uganda, Chris Blattman, an associate professor of political science at Yale, has been studying the social effects of the government’s youth employment program started in 2007. The program offered grants to small groups of young people for vocational training or to fund the costs of starting a new business. Although a full paper has not yet been published, preliminary findings indicate strong economic benefits of the program which in turn improve social cohesion and community participation while diminishing aggression and “disputes with authorities” among young men. If they bear out, the results may well confirm the oft-repeated policy recommendation that focusing on youth employment is critical to improving national development as well as reducing the likelihood of instability and conflict.
In the year of seven billion, we heard much about the need to invest in young people and the tremendous potential they embody, for demographic dividends as well as overall development. Yet 2011 was also a year of tremendous upheaval, much of which was driven by young people – and their older counterparts – seeking representative and democratic governance. This should serve as a reminder that youth can be a remarkable force for positive change, but in too many places – South Sudan among them – their opportunities, prospects, and contributions are constrained. As the UNICEF survey results reiterate how important this issue is to development programming, the Uganda research may be another important piece of evidence that direct investment in young people reaps tangible results not only for them, but also for society.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Chris Blattman, ILO, Sommers and Schwartz (2011), South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics, UNICEF, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “UNAMID Peacekeeper Speaks with Sudanese Youth,” courtesy of UN Photo/Albert Gonzalez Farran. -
Jake Naughton, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting
Pulitzer Center Launches Collaborative Reporting Project on Reproductive Health
›The original version of this article, by Jake Naughton, appeared on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting blog.
The Pulitzer Center launched its collaborative reproductive health-reporting project at this year’s International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in Dakar, Senegal. The project brings together four journalists from Africa and four from the United States who will collaborate to enhance local and international reporting about reproductive health across the continent.
The African journalists are Mae Azango of Liberia, Estelle Ellis of South Africa, Sam Olukoya of Nigeria, and Ken Opala of Kenya. Their U.S. counterparts are Christian Science Monitor correspondent Jina Moore; New Yorker editorial staffer Alexis Okeowo; and the Pulitzer Center’s managing director Nathalie Applewhite and visual media coordinator Jake Naughton.
More than two thousand reproductive health professionals and hundreds of journalists from all over the world participated in the conference, which sought to shine a spotlight on the unmet need for family planning services worldwide, and to focus on integrating family planning into general health services.
Continue reading on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting blog.
Video Credit: “Meet the Journalists: Dakar,” courtesy of the Pulitzer Center. -
Watch: Dr. Vik Mohan on Integrating Family Planning and Conservation in Madagascar
›The integration of population, health, and environment programming “enables us to create synergies that mean we are more effective at achieving both health and conservation goals,” said Dr. Vik Mohan, director of sexual and reproductive health programming for Blue Ventures, in an interview with ECSP at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning.
After Blue Ventures established their first clinic in 2007 in the village of Andavadoaka, on Madagascar’s southwest coast, “we felt immense pressure to scale up our intervention,” said Mohan. “We started with one clinic in one village, and now we have a multi-site service covering all 40 villages that we partner with for our community-based conservation work,” he said.
According to data compiled by Blue Ventures, the average total fertility rate in the region is 6.7 children per woman. The London-based eco-tourism-turned health and environment NGO offers a variety of family planning services to meet local demand, including mobile outreach clinics and community-based distribution of contraceptives. They also partner with Marie Stopes International to offer long-acting and permanent methods of contraception for those that want it.
“This Model Can Be Taken to Scale”
By integrating conservation and reproductive health messaging and service delivery, “we are getting greater buy-in from the community because they all see the added value of the breadth of things that we offer them,” Mohan said. “Men who came to hear about fisheries management get to hear about family planning technologies, practically for the first time in their lives.”
The fishermen are able to see the links between food security and population growth through their own experience, he added. “We believe very passionately this model can be taken to scale,” Mohan said. “This is something that could be easily replicated in other regions. Definitely in other coastal regions, but almost certainly in other remote areas – perhaps areas of high biodiversity where there are existing projects, perhaps conservation projects – but where there is an unmet need for healthcare and family planning in particular.”
“My advice to other organizations, whether you are doing healthcare or whether you are doing conservation, is just think holistically,” said Mohan. “If you are a conservation organization that recognizes that there is an unmet healthcare need for the communities that you work with, then…don’t be afraid to ask those questions, and don’t be afraid to build capacity to meet the need, if you find one. Or, don’t be afraid to partner with health NGOs to enable that need to be met.”
For more on Blue Ventures’ integrated efforts, see also ECSP FOCUS Issue 23, “To Live With the Sea: Reproductive Health Care and Marine Conservation in Madagascar,” co-authored by Vik Mohan. -
Famine and Food Insecurity in the Horn of Africa: A Man-Made Disaster?
