Showing posts from category U.S..
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Andrew Freedman, Climate Central
Senate Hearing Focuses on Threat of Sea Level Rise
›April 21, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Andrew Freedman, appeared on Climate Central.
Sea level rise poses an increasingly grave threat to coastal energy facilities and communities during the course of the next several decades, with some impacts already evident, according to testimony delivered Thursday before a rare Senate hearing on climate science.
The hearing, held by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, focused on the challenges posed by sea level rise, which is one of the most visible manifestations of a warming planet.
“Sea level rise takes the current level of vulnerability and multiplies it,” said Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.). “When sea levels rise, the storm surge associated with extreme storms gets even worse, and even an average storm can have above-average consequences.”
Although Chairman Bingaman said he hoped the hearing would help restart “a national conversation” on climate change, the hearing instead may have served to highlight the continuing partisan divide on global climate change. While there were five Democrats in attendance, just one Republican – ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) – participated in the hearing, a fact not lost on Minnesota Democrat Al Franken, who called climate change the proverbial “elephant in the room.”
Continue reading on Climate Central.
Sources: U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Image Credit: Climate Central. -
Geoff Dabelko On ‘The Diane Rehm Show’ Discussing Global Water Security
›April 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was recently a guest on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the just-released U.S. intelligence community assessment of world water security. He was joined by co-panelists retired Maj. Gen. Richard Engel (USAF) of the National Intelligence Council’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (a key figure in preparing the report), Jessica Troell of the International Water Program at the Environmental Law Institute, and Steve Fleischli of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Department of State-requested assessment (outlined in more detail, here and here) is a very positive contribution, said Dabelko. It “moves away from the arm-waving, headline-grabbing, water wars frame – the kind of sky-is-falling frame that is intuitively appealing and certainly appealing for politicians and headline writers, but doesn’t really reflect the reality.” He continued:What this report instead does, is recognize that there’s been an awful lot of cooperation around water even in the face of scarcity and that that cooperation in part helps us avoid conflicts, whether they’re violent or political, and that we should invest in those institutions that help us get to cooperation.
Visit the show’s program page to listen to the full segment, or read the transcript here.
It also suggests that it’s inadequate and incorrect to think of water as just a single-sector issue. The report is quite clear in connecting it to energy, connecting it to food, connecting it to health, economic development, agriculture obviously, and so that recognition [in] analysis sounds in some way straightforward, but unfortunately, when we organize our responses, we often respond in sector, and there’s not nearly enough communication and cooperation.
And finally, the report does say that the future may not look like the past, and so while we don’t have evidence of states fighting one another over water – and the judgment of the report is in the next 10 years, we won’t see that – it does hold out the prospect for as we go farther down the line, in terms of higher levels of consumption and higher levels of population, that we need to pay special attention because there’s some particular river basins in parts of the world where, as I said, the future may not look like the past and we have greater concerns for higher levels of conflict.
Sources/Image Credit: The Diane Rehm Show. -
Peacemakers or Exclusion Zones? Saleem Ali on Transboundary Peace Parks
›“Traditionally, natural resources have been thought of as a source of conflict…but what we’ve been trying to do is look at the other side of the story, which is that natural resources, in terms of their quality, can create that impulse for conservation and cooperation,” said Saleem Ali, professor of environmental studies and director of the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont, while speaking at the Wilson Center.
This narrative around peace parks or transboundary conservation areas that are used for peacebuilding is a relatively recent field of research, said Ali. “It’s one thing to have a protected area on a border and have cooperation between friendly parties – like the U.S. and Canada,” he said, “and it’s a totally different thing to explore this in areas where there’s a history of protracted violent conflict.”
Yet, Ali said, we have “a good institutional framework for understanding what kind of parks could potentially be developed.” Cooperation between Ecuador and Peru in the Cordillera del Condor protected area, for example, is an incidence where transboundary conservation was actually written into the peace process between two warring states. Recent tragedies on the Siachen glaciers highlight another case where calls have been made to use peace parks as a way to demilitarize a contentious border over which India and Pakistan have long argued.
Questions remain though about the capacity of conservation processes to sustain peace, and “whether micro-conflicts that might arise through any conservation being practiced can be managed effectively.” Peace parks established in South Africa after apartheid, for example, produced “micro-conflicts between the haves and the have-nots – the classic conflict between conservation as an exclusionary arena versus a more inclusionary vision.”
“A lot of those organizations have learned from those past mistakes and we’re moving in the right direction,” Ali said, “but that’s still an area that requires far more research, and also more applied work, to find the right mix of conservation and economic development.” -
Natural Resource Management, Climate Change, and Conflict
›In Climate Change and Conflict: Lessons From Natural Resource Management, a new report from the Danish Institute for International Studies, authors Mikke Funder, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Ida Peters Ginsborg, and Nanna Callisen Bang, review literature on how natural resource management, climate change, and conflict interact on the local, national, and transboundary levels, from which they offer lessons for development policymakers and programmers. Since natural resource management is “strongly related” to how climate change and conflict interact, they write, a better understanding of how natural resource management has taken conflict prevention and resolution into account would benefit development work aimed at mitigating climate change’s “multiplier effect” on conflict. Recommendations include working on as local a level as possible; working with and strengthening existing customary and legal conflict resolution frameworks; and coordinating development efforts across sectors so that policymakers and programmers can minimize the risk of unintentionally causing or aggravating conflict.In his March 2012 Transatlantic Academy paper, “The Geostrategic Implications of the Competition for Natural Resources: The Transatlantic Dimension,” François Heisbourg analyzes the strategic implications of emerging trends affecting the global energy marketplace, including climate change and scarcity. Whereas Europe and the United States shaped energy markets in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, there is no comparable leader in the 21st century marketplace, writes Heisbourg, nor is it clear that one will emerge. Instead, there will be a growing number of influential countries, like Brazil, India, and China, that will have an impact as both consumers and producers. That said, the Persian Gulf will remain geopolitically important given its dominance of the oil market, giving reason for the United States, Europe, India, and China to actively pursue cooperation in the Gulf in order to minimize the risk of future energy crises, Heisbourg concludes. -
Global Water Security Calls for U.S. Leadership, Says Intelligence Assessment
›March 26, 2012 // By Schuyler NullAlongside and in support of Secretary Clinton’s announcement of a new State Department-led water security initiative last week was the release of a global water security assessment by the National Intelligence Council and Director of National Intelligence. The aim of the report? Answer the question: “How will water problems (shortages, poor water quality, or floods) impact U.S. national security interests over the next 30 years?”
