Showing posts from category natural resources.
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Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions
›October 21, 2011 // By Theresa Polk“Water is tied to everything we care about,” said MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and President of the Pacific Institute Peter Gleick in an interview with ECSP. However, “we cannot talk about water or any other resource issue…without also understanding the enormously important role of population dynamics and population growth.”
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Watch: Scott Wallace on the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes and the Intersection Between Human Rights and Conservation
›October 19, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffIn the far west of the Amazon, some of the last uncontacted indigenous tribes on Earth live untouched by modern society. Scott Wallace, frequent contributor to National Geographic and former public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, spoke to New Security Beat about his new book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes, which chronicles his harrowing trip through the Javari Valley Indigenous Land. Wallace accompanies former sertanista (“agent of contact”)-turned-native rights advocate Sydney Possuelo as he attempts to map and protect the territory of the flecheiros, or Arrow People, named for the poison-tipped arrows they use.
The Brazilian government and activists are trying to protect the areas where these native groups live and allow them to choose for themselves if they want contact. “It’s not that hard to find us,” Wallace said. For the moment, however, “it’s clear that they do not want that contact.”
By protecting these people, the government is also protecting thousands, if not millions, of acres of virgin rainforest, said Wallace, creating a mutually beneficial intersection between human rights and environmental conservation.
“The assumption is that there is now a global village, everyone’s connected…no one of us is separated from anyone else on the planet by more than six degrees of separation,” said Wallace. But that assumption breaks down in the face of these people who live in complete isolation from the rest of the world.
We have to decide whether to leave them alone and let them live their lives or try to make lasting contact, said Wallace. Contact would open up the tribe’s land and resources to development but come at great risk to their society, their lives (due to vulnerability to disease), and the Amazonian ecosystem, as the example of India’s Adavasi tribes demonstrates. -
Women and Water: Streams of Development
›“One of the things that we consistently learn is that water is a woman’s issue,” said Lisa Schechtman, WaterAid America’s head of policy and advocacy, leading off a September 23 Wilson Center on the Hill panel on gender, water, and development. Schechtman was joined in the discussion by Jae So, director of the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program; Christian Holmes, USAID’s Global Water Coordinator; and Geoff Dabelko, moderator and director the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Water issues affect everyone, but women often bear the brunt of water collection responsibilities, making them vulnerable to changes in access or sanitation, especially in developing countries. “Studies show that about 26 percent of a rural African woman’s time is spent collecting water,” Schechtman said. “That means that they can’t go to school, they can’t take care of their families, or go to clinics, or spend time generating income, or doing other things in their community like participating in political processes.”
What’s more, as women make the hours-long hike to get water, “they’re risking injury and sexual assault,” Schechtman added. “So there’s a really wide-ranging set of impacts, just out of the actual act of collecting water.”
The Horn of Africa: Severe Problems, Small Changes
In one town in northeastern Kenya, Holmes said women have to travel 12 miles to find water – and even then, they are drawing it from a waterhole shared with wildlife. In Ethiopia, “we have severe problems,” he said, “not the least of which is not just sanitation but also HIV and AIDS,” as HIV/AIDS patients often drink unsanitary water to take their medications. That water gives them diarrheal disease, “so they’re excreting the value of the treatment” – and women, as household caregivers, bear an ever greater burden.
In Somalia, girls drop out of school once they start menstruating because schools do not have latrines that allow them to meet their needs safely and privately. “To think that the lack of a latrine could make you drop out of school and your entire life is going to change overnight – it’s just not acceptable,” said Holmes.
In each of these cases, small changes could dramatically reduce strains on women. Holmes pointed to a USAID project in Kenya that is building wells closer to population centers and empowering women by bringing them into the decisions on developing and managing wells. In Ethiopia, NGOs are working to train women on sanitation and hygiene, which could reduce the burden of illness on women and their families. And in Somalia, the simple addition of women’s latrines at schools would mean girls can continue their education beyond puberty.
