Showing posts from category natural resources.
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Edward Carr, Open the Echo Chamber
Drought Does Not Equal Famine
›July 27, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Edward Carr, appeared on Open the Echo Chamber.
After reading a lot of news and blog posts on the situation in the Horn of Africa, I feel the need to make something clear: The drought in the Horn of Africa is not the cause of the famine we are seeing take shape in southern Somalia. We are being pounded by a narrative of this famine that more or less points to the failure of seasonal rains as its cause…which I see as a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.
First, I recommend that anyone interested in this situation – or indeed in food security and famine more generally, to read Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts. It is a very readable account of massive famines in the Victorian era that lays out the necessary intersection of weather, markets, and politics to create tragedy – and also makes clear the point that rainfall alone is poorly correlated to famine. For those who want a deeper dive, have a look at the lit review (pages 15-18) of my article “Postmodern Conceptualizations, Modernist Applications: Rethinking the Role of Society in Food Security” to get a sense of where we are in contemporary thinking on food security. The long and short of it is that food insecurity is rarely about absolute supplies of food – mostly it is about access and entitlements to existing food supplies. The Horn of Africa situation does actually invoke outright scarcity, but that scarcity can be traced not just to weather – it is also about access to local and regional markets (weak at best) and politics/the state (Somalia lacks a sovereign state, and the patchy, ad hoc governance provided by Al Shabaab does little to ensure either access or entitlement to food and livelihoods for the population).
For those who doubt this, look at the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) maps I put in previous posts here and here (Editor: also above). Famine stops at the Somali border. I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have. Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya. Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia meet.
Continue reading on Open the Echo Chamber.
Image Credit: FEWS NET and Edward Carr. -
In Rush for Land, Is it All About Water?
›July 26, 2011 // By Christina DaggettOver the past few years, wealthy countries with shrinking stores of natural resources and relatively large populations (such as China, India, South Korea, and the Gulf states) have quietly purchased huge parcels of fertile farmland in Africa, South America, and South Asia to grow food for export to the parent country. With staple food prices shooting up and food security projected to worsen in the decades ahead, it is little wonder that countries are looking abroad to secure future resources. But the question arises: Are these “land grabs” really about the food — or, more accurately, are they “water grabs”?
The Great Water Grab
With growing urban populations, an expanding middle class, and increasingly scarce arable land resources, some governments and investors are snapping up the world’s farmland. Some observers, however, have pointed out that these dealmakers might be more interested in the water than the land.
In an article from The Economist in 2009, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claimed that “the purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.”
Consider some of the largest investors in foreign land: China has a history of severe droughts (and recently, increasingly poor water quality); the Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are among the world’s most water-stressed countries; and India’s groundwater stocks are rapidly depleting.
A recent report from the World Bank on global land deals highlighted the effect water scarcity is having on food production in China, South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, stating that “in contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have large untapped water resources for agriculture.”
Keeping Engaged and Informed
“The water impacts of any investment in any land deal should be made explicit,” said Phil Woodhouse of the University of Manchester during the recent International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, as reported by the New Agriculturist. “Some kind of mechanism is needed to bring existing water users into an engagement on any deals done on water use.”
At the same conference, Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South cautioned, “Those who are taking the land will also take the water resources, the forests, wetlands, all the wild indigenous plants and biodiversity. Many communities want investments but none of them sign up for losing their ecosystems.”
With demand for water expected to outstrip supply by 40 percent within the next 20 years, water as the primary motivation behind the rush for foreign farmland is a factor worth further exploration.
Global Farming
According to a report from the Oakland Institute, nearly 60 million hectares (ha) of African farmland – roughly the size of France – were purchased or leased in 2009. With these massive land deals come promises of jobs, technology, infrastructure, and increased tax revenue.
In 2008 South Korean industrial giant Daewoo Logistics negotiated one of the biggest African farmland deals with a 99-year lease on 1.3 million ha of farmland in Madagascar for palm oil and corn production. The deal amounted to nearly half of Madagascar’s arable land – an especially staggering figure given that nearly a third of Madagascar’s GDP comes from agriculture and more than 70 percent of its population lives below the poverty line. When details of the deal came to light, massive protests ensued and it was eventually scrapped after president Marc Ravalomanana was ousted from power in a 2009 coup.
