-
Ethan Goffman, SSPP Blog
Securing a Sustainable Future: The Military Takes On a New Mission
›January 25, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Ethan Goffman, appeared on the Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy blog.
In a time of polarized politics in the United States, over the environment and just about everything else, an overlooked development is how much the military, as well as the national security apparatus, has taken on climate change and other environmental challenges. “Environment and Security” was thus a profoundly important choice of theme for the 2012 National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment, held last week in Washington, DC. With the early effects of climate change apparently already occurring, notably in an increase in natural disasters and in a new northwest passage through the Arctic, those responsible for our security can’t afford to sit around and engage in speculation that climate change is caused by sunspots or isn’t really occurring. It is the military’s job, after all, to take action against potential threats rather than getting immersed in domestic politics.
The concern with climate change is the next step in a widening of the concept of security from strict military matters, to include such interrelated strands as food and water access, public health, and the environment. Much of the military has already acknowledged that armed force alone won’t make us safe. “Energy security, economic security, environmental security, and national security are all inextricably linked. Address one and you need to think of the others,” explained Vice-Admiral Dennis McGinn at the conference.
One obvious linkage is the connection of our oil dependency with security risks that can easily draw us into conflict in politically unstable parts of the world. Just how much the recent wars in the Middle East are about oil, and how much about a clash of civilizations, is a matter of considerable debate, although undoubtedly both factors play a part. The Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, choking outgoing oil deliveries, underscores vulnerability on the energy issue. From another angle, in Afghanistan, the military experienced the fragility of supply lines for a force strongly dependent on large quantities of oil. The Air Force, in particular, is working on algal jet fuel to free us from such reliance. And the Navy’s need for more icebreakers and other capacity shows concern regarding shipping and resource exploitation enabled by the melting of Arctic ice and the new passage.
Continue reading on the SSPP blog.
Photo Credit: Sherri Goodman and Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, courtesy of Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue to Improve Maternal Health
›“Throughout the 2009-2011 Advancing Dialogue on Maternal Health lecture series, we always heard the same good news: we know how to save the lives of women and girls. But more political will is needed,” said Calyn Ostrowksi, program associate for the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative on December 15 for the launch of the series’ culminating report, Delivering Solutions: Advancing Dialogue To Improve Maternal Health.
Joining Ostrowski were co-author Margaret Greene, director of GreeneWorks; Luc de Bernis, senior advisor on maternal health at the UN Population Fund; Tim Thomas, interim director for the Maternal Health Task Force; and Chaacha Mwita, director of communications at the African Population and Health Research Center.
One of the few forums dedicated to maternal health, the series brought together senior-level policymakers, academic researchers, members of the media, and NGO workers from the United States and abroad. The series consisted of 21 separate events, with hundreds of experts sharing their experiences and thousands of participants and stakeholders providing their expertise. The final report captures, analyzes, and synthesizes the strategies and recommendations that emerged from the series.
Promoting Social Change
Unlike other health issues, said Green during her presentation on the findings of Delivering Solutions, the field of maternal health requires a holistic and multi-faceted approach; that is, an approach that looks not only at health systems, but also at underlying social factors. The report divides maternal health into three broad categories: social, economic, and cultural factors; health systems factors; and research/data demands.
Looking first at the social, cultural, and economic issues, Greene highlighted the need to improve nutrition and educational opportunities for young women in developing countries. Policymakers must be convinced that investing in women is not just good for women but good for families and children, she said. The participation of male partners and other male family members is also needed to increase access to maternal health services, such as family planning, and promote gender equality. The report pointed to a number of recommendations to promote male engagement:- Target interventions that educate men about danger signs and pregnancy complications.
- Address pressures that many young married men feel to prove their fertility.
- Inform men about sexual rights and how they relate to the health and wellbeing of their partners.
Health systems and medical resources play an equally pivotal role in reducing maternal mortality as social factors. The report highlights several key areas for strengthening the health system including the expansion of healthcare workers, health finance schemes, technology, and commodity distribution.
One key recommendation is to integrate reproductive health and maternal health supply chains. Four key medicines, oxytocin misoprostol, magnesium sulfate, and manual vacuum aspirators, target the three leading causes of maternal mortality (post-partum hemorrhage, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion). Efforts to improve the distribution of these commodities should be more widely dispersed in developing countries and supported by community-based interventions. Women in urban slums, for example, face unique challenges that are not being adequately addressed.
