“In Kenya’s highly competitive landscape, land has become the battleground,” argued Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post. Maathai joins a growing group of experts who emphasize that recent violence in Kenya stems not only from ethnic divisions, but also from longstanding tensions over resource allocation. Earlier this year, guest contributor Colin Kahl asserted that the struggles between the Kikuyu, Luo, and Kalenjin tribes are partly based on disparate levels of property ownership.

The media sometimes portray the violence in Kenya as a simple manifestation of ethnic friction, but many commentators note the importance of land distribution and other factors. Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and a visiting public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, told The New York Times, “You have to understand that these issues are much deeper than ethnic. They are political…they go back to land.” In a similar vein, Oxford University’s David Anderson told Newsweek, “If this violence is really driven by ethnic hatred, why is it that violence breaks out in specific places that are utterly predictable? This violence…is provoked in areas that have a history of violence because of other issues, like land.”

Looking forward, Harvard professor Calestous Juma says that if mediation talks are to be effective, they will have to avoid “the template [of thinking] about Africa in terms of ethnic differences.” Similarly, Maathai emphasizes that “ruling elites must devote time, energy and resources to ensuring…equitable distribution of resources.”

“It is true that countries like Kenya and Pakistan and some other developing countries have high population growth rates. And that is a real tragedy for Kenya and Pakistan, which are trying to improve their lot but are getting overwhelmed with more people to feed,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond told Living on Earth host Bruce Gellerman in a recent interview. “But it’s not a tragedy for the rest of the world because those people in rapidly growing third world countries don’t consume very much. The real tragedy for the world is the growth rate of population and consumption in the first world.” Diamond’s comments echoed points he made in a January 2008 New York Times op-ed, in which he argued that total consumption, not total population, is the real threat to Earth’s dwindling natural resources.

Diamond believes we should focus on reducing consumption rates in affluent societies, where the average person consumes 32 times more resources than the average person in a developing country. “Whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates [in the United States and other developed countries], because our present rates are unsustainable. Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates,” wrote Diamond. “Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher.”

Diamond also struck an optimistic tone in “Environment, Population, and Health: Strategies for a More Secure World,” an article in Environmental Change and Security Program Report 10: “Every one of our problems—deforestation, overfishing, water scarcity, and toxic waste—is of our own making. Therefore, we can choose to stop causing them.”

China has begun to reverse the high rates of desertification that have plagued it for decades, reported China Daily on January 24. Thanks to the efforts of communities, NGOs, and local governments, China’s deserts are now shrinking by 7,585 kilometers a year, in contrast to their annual growth rate of 10,400 square kilometers in the late 1990s. Yet 400 million Chinese remain affected by desertification: Erosion—particularly due to wind—can cause violent sand storms, forcing people from their homes and threatening the economies of major Asian cities including Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. Human health effects include respiratory and eye infections. For more on the health effects of desertification, see “Desertification and Environmental Health Trends in China,” a research brief by the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum (CEF).

In August 2007, CEF and water NGO Circle of Blue assembled a group of desertification experts and photographers to take a five-day car ride from Beijing into eastern Inner Mongolia in northeast China, one of the regions that has suffered most from desertification. On their drive into the ocean of sand, the team gathered stories, photos, and video to put a human face on China’s desertification crisis. The result of their trip is a multimedia report, “Reign of Sand,” which explains that the primary causes of China’s increasingly frequent and severe sand storms—most of which originate in Inner Mongolia, home to the largest grasslands on earth—are the ecological mismanagement of this region and deepening drought in northern China.

By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

Replacing 10-20 percent of mangroves in coastal areas of Thailand with shrimp farms does not seriously damage the mangroves’ ability to protect against tsunamis, says an article published recently in Science. According to the authors, “reconciling competing demands on coastal habitats should not always result in stark preservation-versus-conversion choices.”

Chimpanzees and other endangered species are being threatened by a thriving bushmeat trade in Tanzanian refugee camps, says a report by the NGO Traffic. “The scale of wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped conceal the failure of the international community to meet basic refugee needs,” said report lead author George Jambiya.

“Health professionals have a vital contributory role in preventing and reducing the health effects of global environmental change,” argue A. J. McMichael and colleagues in an article in the British Medical Journal (subscription required to access full text).

Muslim countries around the world should follow the example of some of Indonesia’s pesantren (religious schools) and incorporate environmental conservation into the teaching and practice of Islam, argues MIT professor and frequent Wilson Center speaker Saleem Ali, who edited Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution.

The rising price of oil is making food more expensive and threatening the food security of the poor, reports The New York Times. “According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.”

“The surge in the copper price has stirred up an emotional debate in Zambia about the obligations of the government—and investors—regarding the exploitation of minerals for the long-term benefit of countries. For a country built on the back of a previous copper heyday, but which has experienced massive poverty and underdevelopment for decades, this is unsurprising,” writes Diana Games for Resource Investor.

Hostility between the Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) and the country’s government—brewing since government officials announced a sharp increase in mining project commitments in the northern region of Niger in early 2007—escalated this month. Violence reached Niger’s capital city of Niamey for the first time on January 8, 2008, when a landmine exploded under a car, killing a local radio director. The MNJ, which decries what it perceives as the unequal distribution of profits from uranium mining and oil drilling in Tuareg territory, has killed nearly 50 soldiers since early last year, earning the wrath of the Nigerien government. Although the group vehemently denies any involvement with the January 8 attack, many in Niger are skeptical of this claim.

The National Interest sponsored an online debate on the links between natural resources and conflict featuring David Victor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Klare, Sherri Goodman, and Paul Kern.

Georgetown University’s Colin Kahl argues that Kenya’s present strife is largely due to deep-seated ethnic land grievances, while a Council on Foreign Relations brief claims that it is partially the result of demographic factors—the country’s “youth bulge,” for instance.

“Weathering the Storm: Options for Framing Adaptation and Development,” a new report from the World Resources Institute, reviews climate change adaptation efforts from throughout the developing world, and explores how adaptation activities intersect with poverty, environmental degradation, and other challenges.

An article from IRIN News examines whether or not the extraction of Mozambique’s mineral resources—including heavy metals, coal, natural gas, and perhaps oil—is likely to reduce the country’s widespread poverty.

Thousands of people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi have fled the flooding caused by the overflowing Zambezi River, reports BBC News. “Damage to crops and roads has raised fears of food shortages, and aid agencies have also warned of increased risk of waterborne diseases and diseases caused by poor sanitation.”

Henrik Urdal, a senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), spent several weeks at the Woodrow Wilson Center this autumn as a visiting fellow. At PRIO, Urdal researches the relationships between demography and armed conflict, focusing particularly on population pressure on natural resources. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko sat down with Urdal to discuss his current research interests, including the implications of a rapidly urbanizing global populace, sub-national demographic trends in India, and the extraordinary Iranian fertility decline.

During a recent trip to Costa Rica, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko visited Alexander Lopez, director of the School for International Affairs at the National University of Costa Rica. With his extensive field work, Lopez is an expert on the linkages between environment and conflict, as well as the management of transboundary river basins in Latin America. In the following podcast, Lopez discusses the growing awareness of environment and security linkages in Central America and his current work on building regional cooperation and integration of natural resource management.