While perhaps an extreme example, the Daewoo/Madagascar deal nonetheless demonstrates the conflict potential of these massive land deals, which are taking place in some of the poorest and hungriest countries in the world. In 2009, while Saudi Arabia was receiving its first shipment of rice grown on farmland it owned in Ethiopia, the World Food Program provided food aid to five million Ethiopians.
Other notable deals include China’s recent acquisition of 320,000 ha in Argentina for soybean and corn cultivation – a project which is expected to bring in $20 million in irrigation infrastructure, the Guardian reports – and a Saudi Arabian company which has plans to invest $2.5 billion and employ 10,000 people in Ethiopia by 2020, according to Gambella Star News.
But governments in search of cheap food aren’t the only ones interested in obtaining a piece of the world’s breadbasket: Individual investors are also heavily involved, and the Guardian reports that U.S. universities and European pension funds are buying and leasing land in Africa as well.
The Future of Land and Water
Whatever the benefits or pitfalls, large-scale land deals around the world look set to continue. The world is projected to have 7 billion mouths to feed by the end of this year and possibly 10 billion plus by the end of the century.
Currently, agriculture uses 11 percent of the world’s land surface and 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, according to UNESCO. If and when the going gets tough, how will the global agricultural system respond? Whose needs come first – the host countries’ or the investing nations’?
Christina Daggett is a program associate with the Population Institute and a former ECSP intern.
Photo Credit: Number of signed or implemented overseas land investment deals for agricultural production 2006-May 2009, courtesy of GRAIN and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Sources: BBC News, Canadian Water Network, Christian Science Monitor, Circle of Blue, The Economist, Gambella Star News, Guardian, Maplecroft, New Agriculturalist, Oakland Institute, State Department, Time, UNFPA, UNESCO, World Bank, World Food Program. -
Failed States Index 2011
›“The reasons for state weakness and failure are complex, but not unpredictable,” said J.J. Messner, one of the founders of the Fund for Peace’s Failed States Index, at the launch of the 2011 version of report in Washington last month. The Index is an analytical tool that could aid policymakers and governments seeking to prevent and mitigate state collapse by identifying patterns of underlying drivers of state instability.
The Index ranks 177 countries according to 12 primary social, economic, and political indicators based on analysis of “thousands of news and information sources and millions of documents” and distilled into a form that is meant to be “relevant as well as easily digestible and informative,” according to the creators. “By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states,” they write, the Index “makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policymakers and the public at large.”
Common Threats: Demographic and Natural Resource Pressures
The Index reveals that half of the 10-most fragile states are acutely demographically challenged. The composite “Demographic Pressures” category takes into account population density, growth, and distribution; land and resource competition; water scarcity; food security; the impact of natural disasters; and public health prevention and control. Additional population indices are found in “Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs),” and health indicators, including infant mortality, water, and sanitation, are spread across several categories.
Not surprisingly, some of the most conflict-ridden countries show up at the top of the list. The Index highlights some of the lesser known issues that contribute to their misery: demographic and natural resource stresses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen (a list that would include Palestine, if inclusion in the Index were not contingent on UN membership); the DRC’s conflict minerals; and Somalia and Sudan’s myriad of environmental and migration problems, which play major roles in their continued instability.
Haiti, with its poor health and lack of infrastructure and disaster resilience, was deemed the Index’s “most-worsened” state of 2011. The January 2010 earthquake and its ensuing “chaos and humanitarian catastrophe” demonstrated that a single event can trigger the collapse of virtually every other sector of society, causing what Messner termed the “Humpty Dumpty effect” – while a state can deteriorate quickly, it is much harder to put it back together again.
The inclusion of natural resource governance within the social and economic indicators would render the Index a more complete analytical tool. In a 2009 report, the UN Environment Program (UNEP) found that “since 1990, at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fueled by the exploitation of natural resources,” and that effective natural resource management is a necessary component of conflict prevention and peacebuilding operations.