›This year’s drought in the Horn of Africa has been the region’s worst in decades and has exploded into a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions. In Somalia, where the drought is layered on top of two decades of conflict and an extremely weak state, the impact of the drought has been most damaging. Somalia is the only country in the region where the UN has declared famine zones. And, even though the UN recently upgraded three of Somalia’s six famine areas to “lesser emergencies,” four million Somalis – more than half the country’s population – remain in urgent need of food and general humanitarian aid.
The drought may have been what sparked the current crisis, but other, longer-term factors, like a sustained lack of agricultural development, extreme rural poverty, and changing weather patterns, not to mention Somalia’s lack of functioning government, set the stage.
A Long-Term Crisis in the Making
“Lack of rainfall over several seasons is the most immediate and most visible cause of the current humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa,” said Jim Hansen of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in a brief video produced this summer by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University (watch above). Much of the Horn’s population “depends on rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism for their livelihoods and sustenance,” said Hansen. Already “quite poor and…locked in poverty for quite a long time,” environmental and resource degradation, paired with rapid population growth, have compounded their vulnerability to extreme events, he said.
Throughout the region, resilience to crises like the current drought has been weakened by decades of poor agricultural planning, “driven more by shifts in ideology than any real evidence among some of the key international development organizations,” said Hansen. That poor planning has made communities more dependent on humanitarian aid when poor weather hits, which in turn forces aid groups to redirect resources away from longer-term development and towards short-term disaster relief instead, Hansen said.
While these problems exist across the Horn of Africa, Hansen points out that the crisis has been most damaging in Somalia, which he attributes to the country’s weak governance and to international aid groups’ limited ability to operate in the country.
“Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Somalia have similar severity of drought, but the humanitarian crisis is much more severe – the loss of livelihood and life is greater in Somalia largely because the government is weaker,” he said.
The Government’s Role
Owen Barder, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, draws a more direct line between governance and famine in the Horn. “In Somalia…there’s a complete breakdown of government, and the consequence is the famine that we’re seeing,” said Barder during a Center for Global Development podcast. The country has been without a functioning government since 1991, when civil war broke out. It has since become “the most food-insecure nation in the world” and, as described by Foreign Policy, “the international community’s longest-running failure.”
Barder raised two points about the government’s role in famine. One, that access to information – in this case an early warning system monitoring drought conditions – can minimize the humanitarian impact of any given natural disaster; and two, that a country’s government must be able to translate that information into action in order for it to actually make a difference.
Barder is not alone in emphasizing the state’s role as a driver of the famine. Edward Carr, a AAAS science fellow with USAID, wrote in July, when the UN first declared famine in Somalia, that attributing the famine solely to drought is “a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.”
Charles Kenny, also a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, went even further on Foreign Policy, arguing that famine, or “mass starvation as an intentional act of governance,” should be categorized as a crime and prosecutable at the International Criminal Court.
Al Shabab and the Months AheadAs of late November, the United Nations estimated that tens of thousands had died in Somalia alone since drought began this spring. Though USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) reports that famine has now subsided in three of the six southern regions it initially struck, a quarter of a million Somalis remain at risk of “imminent starvation,” according to the UN.
According to FEWSNET, famine should not reappear in the foreseeable future, assuming aid groups can maintain current distribution levels – a key caveat. Ten days after FEWSNET issued its analysis, however, Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked militant organization that controls much of southern Somalia, banned 16 aid groups, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, from operating in the areas under its control. UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told the BBC that the move would put “about 160,000 severely malnourished children…at imminent risk of death.”
Fighting in southern Somalia between Al Shabab and Kenyan and Ethiopian forces is adding another layer to the country’s humanitarian crisis. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reported that, as of late November, the fighting had become the primary driver of internal displacement, replacing drought and famine as the key drivers during the first three quarters of the year. The UNHCR estimated that, between the drought and the conflict, 1.46 million Somalis have been displaced.
Meanwhile, the rainy season is picking up, and although that’s good news for farmers and pastoralists, it also means that Somalis will be vulnerable to diseases like measles, typhoid, and cholera, which can spread quickly through overcrowded, under-supplied IDP camps. Somalis still living under Al Shabab’s control are prohibited from getting vaccinations, amplifying their vulnerability to disease in the coming months.
These latest developments offer strong evidence that policy decisions can exacerbate the human toll of natural disasters. From Barder’s perspective, that is reason for optimism. “We have the information, we have the capacity to prevent it from happening,” he said.
For more on Somalia’s underlying demographic issues, see Elizabeth Leahy Madsen’s post “In Somalia, Beyond the Immediate Crises, Demography Reveals a Long-Term Challenge.”
Sources: AlertNet, Associated Press, BBC, Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, The New York Times, UNHCR, UN News Centre, Voice of America.
Video Credit: “Jim Hansen on Food Security in East Africa,” courtesy of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society on vimeo; image credit: FEWSNET/USAID.
