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Harry Verhoeven, ChinaDialogue
China Shifting Balance of Power in Nile River Basin
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The original version of this article, by Harry Verhoeven, appeared on ChinaDialogue.
The growing intensification of economic, political and social ties between China and Africa in the last 15 years is often told as a story of copper, petrodollars, emerging Chinatowns, and bilateral visits by heads of state.
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Women: Producers, Not Just Reproducers
›A major theme on day one of the global Women Deliver conference here in Kuala Lumpur was that “women are not just reproducers, they’re producers.” That is, maternal health and other gender-related issues not only affect the lives of women, girls, and children, but help shape the economies and societies that they live in.
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Once-in-a-Species Opportunity: For a World Free of Poverty, Seize the Demographic Dividend in Africa
›April 11, 2013 // By Laurie MazurA world “free from the stain of poverty” is within our grasp, declared World Bank President Jim Yong Kim in a speech at Georgetown University last week. Kim then announced a plan to virtually eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.
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Africa Can Help Feed Africa: Removing Regional Barriers to Trade in Food Staples
›We need to understand why barriers to trade exist in order to alleviate the food insecurity that confronts Africa, said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice president for Africa, at the Wilson Center in January.
The World Bank released a new report in October 2012 that is part of a series that concentrates on intraregional trade. Africa Can Help Feed Africa: Removing Regional Barriers to Trade in Food Staples, however, is unique, Diop said, because it “moves the focus from general barriers to trade in Africa to focus on food,” so that policymakers can move away from crisis response and address food insecurity at a base level. [Video Below]
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How Does Climate Change Figure Into the Feed the Future Initiative?
›January 7, 2013 // By Kathleen Mogelgaard1.8 million food producers using improved technologies or management practices. Nearly 9 million children reached through nutrition programs. 2.4 million hectares under improved technologies or management practices. New mechanisms for donor coordination. A forward-looking agricultural research agenda. Innovative private-sector partnerships to support smallholder farmers. These are among the successes reported for the first three years of Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s new global hunger and food security initiative.
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CCAPS Looks to Map Climate-Related Aid in Africa
›Adapting to the effects of climate change is increasingly becoming an important component of many international development efforts. But how that integration occurs and what it looks like is an open question. To help answer that, the Climate Change and African Political Stability Program (CCAPS) at the University of Texas at Austin recently released a new database that for the first time tracks all the climate-related aid in one country – Malawi.
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2012 Aid Transparency Index
›Publish What You Fund recently released its 2012 Aid Transparency Index, an annual review of 43 indicators assessing to what degree information about policies, strategies, and individual projects are published for public consumption by aid donors. These indicators include things like disclosing the type of aid given (e.g., grant, loan, export credit, debt relief), the quality of disclosure policies, and the online presence of centralized, public databases of all the organization’s activities.
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African Nations Pioneer Natural Resource Accounting With ‘Gaborone Declaration’
›June 20, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodIn a move with potentially substantial ramifications for future sustainable development, 10 African nations have agreed to begin assigning monetary value to the benefits provided by non-commodity natural resources, including ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, and coral reefs.
Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania each affirmed their support for the “Gaborone Declaration” during last month’s Summit for Sustainability in Africa, co-hosted by Conservation International and the government of Botswana. The goal, according to Botswanan President Ian Khama, is to include these new valuations in national accounting, providing policymakers a clear perspective on the costs and benefits associated with the development or conservation of their natural resources for the first time.
Coming just prior to the Rio+20 conference, the signatories said they hoped assigning calculable costs to resource usage would encourage more sustainable development by bringing hitherto “invisible” costs and externalities into the open and onto the balance sheet.
Though the challenges of properly assessing the values of various ecosystem services are understandably many, the potential benefits of natural capital accounting are substantial.
According to SciDev.Net, the World Bank’s Vice President for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte spoke in support of the declaration at the summit. She pointed out, for example, the advantage of knowing that a hectare of mangrove trees in a certain region of Thailand has been calculated to provide approximately $16,000 of flood protection when considering whether to clear-cut and sell the raw wood (worth about $850), convert the region into a shrimp farm ($9,000), or preserve it.
Such accounting may be particularly beneficial to the Gaborone signatories and other African nations, given growing concern among experts about foreign investment in land, natural resources, and even water on the continent.
But the declaration – and the very idea of natural capital accounting – is not without controversy.
Some argue that commodifying such resources will actually encourage their destruction rather than protect them by ascribing monetary values to previously free and shared resources, thus advantaging richer stakeholders and nations at the expense of poorer ones. As Hannah Griffiths of the UK-based World Development Movement recently wrote in The Guardian, “the result [of natural resource accounting] would be the further privatisation of essential elements of our planet to which we all share rights and have responsibilities.”
Along these lines, Nigerian environmental activist and chair of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, has voiced his strenuous opposition to the plan made at the summit. “This declaration is blind to the fact that the bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for continued rape of African natural resources,” he said in SciDev.
However, the signatories of the Gaborone Declaration dismissed these concerns and pointed to the value of natural resource accounting for sustainable development.
“Africa is where sustained and sustainable economic growth and stewardship of natural wealth become one and the same thing,” said Kyte at the summit. “By endorsing natural capital accounting as a tool for delivering on more inclusive green growth, Africa is showing the way for the rest of the world.”
Conservation International CEO and Chairman Peter Seligmann agreed, calling the declaration “a very big deal, a very big moment, and a big step forward.” He connected it to the imminent Rio+20 conference as well, saying the pledge is “truly a beacon on the hill for the rest of societies” and that “it will be held up on top of that hill in Rio de Janeiro.”
Indeed, the World Bank has listed natural capital accounting as one of six key issues for Rio+20, and in a report last month titled Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development, noted that “it is vital that economic values for environmental assets be comparable to other economic values.”
The World Bank has already made significant progress in promoting the practice through its Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) global partnership, encouraging at least 24 countries to use some form of natural resource accounting to date. WAVES aims to sign up 50 more nations and 50 private corporations beginning at Rio+20, as a part of its “50:50 Campaign.”
WAVES and the Gaborone Declaration show that natural capital accounting is gaining momentum as a means to incentivize more sustainable development. The international news media is beginning to take notice as well. The results of the Rio+20 conference will be a good opportunity to gauge just how far the idea has come and what the extent of its future application might be.
Sources: Conservation International, The Guardian, SciDev.Net, World Bank.
Photo Credit: “Saving the Sacred Rock,” courtesy of flickr user isurusen (Isuru Senevi); video: The World Bank.
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