The Elephant in the Room: Predicting the Arab Spring
Why did the Index fail to predict the Arab Spring sweeping the Middle East and North Africa? Many critics assert that the inconsistent ranking of the states, ranging from Yemen (ranked 13th) to Bahrain (ranked 129th), demonstrates that the Index is a poor indicator of state instability. Particularly, critics argue that many of the countries experiencing revolutions were ranked artificially low.
“Of course, the Failed States Index did not predict the Arab Spring, and nor is it intended to predict such upheavals,” said Messner at the launch event. “But by digging down deeper into the specific indicator analysis, it was possible to observe the growing tensions in those countries.” The Index has consistently highlighted specific troubling indicators for the region, such as severe demographic pressures, migration, group grievance, human rights, state legitimacy, and political elitism.
Blake Hounshell, a correspondent with Foreign Policy (long-time collaborators with the Fund for Peace on the Index), wrote that the Index was never meant to be a “crystal ball” – even the best statistical data cannot truly encapsulate the complex realities that lead to inherently unpredictable events, such as revolutions. “It’s thousands of individual decisions, not rows of statistics, that add up to political upheaval,” Hounshell continued.
Demographer Richard Cincotta’s work on Tunisia’s revolution illuminates how the Index’s linear indicators can mask a complex reality. Whereas the Failed States Index simply measures “demographic pressure” as a linear function of how youthful a population is, Cincotta pointed out at a Wilson Center event that it was actually Tunisia’s relative demographic maturity that paved the way for its revolution and gives it a good chance of achieving a liberal democracy. Other countries in the region are much younger than Tunisia (Yemen being the youngest). The Arab Spring demonstrates that static indicators alone often do not have the capacity to predict complex social and political revolutions.
Sources: Foreign Policy, The Fund for Peace, UNEP.
Image Credit: Failed States Index 2011, Foreign Policy. -
Leona D’Agnes on Evaluating PHE Service Delivery in the Philippines
›“By reducing population growth, we are going to have a better chance of sustaining the gains of an environmental conservation project,” said Leona D’Agnes in this interview with ECSP. D’Agnes, a technical advisor to PATH Foundation Philippines, served as lead author on a research article published late last year in Environmental Conservation titled, “Integrated Management of Coastal Resources and Human Health Yields Added Value: A Comparative Study in Palawan (Philippines).” The study provided concrete statistical evidence that integrated development programming incorporating population, health, and the environment (PHE) can be more effective in lowering population growth rates and preserving critical coastal ecosystems than single-sector development interventions.
“What set this research apart from earlier work on integrated programming was the rigorous evaluation design that was applied,” said D’Agnes. “What this design aimed to do is to evaluate the integrated approach itself. Most of the previous evaluations that have been done on integrated programming were impact evaluations — they set out to evaluate the impact of the project.” This most recent research project, on the other hand, sought to evaluate the effectiveness of cross-sectoral interventions based on “whether or not synergies were produced,” said D’Agnes.Although it took her team six years to generate statistically significant findings in Palawan, D’Agnes reports that the synergies of PATH Foundation Philippines’ PHE intervention took the form of reduced income poverty, a decreased average number of children born to women of reproductive age, and the preservation of coastal resources, which helped bolster the region’s food security.
Going forward, D’Agnes said, an integrated approach to environmental conservation should also prove appealing because of its cost effectiveness. “This has huge implications for local governments in the Philippines, where they are struggling to meet the basic needs of their constituents in the face of very small internal revenue allotments that they get from the central government,” she said. “They can really pick up on this example to see that at the local level, if somehow they can do this integrated service delivery that was done in the Integrated Population and Coastal Resource Management (IPOPCORM) model, that they’ll be able to achieve the objectives of both their conservation and their health programs in a much more cost-effective way, and, in the process, generate some other [positive] outcomes that perhaps they didn’t anticipate.”
D’Agnes expects the study’s results will prompt a fresh look at cross-sectoral PHE programming. “I hope that this evidence from this study will help to change the thinking in the conservation community about integrated approaches to conservation and development,” she said.
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Life on the Edge: Climate Change and Reproductive Health in the Philippines
›July 18, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeHigh population growth and population density have placed serious stress on natural resources in the Philippines. No one lives far from the coast in the 7,150-island archipelago, making the population extremely dependent on marine resources and vulnerable to sea-level rise, flooding, and other effects of climate change. The coastal megacity of Manila – one of the most densely populated in the world – is beset by poor urban planning, lack of infrastructure, and a large population living in lowland slums, making it particularly vulnerable to increased flooding and natural disasters. [Video Below]
The Philippines is now home to 93 million people and by 2050 is expected to reach 155 million, according to the UN’s medium fertility variant projections. Development programs in the country have made great strides towards increasing access to family planning and reproductive health services as well as improving management of marine resources, but the underlying trends remain troubling.
The Battle Over Reproductive Health
Since 1970, the government’s Commission on Population has been addressing population growth, reproductive health, and family planning. “The impact of the high rate of population growth is intricately linked to the welfare and sustainable development for a country like the Philippines, where poverty drives millions of people to overexploit their resource base,” wrote the commission. As a result of these efforts and others, total fertility rate has dropped from 6.0 children per woman in 1970, to the present 3.2.
The Philippines has also made great gains towards achieving Millennium Development Goal targets, “particularly in the alleviation of extreme poverty; child mortality; incidences of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria; gender equality in education; household dietary intake; and access to safe drinking water,” according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Yet, “glaring disparities across regions persist,” UNDP states.
One of the poorest regions in the country, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, is also home to a violent separatist movement. With limited access to health services, fertility and population growth rates are the highest in the country. Women in Mindanao average 4.2 children per woman; one in four married women has an unmet need for contraception; and 45 percent of households live in poverty (compared to 24 percent nationally).
Nationally, “serious challenges and threats remain with regard to targets on maternal health, access to reproductive health services, nutrition, primary education, and environmental sustainability,” according to UNDP–in particular, indicators on maternal health are “disturbing” and of all the MDGs, are labeled “least likely to be achieved.”
Out of three million pregnancies that occur every year, half were unplanned and one-third of these end in abortions, according to a 2006 report of the Allan Guttmacher Institute conducted in the Philippines. Induced abortion was the fourth leading cause of maternal deaths, and young women accounted for 17 percent of induced abortions. Over half of births occurred at home and one-third of them were assisted by traditional birth attendants. Around 75 percent of the poorest quintile did not have access to skilled birth attendants compared to only 20 percent of the richest quintile.
The politically influential Catholic Church recently blocked passage of a reproductive health bill, despite support by President Benigno Aquino and a majority of Filipinos. The bill seeks to provide universal access to contraception and would make sex education required from fifth grade onwards, a provision that has angered Church officials.
Manila Under Water
The Philippines’ combination of high population growth and limited land area (nearly all of which is near the coast) makes the country extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Sixty-five percent of Filipinos live in coastal areas and 49 percent live in urban areas. Paul Hutchcroft, in Climate Change and Natural Security, writes that “even in the best of times, the frequency of typhoons, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions makes the Philippines one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world” (p. 45).
Population growth, climate change, and deforestation will only increase the severity of these disasters, he concludes. Hutchcroft points out that by 2080, projected temperature increases of between 1.2 to 3.9 degrees Celsius could raise sea levels by an estimated 0.19 to 1.04 meters – a scary thought for the 15 million living within a one-meter elevation zone (p. 46).
In 2009, metropolitan Manila, currently home to 11 million people (18,650 per square kilometer) and projected to grow to 19 million by 2050, was hit by tropical storms that caused devastating flooding – at their peak, waters reached nearly seven meters, according to a World Bank report. “More than 80 percent of the city was underwater,” write the authors, “causing immense damage to housing and infrastructure and displacing around 280,000-300,000 people.”