Closing the Water Gender Gap
The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development recommends that development professionals “look at the gender gaps in basic endowments, like access to health, access to water resources, access to land,” and determine not just how they affect men and women differently but why those gaps exist in the first place, said Jae So.
A CARE and Swiss Development Corporation study of water services in Nicaragua found that when men realized how much of a role water-related activities played in women’s day-to-day lives, “it energized the entire community to really devote their collective resources” towards improving water management, said So.
“Water touches everything else in one’s life,” said Holmes. “You can link it to water and climate change, water and health, water and food, water and conflict, water and education – all are interwoven.”
Event ResourcesSources: The United Nations, UNICEF, USAID, WaterAid America, The World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Repatriated Mamas at the fountain,” courtesy of flickr user Julien Harneis -
Watch: Dennis Taenzler on Four Key Steps for REDD+ to Avoid Becoming a Source of Conflict
›The UN Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) provides financial incentives to developing countries to conserve their forests and invest in low-carbon pathways to sustainable development. However, it may also be a potential new source of conflict, says Dennis Taenzler, a senior project manager at adelphi in Berlin, who works on climate and energy policies as well as peace and conflict issues.
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Aaron Wolf on Water Management, Agriculture, and Population Growth in the Middle East
›In terms of groundwater depletion, “Yemen and Gaza are probably the two places worst off in the Middle East,” Aaron Wolf told ECSP in a recent interview. Wolf, a water expert and geography professor at Oregon State University, said population growth across the broader Middle East region has led to intensified groundwater pumping in recent years. This trend has raised the prospects for water-related conflict down the road, as countries drain their groundwater stocks faster than the aquifers can recharge. Potentially complicating matters further, said Wolf, is that most aquifers in the Middle East cross international boundaries.
Despite the region’s history of water tensions, Wolf said the unprecedented level of demographic change currently being experienced across the Middle East is not necessarily a recipe for future confrontations over the resource, in part thanks to the existence of water-sharing agreements in the area. Nevertheless, mounting demand will likely force water-users across the region – especially within the agriculture sector – to change the ways they utilize the resource.
Accounting for 80 to 90 percent of total water usage in some Middle Eastern countries, agricultural operations have already been forced to adjust to the evolving water-access situation. While moving from flood irrigation to drip irrigation represents one policy option if sufficient funds are available, Wolf said doing away with local food production “is a path that a lot of countries are going to have to take” to ensure a relatively stable water supply for their populations’ drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs.
Wolf added that one frequently discussed but not entirely realistic option for addressing the region’s water-supply concerns involves desalination. To date, widespread deployment of the technology has been hampered by high costs and substantial energy requirements, although that hasn’t stopped a few countries in the region – among them the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Israel – from becoming partially reliant on converted fresh water.
Wolf maintained that desalination’s hefty price tag means the technology is useful only for urban population centers near the coast. Moving converted sea water further inland remains a non-starter, he said, because transporting it requires an enormous amount of energy (a cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton).
For the same reasons, Wolf asserted, using desalinated water for agriculture doesn’t seem to be in the cards any time soon. “Right now a cubic meter of desalinated water costs about 40 cents, and you can’t use that for agriculture unless it drops down to about 8 cents a cubic meter,” Wolf said. “So until you can irrigate with desalinated water, it really doesn’t go a long way towards mitigating the larger water crisis.”
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Sources: American University, International Food Policy Research Institute, World Bank. -
Remembrance: Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Linked Environment and Conflict
›September 26, 2011 // By Schuyler NullSad news today as Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has passed away in Nairobi. The Green Belt Movement, which Maathai founded in 1977, has planted over 30 million trees and advocates for what Maathai called the three essential components of a stable society: sustainable environmental management, democratic governance, and a culture of peace. [Video Below]
“Almost every conflict in Africa you can point at has something to do with competition over resources in an environment,” said Maathai during her visit to the Wilson Center in 2009:Unless you deal with the cause, you are wasting your time. You can use all the money you want for all the years you want; you will not solve the problem, because you are dealing with a symptom. So we need to go outside that box and deal with development in a holistic way.