Additionally, new technologies should be more creatively and effectively used, in particular the use of mobile phones in rural communities.
Many of the policy recommendations offered by the report, as Greene pointed out, are low-cost and highly effective. Yet three significant challenges remain for the field in general:- Six countries – Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan – account for over half of the maternal deaths worldwide. The unique problems of each of these countries must be addressed and solved.
- Integration of maternal health with existing health services along with an over-reliance on community health workers can overburden weak infrastructure.
- Unnecessary cesarean births are on the rise as more women deliver in private sector facilities. These births cost 2 to 18 times as much as vaginal births and create unnecessary risks for mothers.
Chaacha Mwita of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), located in Nairobi has seen firsthand the result of an overburdened and inadequate maternal health system in both his personal and professional life. Mwita endorsed the findings of the series report, emphasizing in particular the focus on transportation systems, male involvement, stakeholder dialogue, and education.
Mwita said that collaboration at all levels is the key to improving maternal health. Policymakers must communicate with researchers, who, in turn, must communicate with doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators in the field. The collaborative in-country dialogue series between the Wilson Center and APHRC, he believes, was a highly useful and easily replicable way of encouraging dialogue among relevant stakeholders in the field.
The Big Picture
”Our hope is that we’ve been able to seed discussions,” said Tim Thomas of the Maternal Health Task Force, one of the co-sponsors of the maternal health series. “We hope those seeds will take root and flourish.” Luc de Bernis, senior maternal health advisor of UNFPA, echoed Thomas’ sentiments, emphasizing the need for continued dialogue.
While maternal health has drawn increased international attention, creating political agreement among policymakers is a complex and often difficult process. There has been marked, though uneven, progress in improving maternal health across the globe, but more must be done. The Delivering Solutions report provides a state of the field assessment as well recommendations for existing, easy-to-implement solutions.
Event Resources: -
New Research on Climate and Conflict Links Shows Challenges for the Field
›
“We know that there will be more conflicts in the future as a result of climate change than there would have been in a hypothetic world without climate change,” said Marc Levy, deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, although existing data and methodologies cannot predict how many additional conflicts there will be, or which causal factors will matter most. [Video Below]
-
John Donnelly, Global Post
A Call for Young People to “Get Angry” About Global Warming
›January 18, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by John Donnelly, appeared on Global Post.
The elder called on the younger generation to speak up.
At a session on climate change and family planning Thursday, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said that she keeps hoping that more young people will demand action on global warming.
“Maybe there’s a need to link the more thoughtful aspects of the Occupy movement with this, to get some of that more radical thinking,” she said. “As younger people increasingly understand the issues, I would say, ‘get angry’ so that we feel the need to do something more urgent. Let us know this is your future and for goodness sake it is absolutely urgent.”
She spoke at a session called “The Road to Rio: Climate Change, Population and Sustainability,” part of the Aspen Institute’s “7 Billion: Conversations that Matter” roundtable series (watch above). The discussion, organized by Aspen Global Health and Development, focused on strategies leading up to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Summit in June – as well as what should be happening beyond Rio.
Continue reading on Global Post.
Video Credit: The Aspen Institute. -
ECSP at the 12th Annual NCSE Environment and Security Conference
›January 17, 2012 // By Schuyler NullThe National Council for Science and the Environment’s 12th annual Environment and Security Conference starts tomorrow at the Ronald Reagan Building with a high profile line-up of speakers and participants, including Rajiv Shah, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Lisa Jackson, Marcia McNutt, Amanda Dory, Sherri Goodman, and more.
If you are attending, be sure to see ECSP’s own Geoff Dabelko on the opening plenary, “Integrating Climate, Energy, Food, Water, and Health,” at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow and the “Water and Conflict” symposium at 2:00 p.m.. We will also have a booth on the floor which we’d encourage you to swing by for more information on our work at the Wilson Center and upcoming events.
There are a host of panels on essentially every environment-security topic you can think of at the conference, so be sure to check out the full agenda for details. Follow our Twitter feed for updates and watch here for any news or interviews in the coming days too. -
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.
-
Iran: A Seemingly Unlikely Setting for World’s Fastest Demographic Transition
›January 11, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenThis is the second post in a series profiling the process of building political commitment in countries whose governments have made strong investments in family planning. Read the first post, on Rwanda’s recent rapid demographic changes, here.