“Even if current flood infrastructure plans are implemented, the area flooded in 2050 will increase by 42 percent in the event of a 1-in-100-year flood,” says the World Bank report. Climate change could also increase the cost of flooding as much as $650 million, or 6 percent of GDP. Only by considering climate-related risks in urban planning can the Philippines hope to mitigate the effects of climate change, the report concludes.
Integrated Development: One Piece of the Puzzle?
Population, health, and environment (PHE) programs that integrate family planning and natural resource management are one way to help the majority of Filipinos that live in densely populated and resource-stressed coastal areas.
In ECSP’s FOCUS Issue 15, “Fishing for Families: Reproductive Health and Integrated Coastal Management in the Philippines,” Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes explain how Path Foundation Philippines, Inc.’s IPOPCORM project – which ran from 2000 to 2006 – helped “improve reproductive health and coastal resource management more than programs that focused exclusively on reproductive health or the environment – and at a lower total cost.” A recent peer-reviewed study, co-authored by Castro and D’Agnes and published in Environmental Conservation, proved the same point with rigorous analysis.
“When we started IPOPCORM, there was really nothing about integrating population, health, and environment,” said Castro in an interview with ECSP. IPOPCORM provided some of the first evidenced-based results showing there is value added to implementing coastal resource management and family planning in tandem rather than separately. In part due to the success of the IPOPCORM, the Philippines have become one of the major PHE development implementers in the world.
Creating sustainably managed marine sanctuaries while improving access to family planning provides a way forward for many coastal communities. However, the Philippines’ urban woes – 44 percent of urban dwellers live in slums, according to the Population Reference Bureau – internal divisions, and natural vulnerability will likely make it difficult to dodge considerable climate-related effects in the near future. Already the archipelago’s vast biodiversity is in crisis, according to studies over two thirds of native plant and animal species are endemic to the islands and nearly half of them are threatened; only seven percent of its original old-growth less than 10 percent of the islands’ original vegetation remains; and 70 percent of nearly 27,000 square kilometers of coral reefs are in poor condition.
Sources: CIA, Conservation International, Field Museum, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Philippines National Statistics Office, Population Reference Bureau, United Nations, U.S. Census Bureau, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund.
Photo Credit: “Climate Risk and Resilience: Securing the Region’s Future” courtesy of Flickr user Asian Development Bank. -
Watch: Michael Renner on Creating Peacebuilding Opportunities From Disasters
›Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute working on the intersection between environmental degradation, natural resource issues, and peace and conflict. Recently, Renner has focused on water use and its effects on the Himalayan region. In particular he’s working to find positive opportunities that can turn “what is a tremendous problem, into perhaps an opportunity for collaboration among different communities, among different regions, and perhaps…ultimately across the borders of the region,” he said during this interview with ECSP.
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Rare Earths No More? Mineral Discoveries a Potential Game-Changer for East Asia
›July 7, 2011 // By Schuyler NullDiscoveries announced in a journal article over the weekend may prove a game-changer for global rare earth supplies and recent diplomatic maneuvering in East Asia between China, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. A team of researchers from Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology published findings in Nature Geoscience that indicate vast underwater reserves of rare earth minerals are scattered across a huge swath of the Pacific, including south and east of Japan. The U.S. Geological survey estimates current global reserves of rare earth minerals at about 110 million tons; Yasuhiro Kato, the lead author of the Japanese team, told Reuters that the sites surveyed could contain an additional 80 to 100 billion metric tons (yes, with a “b”) of the valuable resources.
The authors write that an “area of just one square kilometer, surrounding one of the sampling sites, could provide one-fifth of the current annual world consumption of these elements.” The team collected data from 78 sites in total, with the largest concentrations centered east of the Hawaiian and Polynesian islands (see a map of the surveyed areas here).
Resource Relationships
The discovery could prove crucial for Japan, as it has been seeking alternative sources of rare earth minerals after an embargo earlier this year by China, which controls 97 percent of the world’s current supply. The embargo (which China denied) was imposed in October of last year after the Japanese navy arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat, which was alleged to be encroaching on Japanese territorial waters. China’s response increased tensions across the region and produced a flurry of warnings in Washington over the security of U.S. supplies.
Although the embargo was later lifted, Japan and Vietnam reached an agreement for development of Vietnamese mines in November. The tensions sparked by the encounter also spread to the South China Sea where Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino forces have stepped up their jockeying over disputed and resource-rich waters to the highest levels in years. Vietnamese and Chinese naval forces recently held mirror exercises, and Filipino officials invoked a 1950-era defense pact with the United States. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai told reporters in June: “I believe the individual countries are actually playing with fire, and I hope the fire will not be drawn to the United States.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called concerns over navigability and Chinese insistence on bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) negotiations in the South China Sea a matter of “national interest” for the United States last year.
The Japanese team’s discovery has the potential to significantly impact the power dynamics behind these tensions. China has used its rare earth monopoly to pressure Japan and the United States, which in turn may have also helped embolden its recent more aggressive maritime policies. If the new rare earth discoveries prove viable, that calculus could change considerably.However serious questions remain: Many of the discoveries lie outside of established exclusive economic zones, so who has the rights to mine them? They’re also between 11,500 and 20,000 feet below the surface – how long before we have the technologies to extract them at an industrial scale? And how safe – both for humans and the environment – will those processes be? Aboveground rare earth mines are some of the most damaging to the environment – part of the claimed reason China curbed overall exports earlier this year, which drove up global prices and drew the ire of the World Trade Organization.
For more on the importance of rare earth minerals to the defense and electronics industries, see New Security Beat’s “Rare Earth: A New Roadblock for Sustainable Energy?” and “Reading Radar: The Mineral Security of the United States.” For more on the exclusive economic zones map, see “Eye on Environmental Security: Natural Resource Frontiers at Sea;” and on the South China Sea and what it reveals about future diplomatic fault lines between the United States and China, see “U.S. v. China: The Global Battle for Hearts Minds and Resources.”
Sources: Asia Sentinel, The Atlantic, BBC, Government Accounting Office, Nature Geoscience, The New York Times, Reuters, Tech News Daily, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “USS Mustin underway in the Pacific Ocean,” courtesy of flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery, and “Exclusive Economic Zone,” used with permission courtesy of Theo Deutinger and TD Architects. -
Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
Double Choke Point: Demand for Energy Tests Water Supply and Economic Stability in China and the U.S.
›The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue.
The coal mines of Inner Mongolia, China, and the oil and gas fields of the northern Great Plains in the United States are separated by 11,200 kilometers (7,000 miles) of ocean and 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of land.
But, in form and function, the two fossil fuel development zones – the newest and largest in both nations – are illustrations of the escalating clash between energy demand and freshwater supplies that confront the stability of the world’s two biggest economies. How each nation responds will profoundly influence energy prices, food production, and economic security not only in their domestic markets, but also across the globe.
Both energy zones require enormous quantities of water – to mine, process, and use coal; to drill, fracture, and release oil and natural gas from deep layers of shale. Both zones also occur in some of the driest regions in China and the United States. And both zones reflect national priorities on fossil fuel production that are causing prodigious damage to the environment and putting enormous upward pressure on energy prices and inflation in China and the United States, say economists and scholars.
“To what degree is China taking into account the rising cost of energy as a factor in rising overall prices in their economy?” David Fridley said in an interview with Circle of Blue. Fridley is a staff scientist in the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “What level of aggregate energy cost increases can China sustain before they tip over?”
“That’s where China’s next decade is heading – accommodating rising energy costs,” he added. “We’re already there in the United States. In 13 months, we’ll be fully in recession in this country; 9 percent of our GDP is energy costs. That’s higher than it’s been. When energy costs reach eight to nine percent of GDP, as they have in 2011, the economy is pushed into recession within a year.”
Continue reading on Circle of Blue.
Photo Credit: Used with permission, courtesy of J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue. In Ningxia Province, one of China’s largest coal producers, supplies of water to farmers have been cut 30 percent since 2008.