Maathai’s message was molded from her experiences in Kenya and across sub-Saharan Africa in general. She was not shy about condemning African leaders and advocating for women in the political space. In ECSP Report 12, she wrote, “I come from a continent that has known many conflicts for a long time. Many of them are glaringly due to bad governance, unwillingness to share resources more equitably, selfishness, and a failure to promote cultures of peace.”
Importantly, though, Maathai advocated for addressing these issues in concert, not separately. She said at the Wilson Center:I can’t say, ‘Let us deal with governance this time, and don’t worry about the resources.’ Or, ‘Don’t worry about peace today, or conflicts that are going on; let us worry about management of resources.’ I saw that it was very, very important to use the tree-planting as an entry point.
A Message to the World
Some raised questions when Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 – the first awarded to someone from the environmental field – but the recognition was more than deserved, wrote Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) Director Geoff Dabelko on Grist:Maathai is on the front lines of the struggle over natural resources that fuels conflicts across the world. While there is no dramatic footage of tanks rumbling across borders or airplanes flying into buildings, the everyday fight for survival of those who depend directly on natural resources – forests, water, minerals – for their livelihoods is at the heart of the battle for peace and human security.
Maathai explained in Report 12 that she thought her winning of the prize was intended as a message to the world to “rethink peace and security.”
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Elevating such a strong Southern voice – and one whose elephant’s skin bears the scars of the fight for peace – is a noble choice.
The Nobel Committee “wanted to challenge the world to discover the close linkage between good governance, sustainable management of resources, and peace,” she wrote. “In managing our resources, we need to realize that they are limited and need to be managed more sustainably, responsibly, and accountably.”
Sources: Grist, The New York Times.
Photo Credit: David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
Carl Haub, Yale Environment 360
What If Experts Are Wrong On World Population Growth?
›September 22, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Carl Haub, appeared on Yale Environment 360.
In a mere half-century, the number of people on the planet has soared from 3 billion to 7 billion, placing us squarely in the midst of the most rapid expansion of world population in our 50,000-year history – and placing ever-growing pressure on the Earth and its resources.
But that is the past. What of the future? Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end UN estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wild lands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth.
It is customary in the popular media and in many journal articles to cite a projected population figure as if it were a given, a figure so certain that it could virtually be used for long-range planning purposes. But we must carefully examine the assumptions behind such projections. And forecasts that population is going to level off or decline this century have been based on the assumption that the developing world will necessarily follow the path of the industrialized world. That is far from a sure bet.
Continue reading on Yale Environment 360.
Image Credit: Data from UN Population Division, chart arranged by Schuyler Null. -
Perfect Storm? Population Pressures, Natural Resource Constraints, and Climate Change in Bangladesh
›Few nations are more at risk from climate change’s destructive effects than Bangladesh, a low-lying, lower-riparian, populous, impoverished, and natural disaster-prone nation. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2050, sea levels in Bangladesh will have risen by two to three feet, obliterating a fifth of the country’s landmass and displacing at least 20 million people. On September 19, the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, with assistance from ECSP and the Comparative Urban Studies Project, hosted a conference that examined Bangladesh’s imperiled environmental security.
Climate Change and PopulationThe first panel focused on manifestations, drivers, and risks. Ali Riaz addressed the threat of climate refugees. Environmental stress, he said, may produce two possible responses: fight (civil conflict or external aggression) or flight (migration). In Bangladesh, the latter is the more likely outcome. Coastal communities, overwhelmed by rising sea levels and flooding, could migrate to Bangladesh’s urban areas or into neighboring India. Both scenarios pose challenges for the state, which already struggles to provide services to its urban masses and has shaky relations with New Delhi.