To date, only 11 countries outside of the developed world, China, and a handful of small island states have reached the end of the demographic transition, with fertility rates declining from more than four children per woman to replacement level or lower.* Of these, only two countries have completed the transition in 15 years or less – and both might surprise you. One is Cuba, whose government dispensed family planning services to its relatively small population in the 1970s through accessible primary health care facilities and legalized safe abortion eight years before the United States did. The other: Iran.
Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s new theocracy adopted a socially conservative, pro-natalist outlook. Half of the population lived in rural areas, which typically constrains access to health services. In addition, abortion was illegal in most circumstances. According to the UN, Iranian women had an average of 6.5 children each in the early 1980s and the population was growing nearly four percent annually, a rate high enough for it to double in 19 years.
But, by the early 2000s, Iran’s fertility rate had dropped below two children per woman. The swift changes can be attributed to the efforts of government officials concerned about meeting the employment needs of a growing population, supported by public health experts who wanted to rebuild the eroded family planning program.
A Dramatic Policy ShiftThe turning point came after the end of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in 1988. With military demands high – several hundred thousand people were killed during the war – population growth was viewed positively. But as the war ended, policy directives did an about-face.
Although public health officials had framed the need for reinvigorated family planning programs in health-related terms for years, the motivation for government officials to change policy appears to have been economic. The national budget agency informed the prime minister that after nearly a decade of conflict, the country lacked adequate funding to both rebuild and to meet the needs of its people. The prime minister responded quickly, directing that demographic factors be integrated into the new development plan and stating that “Iranians’ standard of living was being eroded by the growth of the country’s population.”
“Pragmatism Has Prevailed Over Pure Ideology”
After convincing their superiors, Iranian government officials who supported family planning faced the added challenge of garnering the backing of the influential religious establishment. Shortly after the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini officially sanctioned the use of contraception, though his perspective was not universal among clerics. Once the prime minister decided to introduce a national family planning program, officials sought support from additional religious authorities. Opposition was minimal after two key institutions offered endorsements. The High Judicial Council determined that there was “no Islamic barrier to family planning” in late 1988, and the Expediency Council approved the government’s plans soon after.
By late 1989, a new family planning program had been officially introduced. The program’s aims were to lengthen spacing between births; limit pregnancies in the early and late reproductive years; and lower fertility by educating the population and ensuring access to free and diverse contraceptive methods. By the mid-1990s, the government had fully integrated family planning into the existing primary health system.
Iran thus followed the example of other majority-Muslim countries where religion was not an impediment to family planning, including Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Oman. Just as in countries where highly Catholic populations have low fertility rates (Italy, Poland, Spain, and many others), religious guidance has been interpreted in varying ways in different settings and is not necessarily a central factor in individual fertility decisions. As Akbar Aghajanian and Amir H. Merhyar write in a summary of Iran’s family planning program, “Pragmatism has prevailed over pure ideology when necessary.”
The Contributions of Women’s Education and a Strong Health System
A new policy orientation was the critical first step, but successful implementation was necessary for Iran’s demographic trajectory to change in response. Fortunately, the government had some advantages in rolling out its new program, namely a strong existing health system, a history of past efforts to promote family planning, and an educated female population among whom demand for contraception was high.Rural development became a priority of the government after the revolution and resulted in improved access to an array of services. In rural areas, community health workers receive two years of training to provide family planning services along with other preventative care and treatment. Services are also available at rural health “houses,” urban clinics, and higher-level centers around the country.
The status of women has also played a major role. A research exercise conducted by IIASA estimated that improvements in educational attainment among women were responsible for about one-third of Iran’s fertility decline between 1980 and 2005. Women’s literacy was already rising during the period of the revolution and reached 74 percent by 1996, while attitudes toward female employment became more supportive. By the late 1990s, new classes of university students included more women than men. The response to the 1989 program indicated that women clearly had an unmet demand for family planning. Use of modern contraception jumped from 31 percent in 1989 to 51 percent just five years later, then rose more slowly over the subsequent decade.
A Dividend Squandered?
The rapid changes in Iran’s age structure, thanks to declining fertility, have opened a window of opportunity for the country to boost economic growth through lower dependency ratios – a phenomenon called the demographic dividend. However, the dividend is not an automatic bonus, and Iran’s capacity to capitalize on its demographic change is questionable.
The unemployment rate among young people today is over 20 percent, indicating that the economy is not generating sufficient jobs, which is a prerequisite to improving productivity. This inopportune climate may even contribute to a further decline in the fertility rate: Some observers have suggested that the country’s economic troubles and rising costs of living have motivated young people to delay marriage and have smaller families. “Unemployment and high costs of living, coupled with social and political restrictions, have made [life] increasingly difficult for young Iranians,” Farzaneh Roudi of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) explained in a blog post last year.
