Showing posts from category natural resources.
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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.” -
Uganda’s Demographic and Health Challenges Put Into Perspective With Newfound Oil Discoveries [Part Two]
›April 26, 2012 // By Kate Diamond
“We never thought we would end up having the same problems here as the people in the Niger Delta. But now I’m worried,” Henry Ford Mirima, a spokesman for Uganda’s Bunyoro kingdom, said last fall in Le Monde Diplomatique. The kingdom – which calls itself East Africa’s oldest – sits along Lake Albert, where over the past seven years British oil company Tullow Oil has discovered oil reserves big enough to produce an estimated 2.5 billion barrels.
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Uganda’s Demographic and Health Challenges Put Into Perspective With Newfound Oil Discoveries [Part One]
›April 26, 2012 // By Kate DiamondUganda’s population is the second youngest in the world, with half of the country younger than 15.7 years old (just older than Niger’s median age of 15.5 years). In the past 10 years, the country – about half the size of France in land area – has added 10 million people, growing from 24 to 34 million. That growth, paired with other factors like poor governance and long-standing insecurity, has made providing basic services a difficult task for a government that is one of Africa’s most aid-dependent.
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Richard Cronin, World Politics Review
China and the Geopolitics of the Mekong River Basin
›April 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Richard Cronin, appeared in World Politics Review.
Two decades after the Paris Peace Accord that ended the proxy war in Cambodia, the Mekong Basin has re-emerged as a region of global significance. The rapid infrastructure-led integration of a region some call “Asia’s last frontier” has created tensions between and among China and its five southern neighbors – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. Both expanded regional cooperation as well as increased competition for access to the rich resources of the once war-torn region have created serious environmental degradation while endangering food security and other dimensions of human security and even regional stability.
China’s seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials and tropical commodities has made it a fast-growing market for several Mekong countries and an increasingly important regional investor. Economic integration has been boosted by a multibillion dollar network of all-weather roads, bridges, dams, and power lines largely financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) that is linking the countries of the Lower Mekong to each other and to China. To date, the ADB’s Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) cooperative development program has primarily benefited large population centers outside the basin proper in China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Unfortunately, the same infrastructure that speeds the flow of people and goods to urban centers also facilitates the environmentally unsustainable exploitation of the forests, minerals, water resources, and fisheries that are still the primary source of food and livelihoods to millions of the Mekong’s poorest inhabitants.
No aspect of China’s fast-growing role and influence in the Mekong region is more evident and more problematic than its drive to harness the huge hydroelectric potential of the Upper Mekong through the construction of a massive cascade of eight large- to mega-sized dams on the mainstream of the river in Yunnan Province. The recently completed Xiaowan dam, the fourth in the series, will mainly be used to send electricity to the factories and cities of Guangdong Province, its coastal export manufacturing base some 1,400 kilometers away. China’s Yunnan cascade will have enough operational storage capacity to augment the dry season flow at the border with Myanmar and Laos by 40-70 percent, both to maintain maximum electricity output and facilitate navigation on the river downstream as far as northern Laos for boats of up to 500 tons.
Continue reading in World Politics Review.
Photo Credit: “Xiaowan Dam Site,” courtesy of International Rivers. -
John Donnelly, Global Post
Aspen Institute on Women, Population, and Access to Safe Water
›April 24, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffLoading the player…The original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on the Global Post.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s World Clock says that the population of the world today is estimated at 7.008 billion people, while projections show that the world could reach the 9 billion marker by 2050.
In the last of its series called “7 Billion: Conversations That Matter,” Aspen Institute’s Global Health and Development hosted a panel of experts based in Africa and the United States on the interconnectedness of gender issues, family planning, population, and access to safe water.
The point of the series was to ask questions about why it mattered that the world was passing the seven billion mark, and the questions today in Washington were appropriately big: Will water wars replace oil wars? What are the solutions to expand water and sanitation to the 2.5 billion people who don’t have it? And just how many people can the world support in an equitable fashion?
An answer to the last question: You need a bigger pie, better manners, and fewer forks.
Borrowing from a book by Joel Cohen called How Many People can the Earth Support? (written in 1996 when the world supported a 5.7 billion population), Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, said that the answer was “it depends on how we use resources.”
Continue reading on the Global Post.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau. -
Andrew Freedman, Climate Central
Senate Hearing Focuses on Threat of Sea Level Rise
›April 21, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Andrew Freedman, appeared on Climate Central.
Sea level rise poses an increasingly grave threat to coastal energy facilities and communities during the course of the next several decades, with some impacts already evident, according to testimony delivered Thursday before a rare Senate hearing on climate science.
The hearing, held by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focused on the challenges posed by sea level rise, which is one of the most visible manifestations of a warming planet.
“Sea level rise takes the current level of vulnerability and multiplies it,” said Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.). “When sea levels rise, the storm surge associated with extreme storms gets even worse, and even an average storm can have above-average consequences.”
Although Chairman Bingaman said he hoped the hearing would help restart “a national conversation” on climate change, the hearing instead may have served to highlight the continuing partisan divide on global climate change. While there were five Democrats in attendance, just one Republican – ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) – participated in the hearing, a fact not lost on Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, who called climate change the proverbial “elephant in the room.”
Continue reading on Climate Central.
Sources: U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Image Credit: Climate Central. -
Georgina Mace on Planetary Stewardship in a Globalized Age: Risks, Obstacles, and Opportunities
›April 18, 2012 // By Stuart Kent“The goal, ultimately, is just to manage our world better,” to have an “integrated system for the environment that is driven by what local communities want and need,” said Professor Georgina Mace, director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London. Mace spoke to ECSP on the sidelines of the 2012 Planet Under Pressure conference.
The environmental challenges of humanity are “really twofold,” she said. First, “human societies have grown up at what we now call the local scale…traditionally using the area in which they live.” Communities have always exerted pressures on their local environment but population growth “means those pressures on local landscapes are much greater than they use to be,” said Mace. “We can’t do everything all in the same place,” without the needs of different groups sometimes conflicting.
Second, “there are connections between societies that are sometimes good but quite often they’re damaging.” For example, the increasingly globalized nature of how we utilize natural resources means that “overuse by one community may affect local people in ways that they have no way of responding to.”
Taking apart the first of these challenges, Mace explained that “the population growth issue is really a population growth and demographic change [issue].” In places with mature age structures, such as North America, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, “the concern is about the number of old people dependent on a reducing number of producers in their society,” while in many poorer regions of the globe the concern is about the “many young people who still have to go through their reproductive years.”
This latter case “looks a horrible problem from the environment point of view,” said Mace, because the areas growing fastest are areas that are “already overused in many ways.” If countries “don’t worry too much about international migration [and] we’re able to accommodate that,” this “demographic divide” could actually be helpful, as countries with growing populations could provide a young, energetic workforce to those that are aging.
Mace made policy recommendations on different scales, from the local to the planetary. At the local level she encouraged making sure that climate interventions “are actually in concert with what’s going on in the environment.” “Let’s take advantage of ecological resilience, biological adaptation – all the things that nature has provided us with that give us mechanisms for coping,” she said.
On a broader scale, she recommended intervening to counteract the “damaging drivers of environmental change,” by using geoengineering and better land use planning, “which is essentially gardening the planet.”
“Both of those offer solutions that are actually incredibly efficient. They also have costs, risks, and obstacles to do with governance, to do with different people being winners and losers, and to do with the fact that we tend to organize our world around nation states and these solutions mostly transcend international boundaries.”
“That’s a major obstacle,” Mace said, but in the end we need “to have a fully integrated planning system that is not top down but has an overall strategy that seeks to optimize all the things that people want and allows a way for local communities to connect.”
“I think that’s the big challenge for us – how to get there.” -
Geoff Dabelko On ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ Discussing Global Water Security
›April 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was recently a guest on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the just-released U.S. intelligence community assessment of world water security. He was joined by co-panelists retired Maj. Gen. Richard Engel (USAF) of the National Intelligence Council’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (a key figure in preparing the report), Jessica Troell of the International Water Program at the Environmental Law Institute, and Steve Fleischli of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Department of State-requested assessment (outlined in more detail, here and here) is a very positive contribution, said Dabelko. It “moves away from the arm-waving, headline-grabbing, water wars frame – the kind of sky-is-falling frame that is intuitively appealing and certainly appealing for politicians and headline writers, but doesn’t really reflect the reality.” He continued:What this report instead does, is recognize that there’s been an awful lot of cooperation around water even in the face of scarcity and that that cooperation in part helps us avoid conflicts, whether they’re violent or political, and that we should invest in those institutions that help us get to cooperation.
Visit the show’s program page to listen to the full segment, or read the transcript here.
It also suggests that it’s inadequate and incorrect to think of water as just a single-sector issue. The report is quite clear in connecting it to energy, connecting it to food, connecting it to health, economic development, agriculture obviously, and so that recognition [in] analysis sounds in some way straightforward, but unfortunately, when we organize our responses, we often respond in sector, and there’s not nearly enough communication and cooperation.
And finally, the report does say that the future may not look like the past, and so while we don’t have evidence of states fighting one another over water – and the judgment of the report is in the next 10 years, we won’t see that – it does hold out the prospect for as we go farther down the line, in terms of higher levels of consumption and higher levels of population, that we need to pay special attention because there’s some particular river basins in parts of the world where, as I said, the future may not look like the past and we have greater concerns for higher levels of conflict.
Sources/Image Credit: The Diane Rehm Show.
