Showing posts from category UN.
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UNEP Maps Conflict, Migration, Environmental Vulnerability in the Sahel
›A new set of maps from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) identifies “climate hotspots” – areas vulnerable to instability exacerbated by climate change – in 17 sub-Saharan countries in and bordering the Sahel region. The maps reflect the fact that, more often than not, the impact of climate change on local populations is compounded by changes in migration, conflict, or both. According to Livelihood Security: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict in the Sahel, the UNEP report accompanying the maps, understanding “the exacerbating effect of changes in climate on population dynamics and conflict in the region” will be essential to developing successful adaptation strategies throughout the region.
UNEP’s maps analyze 40 years of data to pinpoint where the region’s most at-risk populations are located based on environmental, population, and conflict trends dating back to 1970. In a single map pinpointing the Sahel’s 19 hotspots, UNEP synthesizes subnational data from four environmental indicators over time – rainfall (from 1970 to 2006), temperature changes (1970 to 2006), drought (1982 to 2009), and flooding (1985 to 2009) – which are then layered on top of population trends (1970 to 2010) and conflict data (1970 to 2005) in order to identify the region’s most insecure areas.
Composite Vulnerability
At first glance, the map can appear hard to decipher; it is flooded with different colors and symbols, each indicating something different about the extent of climate change, migration, and conflict in the region. A Google Earth version of the map (available for download here) makes all this information easier to process by allowing users to select which indicators they want to see mapped out, cutting back on the number of lines, dots, colors, and pie charts the user has to decode.
Given the vast amount of the information being condensed into these maps, the report is a helpful and worthwhile read. For instance, eight hotspots are in places with growing populations and another seven are located in places that have experienced conflict; altogether, 4 of the 19 hotspots have both past conflict and growing populations. The report digs deeper into the confluence of climate, conflict, and migration by discussing case studies that highlight how the three intersect in local communities (at the same time, the report is careful to avoid suggesting that there is a causal relationship between the three issues.). In Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, for example, tensions have been mounting between northern pastoralists and southern farmers as each group has moved further and further afield in search of water and arable land to sustain their livelihoods.
Holes In the Data
While the hotspot maps include a wealth of information, the report makes clear that it is by no means exhaustive. Rising sea levels are, for instance, a major impending threat to coastal populations in the Sahel, but only the downloadable Google Earth map – not the hotspot map in the report or the Google Earth map as presented online – incorporates this factor. Compounded with a skyrocketing population in the coastal areas – the coast between Accra and the Niger delta is expected to be “an urban megalopolis of 50 million people” by 2020, according to the report – an increase in sea levels could have a huge impact on the region’s stability.
The report also readily admits that the datasets for population trends and conflict have shortcomings. Population data is largely based on censuses, which both the report and its data sources (UNEP’s African Population Database and the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) acknowledge can be inconsistent in their accuracy. Additionally, after 2000, population data is based on projections rather than estimates, which, as last year’s update from the UN Population Division showed, have often proven inaccurate, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Regarding conflict, the UNEP report is straightforward in admitting its limits. The report lacks data on small-scale conflict (fewer than 25 battle deaths, following the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s threshold that separates conflicts from lower-level violence), even as it acknowledges that such conflict is “often the first to occur” when climate change threatens communities’ access to resources and livelihoods.
Ultimately, however, these maps give valuable data on specific locations that are uniquely vulnerable to trends in population, climate, migration, and conflict. They add focus to the conventional wisdom that climate change will impact the region’s stability, and, taken together, the maps and the report provide a valuable resource for scholars and policymakers attempting to craft adaptation policies that take into consideration these complex links.
Sources: Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, UNEP, Uppsala Conflict Data Program.
Image Credit: UNEP. -
Jon Barnett: Should Climate Change Be Addressed by the UN Security Council?
›For a small island state like Tuvalu, climate change is an enormous security issue and they have told the UN Security Council as much, said Jon Barnett, professor of resource management and geography at the University of Melbourne, in an interview with ECSP. But, despite debate in 2007 and 2011, the Council has been unable to reach agreement on whether climate change is an international security issue or not.
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Three New Reports Highlight Ongoing Significance of Youth Demographics in Global Trends
›January 2, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenAmidst world population reaching seven billion and last year’s Arab Spring, which in some nations is continuing into this winter, it can be easy to miss emerging pieces of research that tell us something relatively objective about youth and instability. Three new studies give practitioners and policymakers a stronger foundation of evidence to highlight the challenges and opportunities facing the world’s largest generation of young people.