Given Iran’s challenges in producing adequate jobs and other economic benefits for its population, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent unusual pronouncements on population issues are especially puzzling. Last year, Ahmadinejad introduced a pro-natalist policy offering direct payments to each child born, continuing until they reach adulthood, and later suggested that girls should marry at age 16 or 17.
But despite a high level of international media attention, most observers expect the policy to have little impact. Widespread adoption of family planning has become entrenched in society: 60 percent of Iranian women now use a modern contraceptive method. As PRB’s Roudi wrote in response to Ahmadinejad’s proposal, “Iranian women and men have gotten used to exercising their reproductive rights and would expect to be able to continue to do so.”
*The 11 countries that have achieved replacement fertility or lower outside of developed regions, China, and small island states are Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Myanmar, Thailand, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
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.
Look for related analysis on the political implications of Iran’s changing age structure by Richard Cincotta on New Security Beat soon.
Sources: Abbasi-Shavazi, Lutz, Hosseini-Chavoshi and Samir (2008), Abbasi-Shavazi (2002), Aghajanian and Merhyar (1999), Christian Science Monitor, GlobalSecurity.org, The New York Times, Noble and Potts (1996), Population Reference Bureau, Roudi-Fahimi (2002), UN Population Division, World Bank.
Image Credit: “بیست و پنجم خرداد ۸,” courtesy of flickr user Recovering Sick Soul (Nima Fatemi); charts arranged by Sean Peoples and Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. -
Marc Sommers, Woodrow Wilson Center
Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge
›January 9, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of “Governance, Security, and Culture: Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge,” by Marc Sommers, first appeared in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Vol. 5 (2), 2011.
Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the “youth bulge and instability thesis” leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations.
Learning from Liberia
If ever there was a youth-dominated conflict in modern times, it was Liberia’s long and grueling civil war (1989-1996 and again in 2000-2003). Ignited by Charles Taylor’s Christmas Eve incursion from neighboring Côte d’Ivoire late in 1989, together with perhaps one hundred other men, the conflict soon took the form of youth-led chaos. “What initially was seen as a revolution…fought with sticks and cutlasses,” Mats Utas writes, “was eventually transformed into a war of terror where young people started fighting each other” (2005: 55). In fact, some youth continued to view the war as their revolution, for as long as they were able to take advantage of the opportunity that armed conflict afforded. The civil war provided them with “a chance to become someone in a national system that had marginalized them, but also a chance to get rid of the load of work and expectations that the parental generation had laid on them” (65). Some of the more successful young soldiers, sometimes goaded by their girlfriends, “felt so affluent that they could wash their cars in beer – a beverage most could not even afford to drink prior to the war – and that they could drive a car until it ran out of gasoline and then just dump it for another one” (66). The result was a war that wreaked colossal destruction. By 1997, civil war had already left a nation of perhaps two and a half million with up to 200,000 dead, 700,000 refugees, and much of the remaining population internally displaced (Utas 2008: 113).
The region of sub-Saharan Africa has the most youthful population in the world. Of the 46 countries and territories where at least 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30, only seven are not in sub-Saharan Africa. With this in mind, one of the most striking aspects of contemporary Africa is how male African youth have so frequently been viewed as threats to their own societies. However, the view from below differs dramatically from the largely quantitative analyses from above and from outside the continent. Again, the Liberian example is illuminating. A nation long renowned for grasping leaders and withered government institutions has more recently provided truly upbeat signs of forward movement. That said, most youth continue to be left far, far behind. Fieldwork in rural Liberia uncovered a widespread fear of “rebel behavior youth” – youth who had assumed the attitudes of wartime combatants and became socially sidelined. Liberia’s post-war youth unemployment has been estimated at the astonishing rate of 88 percent. Taking all of this into account – a widespread sense of estrangement and social distance felt by many youth and an economic recovery that is passing most of them by – one could certainly argue that Liberian youth are among the world’s most peaceful populations.
Continue reading in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence.
Marc Sommers is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program and visiting researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center.
Sources: Government of Liberia, Population Action International, Sommers (2007), Utas (2005 and 2008).
Photo Credit: “RPF rally in Gicumbi, Rwanda,” courtesy of flickr user noodlepie (Graham Holliday).
Subscribe:
