“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.

A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”

In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.

Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.

Although numerous research projects have found that environmental change can contribute to conflict “through its impact on social variables such as migration, agricultural and economic decline, and through the weakening of institutions, in particular the state,” very few analysts have systematically addressed the relationship between natural disasters and violent civil conflict, write Philip Nel and Marjolein Rightarts in “Natural Disasters and the Risk of Violent Conflict,” published in the March 2008 issue of International Studies Quarterly (subscription required). Criticizing political scientists’ tendency to diminish the importance of geography and environmental factors in assessing violence, they argue that it has become critically important to “correct this oversight.”

After a few years left out in the cold, environmental security came home to a warm welcome at this year’s International Studies Association conference in San Francisco, drawing large crowds to many star-studded panels. Water, climate, energy, and AFRICOM were hot topics, and the military/intelligence communities were out in force. Many of the publishers indicated they were seeking to acquire titles or journals on environmental security, given the scarcity of books on the topic currently in the works. Demographic security even got a few shout-outs from well-placed supporters.

Climate change and energy security panels dominated the program. Chaired by the National Intelligence Council’s Mathew Burrows, “Militarization of Energy Security” featured contributors to the edited volume forthcoming from Daniel Moran and James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School—including original resource conflict gadfly Michael Klare, who claimed that lack of oil itself isn’t the problem, but that efforts to extract less accessible supplies would provoke violence in places like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Siberia. The intense discussion contrasted the approaches of China and the United States to ensuring energy security; Moran pointed out that China sent “bankers and oilmen” into Africa, whereas the United States created AFRICOM. “If the Chinese had created a military command in Africa, there wouldn’t be a dry seat in the Pentagon,” he added. David Hamon of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency observed that BP has a “security regime to protect their interests that would make a military blush.”

At “Climate Change, Natural Disasters, and Armed Conflict,” Clionadh Radleigh put the kibosh on the fearmongering predictions of waves of transnational “environmental refugees.” Similarly, Halvard Buhaug explored weaknesses in the reported links between climate change and conflict, calling for more rigorous research on this currently trendy topic. Christian Webersik’s research found links between negative rainfall and higher incidences of conflict in Somalia and Sudan, but he cautioned against using this relationship to predict climate-induced conflict.

A flood of panels on water, conflict, and cooperation took advantage of the conference’s West Coast location to call on water world heavies Aaron Wolf and Peter Gleick, who participated in a lively standing room-only roundtable chaired by ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko. Despite the obvious interest in the topic, publishers in the exhibit hall didn’t have much to offer on water and security.

AFRICOM drew some heat, especially from a panel of educators from military academies who explored peace parks and other “small-ball” approaches to conflict prevention. All the panelists were generally supportive of AFRICOM’s efforts to integrate nontraditional development work into the military’s portfolio—which, as discussant and retired U.S. Army Col. Maxie McFarland pointed out, it is already doing “by default” in Iraq and Afghanistan. McFarland cautioned, however, that “just because the Army can do it, doesn’t mean you want them to do it.” Air War College Professor Stephen Burgess predicted that the groundswell of climate change awareness would push the next president to include it in his or her National Security Strategy.

Rich Cincotta’s demographic security panel attracted significant interest—no small feat on the last day. The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Thomas Mahnken said that demographic trends and shocks are of “great interest to us in the government”—particularly forecasting that could identify what countries or regions the DoD should be worried about—particularly China and India (good thing demographer Jennifer Sciubba is on the case in his office).

The emphasis on prediction and forecasting stood out from the general trend of ISA panels, which mostly focus on analysis of current or past events. Mathew Burrows called for government and academia to “push the frontiers” on forecasting even further—particularly on the impacts of food security, water shortages, and environmentally induced migration.

Despite the warm, fuzzy feelings for environmental security, there were few panels devoted to general natural resource conflict, and none to post-conflict environmental peacebuilding (Michael Beevers contributed one of the few papers to explicitly address the topic).

What’ll be next year’s hot topics? Submit your proposals by May 30 for the 2009 ISA Annual Conference in New York City.

