Showing posts from category video.
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Climate and Security Hopes
›December 11, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThe Copenhagen climate negotiations have something for everyone. These mega-conferences attract all types, and the topical diversity of the side events is dizzying. We at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program are focused specifically on the climate and security discussions highlighted in an earlier New Security Beat post.
While I’m not able to join the 400+ participants expected at next week’s climate and security events, I do have some specific hopes for those discussions. And perhaps more importantly, I have hopes for steps after all the delegates go home. I try to capture my holiday wish list in this short video. -
VIDEO – Integrating Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) in Ethiopia
›December 4, 2009 // By Sean Peoples“Incorporating environment, population, and health is a timely issue. Unless we focus on integrated approaches, our Ethiopian Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved,” says Negash Teklu, executive director of the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE), in this short video.
I interviewed Teklu and three other members of CIPHE in Yirgalem, Ethiopia, where they spoke of the importance of PHE integration; why it is vital to involve the community in development projects; and practical steps for implementing integration at the grassroots level.
Everyone agrees that Ethiopia faces serious challenges. Much of the economy is based on agriculture, but drought is all too common, and the land is exacerbated by continual overuse. High rates of population growth coupled with limited resources and uncertain crop yields leaves many people vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. In addition, the country’s health system struggles to provide comprehensive care.
To combat these interconnected problems, the members of CIPHE truly believe that an integrated PHE approach that uses multi-sectoral interventions will best serve the needs of their fellow Ethiopians.
“If we follow the integrated PHE approach, economically we can be beneficial,” Mogues Worku of LEM Ethiopia told me. “We can share a lot of resources among the different sectoral organizations. At the same time with limited resources we can attain our goal by integrating the different sectoral offices and organizations, even at the grassroots level.”
This video will be the first of many on population, health, and environment problems and solutions in Ethiopia. Subscribe to our ECSP YouTube channel or the New Security Beat blog to see the latest videos. -
VIDEO: David Jensen on UNEP and Natural Resource Management After Conflict
›November 5, 2009 // By Sajid Anwar“We don’t do the gloom-and-doom scenarios anymore,” says David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, in a video interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko. “We focus on the opportunities provided by resource management. We focus much more on how they can support economic recovery, how they support livelihoods, how environment can be a platform for cooperation.”
When conducting its post-conflict environmental assessments, UNEP looks for “entry points using specific hotspots or specific sites that people can really understand and see the linkage between environment and conflict, or between their livelihoods and natural resources,” says Jensen. “We always try to be in the field and demonstrate the value of better resource management” for post-conflict recovery. -
VIDEO: Scott Radloff on Family Planning Under the Obama Administration
›November 3, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“We have a new administration that places a priority on family planning and reproductive health,” Scott Radloff, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko after a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
The Obama administration has rescinded the Mexico City Policy and announced an expanded Global Health Initiative. Radloff credits these new policies with opening opportunities “to work with key organizations in international family planning.”
The new family planning and reproductive health programs will address the large unmet need for family planning services in the developing world, particularly in Africa and South Asia. New programs will focus on reaching people in rural communities far from health clinics. “We expect to have great success,” he said. -
VIDEO: Carol Dumaine on Energy and Environmental Security in the 21st Century
›November 2, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“[W]e’re facing unprecedented challenges, literally things that have never happened in the history of human kind, and that should give us some pause… Not only rising temperatures but dramatic changes in precipitation, possibility of millions of people having to be relocated, and challenges to governance on scales that we perhaps haven’t seen before,” says Carol Dumaine, deputy directory of energy and environmental security at the U.S. Department of Energy, in a conversation with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
Dumaine emphasizes that tackling the 21st century’s broad energy and environmental security challenges requires study by experts from a range of fields, including zoology, virology, and information science. To this end, the Department of Energy hopes to leverage its years of investment and research with “the expertise that exists in the private sector and academia and think tanks.”
Looking toward the future, Dumaine identifies global cooperation as key. “The paradigm is a very diffuse, globally distributed risk, and the response must be very diffuse, globally distributed intelligence.” -
VIDEO: José G. Rimon on Key Trends in Funding Family Planning
›October 29, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“The downward trend, in terms of donor funding for international family planning, since the middle of the 1990s to around 2006 has been reversed,” José Rimon II, senior program officer for global health policy and advocacy at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko following a discussion on the future of family planning at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“There is a lot of scientific evidence that if we don’t revitalize the family planning/ reproductive health agenda, it will be very difficult to achieve the health Millennium Development Goals, especially in the area of reducing maternal mortality,” said Rimon. “Just by addressing the unmet need [for contraceptives] and the unintended pregnancies which result from it, you can reduce maternal mortality by 31 percent.”
Rimon said the Gates Foundation is working closely with donors and partner organizations to exchange information on strategy and funding priorities, which, he says, is “not happening in other issues, but it’s happening in the family planning and reproductive field.” -
VIDEO: Cleo Paskal on How Climate Change Will Destabilize Energy Supplies
›October 26, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“Climate change is going to have a very large effect on the ability to extract, distribute, [and] refine energy—in every sector,” says Cleo Paskal, associate fellow for the Energy, Environment, and Development Programme at Chatham House. “You’re going to very likely see increasing instability,” she tells ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in this video interview.
When hydroelectric dams are built, Paskal explains, planners inspect the site to determine the river flow, precipitation levels, and similar measures. But with climate change, “those constants have now all become variables, so your hydro generation is going to be severely affected.”
Last year, India “had an 8 percent decline in the ability to generate hydroelectricity because of changing precipitation patterns. This year…it looks like it’s going to be 12 percent because the monsoon is failing.”
Coastal nuclear power plants will face rising sea levels, increasing storm surges, coastal erosion, while those on rivers will find their supply of cooling water declining and warming. “In the summer of 2003, over a dozen French nuclear plants, because it was so hot, had to power down or shut off,” greatly disrupting the country’s energy supply, Paskal explains. “The predictions are that the temperatures that we saw in 2003 will be a one-in-two year event by 2040.”
Offshore oil and natural gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are now subject to increasingly strong hurricanes. “Katrina and Rita destroyed over 400 platforms, as well as refining capacity onshore. That creates a global spike in energy prices apart from having to rebuild the infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, offshore rigs in the Niger Delta are vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges, while infrastructure built in the Arctic could be at risk as the permafrost continues to melt. -
VIDEO: Alexander Carius on Climate Change and Security in Europe
›October 20, 2009 // By Sean Peoples“The landscape has changed since 2007,” says Alexander Carius of the climate change and international security debates now taking place in Europe. In this short video, Carius, who is managing director at Adelphi Research, discusses the progress made by institutionalizing communication within the European Commission as well as the formal and informal channels between the four member states leading the debate, Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Denmark. “Whether this debate is driven by science, I have my doubts,” said Carius.
Even though the climate-security debate is well underway, the current draft resolution for the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen remains silent on the connections between security and climate change. Moreover, there is a lack of consensus among negotiators on basic issues. As December approaches, skepticism of the likelihood of a comprehensive treaty is growing.