Results of a recent UNICEF staff survey indicate that the people responsible for the UN’s efforts targeting children and youth are seriously concerned about demographic and economic dynamics. Asked to review a list of 20 “global trends,” UNICEF staff rated “growing disparities” and “youth bulge and youth unemployment” as the most significant to children. The results, which the agency will soon publish in a paper on “The Next Generation and Global Trends,” also indicate that staff members feel that UNICEF has a strong capacity to influence the future of these trends.
UNICEF’s recent “Child Outlook” report on global trends discusses the issues highlighted in the survey. The report notes that although many countries are moving toward middle-income status, poverty rates remain stubbornly high, indicating that economic development does not benefit all equally. Income and consumption in such countries tend to be concentrated among the wealthiest households. “While many families will prosper, others are being left behind,” the report explains.
“Tensions and discouragement arising from youth unemployment, combined with higher food prices and fiscal contractions, may have contributed to increased civil unrest, protests, and political instability,” UNICEF asserts. In many developing countries, the number of young people entering the labor market far surpasses the number of available jobs. Although some youth are not working because they are enrolled in secondary or tertiary education, low rates of youth participation in the workforce often are not a matter of choice. Young people, especially those with low levels of education and from poorer families, are often unable to find secure, decent jobs. More than one-quarter of all young people with jobs worldwide live below the poverty line of $1.25 per day.
Economic Pressures on Youth in East Africa
Two other research projects – one published, one still underway – provide additional context to the combination of demographic and economic challenges that face the world’s young people. In the first, part of a recent special U.S. Institute of Peace series on South Sudan, Stephanie Schwartz and Wilson Center fellow Marc Sommers probe the expectations of and obstacles faced by youth in the newly created country.
According to the incipient government’s statistics agency, 72 percent of South Sudan’s population is younger than 30, which places it among the 20 youngest age structures in the world. Only 40 percent of youth ages 15 to 24 are literate, and nearly 80 percent of households depend on agriculture for their income. Based on interviews conducted with urban and rural youth in three areas of South Sudan, the authors find that the pressure of paying rising dowry costs is the most salient issue facing young men, while young women are treated as economic assets with no influence in their own future. The authors’ research suggests that “some young men join armed gangs, at least in part, because they believe it will help them pay dowries.”
Although many young people in South Sudan aspire to the stability of government work, the limited number of jobs and shortage of relevant skills inhibit their aspirations. With an underdeveloped private sector, few opportunities for training, and nepotistic practices in hiring, there is little work for those living in towns and urban areas beyond manual labor and selling goods. The authors recommend that education and job training be expanded, with a focus on equitable access among young people from varied geographic backgrounds.
Across the border in northern Uganda, Chris Blattman, an associate professor of political science at Yale, has been studying the social effects of the government’s youth employment program started in 2007. The program offered grants to small groups of young people for vocational training or to fund the costs of starting a new business. Although a full paper has not yet been published, preliminary findings indicate strong economic benefits of the program which in turn improve social cohesion and community participation while diminishing aggression and “disputes with authorities” among young men. If they bear out, the results may well confirm the oft-repeated policy recommendation that focusing on youth employment is critical to improving national development as well as reducing the likelihood of instability and conflict.
In the year of seven billion, we heard much about the need to invest in young people and the tremendous potential they embody, for demographic dividends as well as overall development. Yet 2011 was also a year of tremendous upheaval, much of which was driven by young people – and their older counterparts – seeking representative and democratic governance. This should serve as a reminder that youth can be a remarkable force for positive change, but in too many places – South Sudan among them – their opportunities, prospects, and contributions are constrained. As the UNICEF survey results reiterate how important this issue is to development programming, the Uganda research may be another important piece of evidence that direct investment in young people reaps tangible results not only for them, but also for society.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group. She was previously a senior research associate at Population Action International.
Sources: Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Chris Blattman, ILO, Sommers and Schwartz (2011), South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics, UNICEF, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “UNAMID Peacekeeper Speaks with Sudanese Youth,” courtesy of UN Photo/Albert Gonzalez Farran. -
Managing the Planet: The Road to Rio+20
›“We still see people thinking about the environment as if it is something apart. The idea of a synergy, a balance of development still, I think, eludes us both in theoretical, but especially in practical terms. And that is what Rio+20 is about,” said Ambassador Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, under-secretary for environment, energy, science, and technology at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Rio+20 conference next year, marks the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Earth Summit. It will be an opportunity to generate new answers to the question of how to collectively develop in a more sustainable and balanced way, said Figueiredo. Jacob Scherr, director of strategy and advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Richenda Van Leeuwen, senior director for energy and climate at the UN Foundation, and Thomas Lovejoy, biodiversity chair at the Heinz Center for Science and professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, joined the ambassador at the Wilson Center on November 16 for a discussion about preparations for the upcoming conference. The event was part of the Managing the Planet seminar series, coordinated jointly by George Mason University and the Wilson Center.
Sustainable Development Goals
Rio+20 should reaffirm the sustainable development vision of the first Earth Summit, said Scherr, “of our ability to deal with all of these issues at once: to move forward on economics, and dealing with poverty, of being equitable, and protecting and preserving the environment for future generations.”
Figueiredo said he sees the concept of a “green economy” as an “instrument to promote sustainable development and eradicate poverty. And in that sense, it seems clear that we will not find one green economy as such, but probably as many green economies as countries in the world, because each country will find its way of using that kind of tool.”
One proposal for the conference, supported by Brazil, is to devise a set of sustainable development goals, which would “embrace the Millennium Development Goals and instill a certain sustainability viewpoint to all of them,” Ambassador Figueiredo said. Furthermore, they would be global in nature, rather than geared towards developing countries, providing a vision for collective development.
“The Millennium Development Goals were good in some ways [but] they were fairly weak on the environmental side,” said Thomas Lovejoy. “This is a chance to actually improve on that, to really bring these elements together.”
Action and Accountability
Through “sustainable development dialogues,” Brazil is working to provide a new mechanism for civil society input at the conference. According to Figueiredo, Brazil hopes to “create a bridge between those who understand the issues, those who have a deep knowledge of the issues, and those who have the power again to do something about it.”
“We have been talking about these issues for 40 years, what we really need is a meeting that, as the Secretary General recently said, is a conference about implementation…to really start moving us down the path towards a sustainable future,” said Scherr.
“You might argue that everything that happened 20 years ago was an absolute failure, but of course it was not, because an awful lot has happened in the interim, it’s just that it hasn’t happened on a big enough scale or fast enough,” Lovejoy said.
“What gives me a lot of reason for hope going into Rio+20 is there are a lot of very practical, very pragmatic efforts involved,” he said.
Richenda Van Leeuwen pointed to the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative as a potential agenda to follow. The initiative has three objectives: ensuring universal access to modern energy services; doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency; and doubling the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.
“We are using Rio, and the seminal opportunity that it represents, as a mechanism to be able to bring these new commitments together…to show that there is an opportunity for concrete actions,” Van Leeuwen said.
A robust accountability framework is vital to that effort, Van Leeuwen said. “It’s easy to make a pledge at a pledging conference, but really what we are looking at is a whole new way of doing business, a whole new action agenda,” she said. “So we are very optimistic and very excited about the opportunity for Rio, but Rio not as an end really, but as a beginning and as an opportunity to be a springboard to get much further global action.”
Photo credit: “Brazil!,” courtesy of Flickr user sparktography.
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Climate Diplomacy in Perspective
›December 20, 2011 // By Lukas RüttingerClimate policy on the international level often seems to be largely limited to negotiations within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, in the shadow of these negotiations, a new approach merging climate and foreign policy is developing. Calling it “climate diplomacy,” proponents of this approach argue that tackling climate change is inherently a political struggle and one in which classic diplomatic instruments should play a role. This is especially true, since the challenges posed by climate change are so huge and the solutions so far reaching that the climate conversation also has to be a diplomatic one. Yet negotiations and treaties are just one instrument of foreign policy and they are only as successful and strong as the political foundation upon which they are built.
The German Federal Foreign Office, supported by adelphi, invited representatives from the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations, as well as over 30 countries for a two-day conference in Berlin this October, “Climate Diplomacy in Perspective – From Early Warning to Early Action,” to discuss what climate diplomacy looks like in practice, what its added value is, and what challenges it is best suited to address.
In working groups on water diplomacy, food security, and coastal stability, common themes and questions quickly emerged. In particular, the value and danger of securitizing the climate change discourse was a prominent issue.
On the one hand, the securitization of issues such as transnational water sharing can raise threat perception to a level that makes it very hard to tackle and may even foster conflict. On the other hand, participants noted that framing climate change as a security challenge might help to finally create the political leverage needed for far-reaching action.
Confronting Complexity
Another common theme was the complexity and linked nature of the climate challenges faced. Although covering different aspects, each working group quickly recognized systems with multiple feedback loops, such as the water-food-energy nexus. The same point was underlined in discussions around complex emergencies and crises, such as the 2010 floods in Pakistan.
However, the discussion did not stop at an analysis of challenges, the working groups also developed many suggestions of what climate diplomacy could and should look like.
One shared recommendation was that the complexity of and links between issues require sectoral policies and institutions to reach beyond their traditional, thematic, and even geographic focus. In regards to cross-border water cooperation, for example, this means that regional political institutions are often better suited than water institutions because of their broader mandate and focus. Where classic diplomacy and regional cooperation do not work, for example because national governments are blocking these efforts, participants proposed that informal diplomacy, track two initiatives, and cooperation on lower administrative levels such as municipalities can provide alternatives.
The complexity of the challenges is daunting but when asked to summarize why diplomats should tackle climate change, John Ashton, the special representative for climate change for the British Commonwealth Foreign Office, summed up his understanding in a simple but to-the-point answer: “Because it is our job.”
Lukas Rüttinger is a project manager for adelphi, mainly focusing on the fields of conflict analysis and peacebuilding as well as resources and governance.
Photo Credit: German Federal Foreign Office. -
From Dakar: Explaining Population Growth and Family Planning to Environmentalists
›December 19, 2011 // By Sandeep Bathala“There is a growing recognition that population is a key driver of environmental, development, governance, and security challenges; however, family planning is not a traditional tool, nor is it often considered an ‘appropriate’ one, for responding to food, water, climate, or conflict,” said Roger-Mark De Souza at a November 30 panel discussion at the 2011 International Conference on Family Planning in Dakar, Senegal. “This presents a challenge for us: How can we change perceptions of family planning so that it becomes part of the solution to wider problems, including natural resource scarcity, lack of economic development, gender inequity, and instability?”
De Souza, vice president of research and director of the climate program at Population Action International (PAI), was joined by Sandeep Bathala, program associate with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program; Robert Engelman, president of Worldwatch Institute; and Daisy Magaña, fellow with the GoJoven Program, for a session on “Reaching Out at Rio: Explaining Population Growth and Family Planning to Environmentalists.”
Population Dynamics Part of Climate Vulnerability
“Advocates…need to communicate that empowering women to make their own reproductive choices will improve both their individual well-being and our collective environment,” said Engelman. According to research conducted on behalf of Americans for UNFPA, messages that focus on women – their health or empowerment – resonate well with American environmentalists, as they do with broader audiences.
PAI’s interactive mapping website shows that high levels of unmet need for family planning and rapid population growth rates are common in countries with low levels of resilience to climate change and high levels of projected decline in agricultural production, said De Souza. “Family planning services can be one element of a multi-pronged strategy to reduce especially women’s vulnerability to these interlocking vulnerabilities,” he said.
“Currently, population growth is viewed as a challenge to addressing climate change-related vulnerabilities, but family planning services are commonly left out of conversations about ways to reduce these vulnerabilities.” This is a lost opportunity, said De Souza: “We can integrate family planning into wider environmental, development, and peace-building efforts.”
At the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, a side event on reproductive health and climate was well-attended. However, as panelist Esther Agbarakwe of the Africa Youth Initiative on Climate Change noted, population was not part of the conference‘s official discussion, due to lack of knowledge and fears of population control. PAI is currently working with UNFPA to produce a series of training modules on population and climate change that will help environmentalists, climate change activists, and researchers better understand and explore these connections.
Tapping the Youth Base
Bathala, formerly the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program director, discussed how the Sierra Club, one of the only major grassroots conservation organizations with a population program, uses youth outreach to raise awareness on the links between the environment, reproductive health, and women’s rights.
Because young people constitute over half of the world’s population, the Sierra Club focuses on empowering youth leaders to make the connection between environmental issues and sexual and reproductive health and rights. The Population and Environment Program reaches youth directly by organizing summits and multi-state campus tours featuring young people from around the world sharing compelling stories with their peers.
“The program provides youth and adult activists with materials, communication strategies, and leadership training,” Bathala said. “With these tools, the activists then educate their community members, campus, and decision-makers about the need for measures that increase access to family planning while addressing poverty, women’s empowerment, and environmental protection.”
In April, fellow panel member and Belize-native Daisy Magaña joined one of the Sierra Club’s U.S. tours to discuss the GoJoven program, which convenes and support youth reproductive health champions throughout Latin America. Through GoJoven, Magaña has worked to expand adolescent reproductive and sexual health choices, services, policies, and programs in Belize.
In a blog post, Magaña discussed how her message was simple: Don’t give up. “If you think being active on environmental and sexual rights issues is hard to do here, imagine doing it in a deeply conservative [Catholic] country like mine,” she told U.S. students.
Sierra Club also leads story tours to functioning population, health, and environment programs in the field, including a 2009 trip to Guatemala and Belize in conjunction with GoJoven. Through visits to 10 project sites, two U.S.-based youth advocates witnessed first-hand the challenges and opportunities associated with community-based sexual and reproductive health programs, significantly enhancing their ability to be pro-active messengers in their own communities. The tour helped the Sierra Club build an international network of young people committed to social and policy change in their countries.
Looking Forward: Finding Ways To Highlight Integration
While recognition of the connections between population growth and environmental impacts is growing, the experience of the panelists shows that it takes innovative methods to reach both the environmental and family planning communities. A similar panel later this winter at the Wilson Center will include representatives of Americans for UNFPA discussing their research on talking to environmentalists about reproductive health and population growth.
With the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) coming in June of next year, highlighting successful strategies is crucial in order to pave the way for better integration in the future.
Event ResourcesImage Credit: Roger-Mark De Souza/Population Action International. -
Ruth Greenspan Bell and Barry Blechman for Foreign Affairs
How Much Did the Climate Talks in Durban Accomplish?
›December 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ruth Greenspan Bell and Barry Blechman, appeared on Foreign Affairs.
The outcome of the recent Durban climate conference represents a victory, of sorts, for a particular vision of how the community of nations might eventually gain control over greenhouse gases. But that vision is flawed, perpetuating an approach that, after more than 20 years of negotiations, has not reversed warming trends. Of particular concern is the continued insistence on a comprehensive deal negotiated by all nations through a UN process. The degree to which the meme of a “legally-binding” agreement has dominated thinking is likewise troubling.
Our October article, “Beyond the Durban Climate Talks,” examined an alternative negotiating pathway – one based on the effective model of nuclear arms control. There, specific issues were opportunistically segmented for resolution. And, in some cases, negotiators achieved progress by working in alternative fora that were not wedded to the UN ground rules, especially the ones that give every country, no matter how small, a potential veto on the results. Unfortunately, the Durban result continues the well-trod UN pathway.
The meetings saw protracted debate about how precisely to characterize the “legal” and “binding” nature of a future agreement that might emerge in 2015 from yet another “new” round of negotiations. Indeed, the supposed distinction between “political” or “voluntary” and “legally binding” agreements has dominated United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations for years. Yet such distinctions break down upon closer examination.
Continue reading on Foreign Affairs.
Ruth Greenspan Bell is public policy scholar at the Wilson Center.
Photo Credit: “Oxfam hungry for climate action at Durban Climate Conference,” courtesy of Oxfam International and Ainhoa Goma. -
Famine and Food Insecurity in the Horn of Africa: A Man-Made Disaster?
›This year’s drought in the Horn of Africa has been the region’s worst in decades and has exploded into a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions. In Somalia, where the drought is layered on top of two decades of conflict and an extremely weak state, the impact of the drought has been most damaging. Somalia is the only country in the region where the UN has declared famine zones. And, even though the UN recently upgraded three of Somalia’s six famine areas to “lesser emergencies,” four million Somalis – more than half the country’s population – remain in urgent need of food and general humanitarian aid.
The drought may have been what sparked the current crisis, but other, longer-term factors, like a sustained lack of agricultural development, extreme rural poverty, and changing weather patterns, not to mention Somalia’s lack of functioning government, set the stage.
A Long-Term Crisis in the Making
“Lack of rainfall over several seasons is the most immediate and most visible cause of the current humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa,” said Jim Hansen of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in a brief video produced this summer by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University (watch above). Much of the Horn’s population “depends on rain-fed agriculture and pastoralism for their livelihoods and sustenance,” said Hansen. Already “quite poor and…locked in poverty for quite a long time,” environmental and resource degradation, paired with rapid population growth, have compounded their vulnerability to extreme events, he said.
Throughout the region, resilience to crises like the current drought has been weakened by decades of poor agricultural planning, “driven more by shifts in ideology than any real evidence among some of the key international development organizations,” said Hansen. That poor planning has made communities more dependent on humanitarian aid when poor weather hits, which in turn forces aid groups to redirect resources away from longer-term development and towards short-term disaster relief instead, Hansen said.
While these problems exist across the Horn of Africa, Hansen points out that the crisis has been most damaging in Somalia, which he attributes to the country’s weak governance and to international aid groups’ limited ability to operate in the country.
“Northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and Somalia have similar severity of drought, but the humanitarian crisis is much more severe – the loss of livelihood and life is greater in Somalia largely because the government is weaker,” he said.
The Government’s Role
Owen Barder, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, draws a more direct line between governance and famine in the Horn. “In Somalia…there’s a complete breakdown of government, and the consequence is the famine that we’re seeing,” said Barder during a Center for Global Development podcast. The country has been without a functioning government since 1991, when civil war broke out. It has since become “the most food-insecure nation in the world” and, as described by Foreign Policy, “the international community’s longest-running failure.”
Barder raised two points about the government’s role in famine. One, that access to information – in this case an early warning system monitoring drought conditions – can minimize the humanitarian impact of any given natural disaster; and two, that a country’s government must be able to translate that information into action in order for it to actually make a difference.
Barder is not alone in emphasizing the state’s role as a driver of the famine. Edward Carr, a AAAS science fellow with USAID, wrote in July, when the UN first declared famine in Somalia, that attributing the famine solely to drought is “a horrible abdication of responsibility for the human causes of this tragedy.”
Charles Kenny, also a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, went even further on Foreign Policy, arguing that famine, or “mass starvation as an intentional act of governance,” should be categorized as a crime and prosecutable at the International Criminal Court.
Al Shabab and the Months AheadAs of late November, the United Nations estimated that tens of thousands had died in Somalia alone since drought began this spring. Though USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) reports that famine has now subsided in three of the six southern regions it initially struck, a quarter of a million Somalis remain at risk of “imminent starvation,” according to the UN.
According to FEWSNET, famine should not reappear in the foreseeable future, assuming aid groups can maintain current distribution levels – a key caveat. Ten days after FEWSNET issued its analysis, however, Al Shabab, the Al Qaeda-linked militant organization that controls much of southern Somalia, banned 16 aid groups, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, from operating in the areas under its control. UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told the BBC that the move would put “about 160,000 severely malnourished children…at imminent risk of death.”
Fighting in southern Somalia between Al Shabab and Kenyan and Ethiopian forces is adding another layer to the country’s humanitarian crisis. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reported that, as of late November, the fighting had become the primary driver of internal displacement, replacing drought and famine as the key drivers during the first three quarters of the year. The UNHCR estimated that, between the drought and the conflict, 1.46 million Somalis have been displaced.
Meanwhile, the rainy season is picking up, and although that’s good news for farmers and pastoralists, it also means that Somalis will be vulnerable to diseases like measles, typhoid, and cholera, which can spread quickly through overcrowded, under-supplied IDP camps. Somalis still living under Al Shabab’s control are prohibited from getting vaccinations, amplifying their vulnerability to disease in the coming months.
These latest developments offer strong evidence that policy decisions can exacerbate the human toll of natural disasters. From Barder’s perspective, that is reason for optimism. “We have the information, we have the capacity to prevent it from happening,” he said.
For more on Somalia’s underlying demographic issues, see Elizabeth Leahy Madsen’s post “In Somalia, Beyond the Immediate Crises, Demography Reveals a Long-Term Challenge.”
Sources: AlertNet, Associated Press, BBC, Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, The New York Times, UNHCR, UN News Centre, Voice of America.
Video Credit: “Jim Hansen on Food Security in East Africa,” courtesy of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society on vimeo; image credit: FEWSNET/USAID.
