Showing posts from category natural resources.
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Demography, Climate in the Spotlight at Planet Under Pressure
›March 27, 2012 // By Kayly OberLondon’s 2012 Planet Under Pressure conference, on all things global change – including climate, population, global risks, and food security – kicked off with a bang on March 26 and ECSP was there to cover it. We’ll be here throughout the week following all of the most pertinent population, health, and security events – we invite you to visit our booth if you happen to be in London, join the conversation on Twitter (#Planet2012), and/or watch the livestream.
During the opening plenaries, UK Scientific Advisor and all-around environmental all-star Sir John Beddington was the first to introduce population into the discussion.
Speaking on “The Planet in 2050” panel, Beddington immediately noted that really 2050 is too far out and instead we should focus on the next two decades. Within these 20 years the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change will be determined by the extent and manner of urbanization and demographic changes, particularly in Africa.
“How are we going to generate an infrastructure to feed 500 million Africans in the next 13 years?” Beddington asked.
Beddington’s talk could be considered a rejoinder to his famous “perfect storm” analogy, outlined in The Guardian in 2009:Our food reserves are at a 50-year low, but by 2030 we need to be producing 50 percent more food. At the same time, we will need 50 percent more energy, and 30 percent more freshwater.
In a later session, “Securing Global Biodiversity,” Simon Stuart, chair of the species survival commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), expanded on this “perfect storm” analogy.
There are dramatic problems out there, particularly with water and food, but energy also, and they are all intimately connected. You can’t think about dealing with one without considering the others. We must deal with all of these together.
He agreed that the global challenge of our day hinged on how human needs add pressures to the natural environment. Rising demand for energy, food, and freshwater not only influences climate change but also exerts unprecedented pressure on soil quality and biodiversity.
But although we’re impeded by major challenges, including “unsustainable economic models,” a lack of public support, and a massive need for investment in conservation, we have made some strides, Stuart said. The Convention on Biological Diversity’s strategic plan for biodiversity, established in 2010, sets 20 targets for biodiversity conservation by 2020. Stuart believes this is the beginning of acknowledging the urgency of addressing the threat to biodiversity.
Tim Coulson, professor of population biology at Imperial College London, compared the efficiency of either reducing fertility rates or per capita consumption to determine the best way to reduce humanity’s impact on the planet.
Coulson ran two simple simulations using India and the United States as case studies. In one model, he changed fertility rates by one percent per year for 50 years. In the other, he decreased per capita consumption by one percent per year for 50 years. What he found in both cases was that decreasing per capita consumption achieved the most rapid change in human impact on the environment. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that a longer-term course of action of declining fertility rates was needed to keep impact stable.
Readers beware, however – this type of experiment is an incredibly simplified exercise in the intersection of people and the environment. A more varied set of scenarios would produce more useful results. As Beddington mentioned, populations in sub-Saharan Africa have both the highest growth rates and the most direct impact on the environment due to their higher reliance on natural resources for livelihoods.
And, perhaps most importantly, as one commentator noted, these scenarios do not take into account cost factors. For instance, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through more energy efficient buildings and transport, the United States would need to invest $1.1 trillion through 2030. Alternatively, the cost to provide for the 215 million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy but are not using an effective means of contraception is estimated at $3.6 billion. Using the “wedge” climate model, meeting unmet family planning needs would be equivalent to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions saved by converting entirely to electric vehicles – at a fraction (about five percent) of the cost.
Stay tuned for more updates from ECSP at the Planet Under Pressure Conference. We’ll also be posting pictures from the conference to our Facebook and Flickr pages.
Video Credit: “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure Conference. -
First Impressions: Four Takeaways from the Global Water Security Intelligence Assessment
›March 27, 2012 // By Geoffrey D. Dabelko
The just-released unclassified National Intelligence Council report on water and security is a very positive contribution to understanding very complex and interconnected ecological, social, economic, and political issues.
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Global Water Security Calls for U.S. Leadership, Says Intelligence Assessment
›March 26, 2012 // By Schuyler NullAlongside and in support of Secretary Clinton’s announcement of a new State Department-led water security initiative last week was the release of a global water security assessment by the National Intelligence Council and Director of National Intelligence. The aim of the report? Answer the question: “How will water problems (shortages, poor water quality, or floods) impact U.S. national security interests over the next 30 years?”
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PBS ‘NewsHour’ and Pulitzer Center Examine Water Shortage and Health Issues in Ghana and Nigeria
›The PBS NewsHour continued its collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting on international reporting last week with an episode on water infrastructure in Ghana and Nigeria. The coverage is especially apropos on World Water Day.
Correspondent Steve Sapienza spoke to reporters in Ghana and Nigeria to highlight long-running access and sanitation issues in both countries caused by poor infrastructure that has not kept up with growth.
Ameto Akpe is a local reporter for Nigeria’s BusinessDay, where her stories “target the contradiction of a country with immense oil wealth and great water resources that are not reaching their citizens.” In the city of Makurdi, capital of the north-central Benue State, she reports on the hundreds of thousands of people who rely on either high-priced water delivery or untreated water drawn straight from the Benue River.
“The previous attempt to build a water treatment plant ended in scandal in 2008,” says Sapienza, “with an unfinished treatment facility and city officials unable to account for $6 million.”
“Unfortunately, the waterworks is only half of the solution to Makurdi’s water problem,” writes Akpe on the Pulitzer Center. “The other half is a system of pipes to deliver the water to the people – and that project is just a twinkle in the eye of a handful of contractors and bureaucrats.”