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The Missing Links in the Demographic Dividend
›March 9, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThe “demographic dividend,” a concept that marries population dynamics and development economics, is on the rise in policy circles – Rajiv Shah, Melinda Gates, and African government ministers have all discussed it recently in high-level forums. Most notably for demographers, World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin wrote a blog post that focuses on the demographic dividend’s potential to give developing countries a powerful economic boost through declining dependency ratios and a proportionately large working-age population.
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Reaching Out to Environmentalists About Population Growth and Family Planning
›“Promoting women’s empowerment is an effective strategy for looking at climate and the environment but also is important in its own right,” said the Sierra Club’s Kim Lovell at the Wilson Center on February 22. “Increasing access to family planning for women around the world is a climate adaptation and climate mitigation solution.” [Video Below]Drawing on research by Brian O’Neill (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and others Lovell explained that meeting the unmet need for family planning around the world could provide up to 16 to 29 percent of the emissions reductions required by 2050 in order to avoid more than two degrees of warming (the target set by nations to prevent the most damaging effects of climate change).
For environmentalists and those concerned with climate change, “sometimes the idea has been that population is toxic, that we can’t talk about population growth,” said Nancy Belden of Belden Russonello and Stewart Consulting, but the results of a recent survey and several focus groups conducted in association with Americans for UNFPA demonstrate that there is great potential for engaging the environmental community in such a discussion.
Belden and Lovell were joined by Kate Sheppard from Mother Jones to discuss how the population and environment communities can come together in the lead-up to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference.
Besides providing a basic health commodity, empowering women through access to family planning also improves adaptation outcomes, said Lovell. “Climate change is already happening and women and families around the world are suffering from the effects of water scarcity [and] of erratic weather patterns,” she said. But “when women have the ability to plan their family size and have more choices about their families and about their reproductive health and rights, that makes it easier to adapt to those climate change effects that are already taking place.”
Resonating With Environmental Priorities
“The people who really care about the environment are generally the same people who care about access to contraception and birth control and family planning…they’re a ready audience to hear about these connections and they’re a ready audience to take action about them,” said Kate Sheppard. Reproductive rights issues are something that people can really connect with, she said; “most women, most men too…understand why it’s an important issue and they’ve understood it in their own life and they have [a] very strong response to it.”
When we approach the linkages between environment and population, said Sheppard, it is important to recognize the role of empowering language – language about access to services, education, and resources for women.
The aim of the Americans for UNFPA survey was to find out whether environmentalists can be engaged in discussions of population issues such as family planning and international voluntary contraception, and if so, how?
The results show that “environmentalists are ready to talk about population, they’re ready to listen – it’s not toxic,” said Belden. She outlined three key findings:
First, environmentalists prioritize the environment but they also give a high priority to empowering women, said Belden. “Population pressures are seen as an environmental problem…they don’t dismiss it,” yet the “strongest framework that we could come up with…for engaging people on the issues around voluntary family planning and contraception focuses on women.”
Second, the environmental community is relatively optimistic about the potential outcomes of family planning programs and of foreign aid in general. When queried, half of the environmentalists strongly supported the idea of U.S. contributions to UN programs that provide voluntary access to contraception in developing countries, said Belden.
When asked to mark their top priority among a list of possible outcomes of providing voluntary access to contraception, 47 percent of the environmentalists selected either “improving living conditions for women and their families” or “ensuring women have options and can make reproductive decisions” as their top priority. While a significant number are also concerned about stalling population growth, this integrative focus on improving the lives of women and their families is heartening, said Belden.
In the Run-Up to Rio+20, More Than Pop
One point that all three speakers stressed is the need to integrate consumption into the integrated population message. In her survey work, Belden found that “if you don’t talk about consumption in the same breath, [environmentalists] start wanting to put it in there because otherwise…this is someone blaming others.”
Lovell similarly highlighted that “if we’re working to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations to come, we have to think about consumption and population.” For instance, “the United States makes up five percent of the world’s population but consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources,” she said.
Said Sheppard: “It’s not simply a problem that the numbers of people here on the Earth are going up, it’s a problem of how people, especially here in the U.S., live.”
It is imperative – especially from a sustainable development standpoint – that while working towards integrating environment and population we remain focused on a message that includes “using less but still having a high quality of life” here at home, said Sheppard.
Event ResourcesSources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo Credit: “Timorese Traditional Home,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
Military-to-Military Environmental Cooperation: Still a Good Idea for China and the United States
›March 1, 2012 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoAs Washington begins to assess the recent visit of Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to become president of China early next year, the search for ways to build confidence between the two powers is on the table yet again.