To download any of the papers mentioned above, visit the ISA’s online paper archive.

For more on ECSP at ISA, see “Environmental Security Is Hot Topic at the 2008 International Studies Association Conference.”

2007 was a significant year for China’s environment. An estimated 750,000 people in China died from respiratory illnesses related to air pollution, while approximately 60,000 died from waterborne diseases. China’s food processing and production sectors made headlines around the globe. Growing desertification in north and northwest China due to excessive water use and land mismanagement created more intense and frequent sand storms that affected the economy and health in China and Northeast Asia. In addition, China most likely surpassed the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses—and while the central government set laudable energy efficiency goals, it recently admitted that China had not met them.

These events have led to growing numbers of environmental health-related protests in China: 51,000 in 2005 and more than 60,000 in 2006. In June 2007, thousands of Xiamen residents protested the construction of a planned chemical plant. And last month, middle class residents of Shanghai took to the streets to oppose potential harm from an extension of China’s magnetic levitation train. As the Chinese government becomes increasingly concerned with the country’s stability, it is beginning to place greater emphasis on mitigating the effects of environmental degradation on its people. Read more about China’s environmental health problems—and what local and international NGOs, governments, and agencies are doing to address them—in China Environment Series 9, the flagship publication of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.

By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

China has begun to reverse the high rates of desertification that have plagued it for decades, reported China Daily on January 24. Thanks to the efforts of communities, NGOs, and local governments, China’s deserts are now shrinking by 7,585 kilometers a year, in contrast to their annual growth rate of 10,400 square kilometers in the late 1990s. Yet 400 million Chinese remain affected by desertification: Erosion—particularly due to wind—can cause violent sand storms, forcing people from their homes and threatening the economies of major Asian cities including Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. Human health effects include respiratory and eye infections. For more on the health effects of desertification, see “Desertification and Environmental Health Trends in China,” a research brief by the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum (CEF).

In August 2007, CEF and water NGO Circle of Blue assembled a group of desertification experts and photographers to take a five-day car ride from Beijing into eastern Inner Mongolia in northeast China, one of the regions that has suffered most from desertification. On their drive into the ocean of sand, the team gathered stories, photos, and video to put a human face on China’s desertification crisis. The result of their trip is a multimedia report, “Reign of Sand,” which explains that the primary causes of China’s increasingly frequent and severe sand storms—most of which originate in Inner Mongolia, home to the largest grasslands on earth—are the ecological mismanagement of this region and deepening drought in northern China.

By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a $550 billion appropriations bill into law on December 20, 2007, which included $300 million to improve water and sanitation in the developing world under the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. Inter Press Service investigates the dangers of fetching water in Malawi, which include crocodiles and cholera.

On December 26, 2007, the Chinese government issued “Energy Conditions and Policies,” a white paper outlining the country’s energy use and plans. The government maintains that China’s history of greenhouse gas emissions gives it the right to grow its economy on fossil fuels, as did most of today’s developed countries, but also pledges China’s strong commitment to renewable energy sources.

Pope Benedict XVI called for better environmental stewardship in his Christmas homily this year, delivered during the traditional Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to The New York Times, “He expanded on the theme [of environmental protection] briefly by saying that an 11th-century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, had spoken ‘in an almost prophetic way’ as he ‘described a vision of what we witness today as a polluted world whose future is at risk.’”

Along with other experts, Fred Meyerson, a professor of demography, ecology, and environmental policy at the University of Rhode Island—and a former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar—is currently participating in an online discussion of population and climate change for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on nuclear proliferation and other global security threats.

The World Bank recently released a Poverty Assessment Report for Yemen, which it produced with assistance from the UN Development Programme and the government of Yemen. IRIN News summarizes the findings.

Last week, I attended a conference hosted by the Berkeley China Initiative and the Luce Foundation entitled “China’s Environment: What Do We Know and How Do We Know it?” The two-day conference attracted many of the big names on China’s environment: leading Chinese journalist and environmentalist Ma Jun, Barbara Finamore of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Orville Schell of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jim Yardley of The New York Times, to name a few. While many of the speakers addressed the two questions in the title of the conference, a presentation that stuck in my mind was by the University of Alberta’s Wenrang Jiang, who also asked, “What should we know about China’s environment?” Proposed answers to this question surfaced and resurfaced throughout the conference, but there are a few with which most attendees would likely concur.

First, and most importantly, as Westerners addressing China’s environmental crises, we need to understand that China’s government and people do not need to be told how bad their environment is: They know. What they need are the technology and technical assistance to address these problems. A particularly striking example of where technical tools are needed, raised by speaker Ye Qi of Tsinghua University and again this week at a China Environment Forum meeting in Washington, D.C., is data collection. China needs researchers, academics, and policymakers to guide the development of a strong data collection infrastructure.

Second, we must recognize that China is not a threatening environmental culprit. In fact, many Chinese environmental regulations and policies are more progressive than our own. China’s biggest challenge is developing the mechanisms to enforce these policies and regulations at the local level—another area in which assistance from abroad could be particularly fruitful. Although several laboratories recently declared that China surpassed the United States in total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year, China’s per capita CO2 emissions are still only one-sixth of the United States’ per capita emissions. China and India’s combined CO2 emissions account for only 10 percent of the world’s total; furthermore, according to speaker Gang He of Columbia University, 27 percent of China’s emissions are due to goods it manufactures and then exports. China’s vehicle emissions laws will meet Euro IV standards nationwide by 2010, which 90 percent of U.S.-manufactured sport utility vehicles could not pass today.

Finally, we must bear in mind the level of pollution-related suffering that occurs in China. We cannot simply impose lofty, globally beneficial programs upon a population struggling daily with unmet human needs. A presentation by Shannon May of the University of California, Berkeley, on the failure of an eco-village in China illustrated this point beautifully. May polled villagers to find out why they had not moved into a new eco-village that had been built to improve land and energy efficiency. She discovered something environmentalists had failed to note: With the 60,000 RMB required to move into the eco-village homes, villagers could instead invest in aquaculture or other industries with high returns, build a home to their own specifications, or pay for a wedding for their children. We must make sure that global goals—such as slowing climate change—that require sacrifices from certain populations also produce tangible local benefits, such as reducing toxic air pollutants.

As several attendees mentioned during the conference, China needs more yin from its Western partners—more patience, flexibility, and self reflection, particularly. Many international NGOs that have worked in China for a long time understand this, but larger bilateral programs shaped by political agendas are not always as flexible.

By CEF Program Assistant Linden Ellis.

Climate change could be to blame for many of the wars in China during the past millennium, says an article published recently in Human Ecology. The study, the first quantitative examination of the link between conflict and temperature changes, is a milestone in climate change research.

David Zhang and co-authors compared the 899 wars that occurred in eastern China between A.D. 1000 and 1911 with climatic data for the same period. They found that warfare frequency in eastern China—particularly in that region’s southern part—correlated strongly with temperature oscillations. Warfare ratios in the cold phases were twice as high as in the warm phases. Furthermore, almost all dynastic changes and warfare peaks coincided with cold phases.

“In general, rebellion was the dominant category of war,” write the authors. “The rebellions were predominantly peasant uprisings induced by famine and heavy taxation, since farmers were always the first to suffer from declining agricultural production.”

The authors surmise that by affecting agriculture, cooler temperatures disrupted food supply, especially in the ecologically vulnerable northern part of eastern China. Food scarcity could have triggered rebellions or forced people to migrate, further exacerbating food shortages in certain areas. Migration could also have generated tension between groups, producing local conflicts—especially when China was populated by nomadic tribes that could move freely. The authors also hypothesize that food scarcity may have encouraged opposing Chinese armies to conduct cross-border raids on each other’s crops. However, additional, more detailed analysis of the pathways leading from cooler temperatures to conflict in eastern China is needed.

It is unclear whether the correlation observed by Zhang in eastern China will hold true for other parts of the world. We should also be careful not to use this one study to draw premature connections to today’s unprecedented climate change. However, we hope additional quantitative studies will be carried out; they would be solid contributions to the research on climate and security, which currently suffers from a scarcity of empirical data.