In Ghana, metro TV reporter Samuel Agyemang explains similar access and sanitation issues in the capitol of Accra and its suburb of Teshie, where some residents have waited decades for piped water, despite substantial foreign investments.
The Pulitzer Center’s Peter Sawyer explains in a companion piece that “the population of Accra has grown enormously in the past several decades. But the water supply system has not grown with it.” As a result, the Ghana Water Company is constantly playing catch-up to provide water to communities, many of whom do not understand how to demand accountability from their officials, says Agyemang.
According to UN estimates, Ghana’s population has increased by more than 10 million people since 1990. Nigeria is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, with 158 million people currently and the UN medium projection estimating a possible 389 million by mid-century.
Reporter Ameto Akpe will be speaking about Nigeria’s water and sanitation problems at an upcoming all-day event on Nigeria at the Wilson Center, scheduled for April 25.
Sources: PBS NewsHour, Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, UN Population Division. -
John Williams: Helping People and Preserving Biodiversity Hotspots
›March 16, 2012 // By Schuyler Null“Both humans and the number of species in the world are not evenly distributed across the globe,” said John Williams of the University of California, Davis, who recently spoke at the Wilson Center about his contribution to Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. “In particular we find that species diversity is concentrated in what’s called the biodiversity ‘hotspots.’”
Largely in the tropics, Mediterranean climates, and along mountain chains, biodiversity hotspots are “where there’s a real concentration in number of species and also unique species – plants and animals that exist nowhere else on Earth,” he said.
“It’s a very complex relationship between biodiversity and human population, because it’s not necessarily [true] that places of high human population are a threat to biodiversity,” said Williams. Many different factors play a role, “like education, like consumption, like economic development, different cultures – how people interface with the natural world – all these things create nuances as far as what that relationship is between biodiversity and where people live.”
“There are some basic things we can do that are going to be good for human welfare, as well as biodiversity,” he continued. A few are addressing lack of education, especially among girls, in areas of high biodiversity; providing basic health services, including family planning, where rural growth rates are highest; and improving physical access to rural areas to promote economic development.
“We see there’s a direct correlation between each additional year of schooling a girl has and their fertility during their lifetime,” Williams said. “As people climb out of poverty, they also choose to have smaller, healthier families.” -
Eelke Kraak, ChinaDialogue
Central Asia’s Dam Debacle
›March 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Eelke Kraak, appeared on ChinaDialogue.
The Toktogul Dam in Kyrgyzstan is an imposing structure. The dam guards the largest and only multi-annual water reservoir in central Asia. The cascade of five hydroelectric stations downstream produces 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s power. Cotton fields thousands of kilometers away in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan depend on the release of water from this dam.
The Toktogul is literally and figuratively the “valve” of the Syr Darya River. But by relying on large-scale engineering projects to control the river, these countries have ignored the fundamentally political nature of water management.
The significance of the Toktogul dam goes beyond its economic benefits. It was the center piece of the Soviet Union’s efforts to conquer nature in its drive to modernize central Asia. When it became fully operational in the late 1980s, the project to control the region’s rivers seemed complete.
But the costs have been high. The Aral Sea, the terminal lake of the main sources of water in central Asia, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, has shrunk to almost nothing. Many areas surrounding what is left of the lake are heavily polluted. Moreover, the now independent Syr Darya riparian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan – disagree on how the Toktogul should be operated.
Continue reading on ChinaDialogue.
Syr Darya River Floodplain, Kazakhstan, courtesy of NASA and the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. -
More People, Less Biodiversity? The Complex Connections Between Population Dynamics and Species Loss
›March 8, 2012 // By Laurie Mazur“For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piece-meal.”
~ Thomas Jefferson, 1799This much is clear: As human numbers have grown, the number of species with whom we share the planet has declined dramatically. While it took about 200,000 years for humanity to reach one billion people around 1800, world population has grown sevenfold since then, surpassing seven billion last year.
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Elizabeth Grossman, Yale Environment 360
How a Gold Mining Boom Is Killing Children in Nigeria
›March 5, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Elizabeth Grossman, appeared on Yale Environment 360.
In early 2010, while working in the impoverished rural region of Zamfara in northwestern Nigeria, the group Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders – encountered many young children suffering from fevers, seizures, and convulsions. An unusually high number of very young children, many under age five, were dying, and there were many fresh graves.
The doctors initially suspected malaria, meningitis, or typhoid, all common in the region. But when the sick children didn’t respond to anti-malarial drugs or other antibiotics, one of the physicians began to wonder if local mining activity might be implicated. Historically an agricultural area, Zamfara had been experiencing a small-scale gold rush, thanks to rapidly rising gold prices that encouraged the pursuit of even the most marginal sources of ore. Mining work was taking place in and around the villages and within many of the mud-walled compounds where families were using flour mills to pulverize lead-laden rocks to extract gold.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctors sent children’s blood samples for testing and the results revealed acute lead poisoning. Many of the children had blood lead levels dozens, even hundreds, of times higher than international safety standards. Within a week, an emergency medical and environmental remediation team arrived and began to grapple with an epidemic of childhood lead poisoning that is being called unprecedented in modern times. In the past two years, more than 400 children have died in Zamfara, more than 2,000 have been treated with chelation therapy, and thousands more have been – and continue to be – severely poisoned by exposure to pervasive lead dust.
Continue reading on Yale Environment 360.
Photo Credit: “Conflict minerals 1,” courtesy of the ENOUGH Project/Sasha Lezhnev.