Mohamed Khalequzzaman examined Bangladesh’s geological vulnerability in the context of climate change. In a deltaic nation like Bangladesh, he explained, sedimentation levels must keep up with rates of sea level rise to prevent the nation from drowning. However, sediment levels now fall below 5 millimeters (mm) per year – short of the 6.5 mm Khalequzzaman calculates are necessary to keep pace with projected sea level rises. He lamented the nation’s tendency to construct large dams and embankments in the Bengal Delta, which “isolate coastal ecosystems from natural sedimentation,” he said, and result in lower land elevations relative to rising sea levels.
Adnan Morshed declared that Bangladesh’s geographic center – not its southern, flood-prone coastal regions – constitutes the nation’s chief climate change threat. Here, Dhaka’s urbanization is “destroying” Bangladesh’s environment, he said. Impelled by immense population growth (2,200 people enter Dhaka each day) and the need for land, people are occupying “vital wetlands” and rivers on the city’s eastern and western peripheries. “Manhattan-style” urban grid patterns now dominate wetlands and several rivers have become converted into land. Exacerbating this urbanization-driven environmental stress are highly polluting wetlands-based brickfields (necessary to satisfy Dhaka’s construction needs) and city vehicular gas emissions.
Adaptation Responses
The second panel considered possible responses to Bangladesh’s environmental security challenges. Roger-Mark De Souza trumpeted the imperative of more gender-inclusive policies. Environmental insecurity affects women and girls disproportionately, he said. When Bangladesh is stricken by floods, females must work harder to secure drinking water and to tend to the ill; they must often take off from school; and they face a heightened risk of sexual exploitation – due, in great part, to the lack of separate facilities for women in cyclone shelters. He reported that such conditions have often led to early forced marriages after cyclones.
Shamarukh Mohiuddin discussed possible U.S. responses. On the whole, American funding for global climate change adaptation programs has lagged and initiatives that are funded often focus more on short-term mitigation (such as emissions reductions) rather than adaptation. She recommended that Washington’s Bangladesh-based adaptation efforts be better coordinated with those of other donors.
Mohiuddin also suggested that to convey a greater sense of urgency, Bangladesh’s climate change threats should be more explicitly linked to national security – and particularly to how America’s strategic ally, India, would be affected by climate refugees fleeing Bangladesh.Philip J. DeCosse highlighted Bangladeshi government success stories in the famed Sundarbans – one of the world’s largest mangrove forests. Officials have banned commercial harvesting in some areas of the forests and shut down a highly polluting paper mill. He also praised civil society and the media for bringing attention to the Sundarban’s environmental vulnerability. As a result of efforts such as these, the Sundarbans are “coming back,” he said, with mangrove species growing anew. Thanks to a range of actors – from the forestry department to civil society – these forests are also now being “governed more than managed,” said DeCosse.
The Sundarbans – click to view larger map.
DeCosse’s fellow panelists identified additional hopeful signs. Morshed shared a photograph of a green, pristine park in Dhaka. De Souza underscored how family planning programs have worked in Bangladesh in the past, with fertility rates declining considerably in recent years, and several speakers spotlighted efforts by civil society and the media to bring greater attention to Bangladesh’s environmental security imperatives.
Nonetheless, major challenges remain, and panelists offered a panoply of recommendations. Khalequzzaman called for a major geological study of soil loss and siltation. De Souza implored Bangladesh to ensure that women’s roles and family planning considerations are featured in climate change negotiations and adaptation policies. Morshed advocated for imposing urban growth boundaries and enhancing public transport in cities. And several speakers spoke of the need to pursue more effective natural-resource-sharing arrangements with India. Ultimately, in the words of De Souza, it may not be possible to eliminate Bangladesh’s “perfect storm” – but much can be done to calm it.
Event ResourcesMichael Kugelman is a program associate with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program.
Sources: UN.
Photo/Image Credit: “Precarious Living, Dhaka,” courtesy of flickr user Michael Foley Photography; “Impact of Sea Level Rise in Bangladesh,” courtesy of UNEP; and the Sundarbans courtesy of Google Maps.
