Showing posts from category environmental security.
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Annie Murphy, International Reporting Project
Mozambique Coal Mine Brings Jobs, Concerns
›May 31, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Annie Murphy appeared on the International Reporting Project and NPR (follow the links for the accompanying audio track as well). Murphy appeared with three other IRP fellows at the Wilson Center on April 28 to talk about their experiences reporting abroad.
As developing countries grow, their need for raw materials grows, too.
This is the case for Brazil, a country that has much in common with the nation of Mozambique: Both have a mix of African and Portuguese influences; both are rich in natural resources; and both fought long and hard to throw off European colonialism.
Today, however, a Brazilian coal mine in Mozambique has some wondering what the energy demands of growing economies like Brazil really mean for African countries like Mozambique.
This coal mine in northwestern Mozambique is owned by the Brazilian company Vale — it’s a gaping, dark gray pit in the middle of a green, windswept savannah. Still under construction, it currently employees about 7,500 people.
Jose Manuel Guilengue, 23, a machine operator, says that he and a friend traveled 1,000 miles from the capital to get there, where they were both hired. That was a year ago. He now makes around $400 a month — which is more than four times the average salary in Mozambique.
According to the general manager overseeing construction, Osvaldo Adachi, this mine will produce about 11 million tons of coal each year, for at least three decades.
Continue reading and listen to the audio at the International Reporting Project.
Annie Murphy reported this story during a fellowship with the International Reporting Project (IRP). To hear more about Murphy and the IRP program, see the event summary for “Reporting on Global Health: A Conversation With the International Reporting Project Fellows.”
Photo Credit: Adapted from Mozambique, courtesy of flickr user F H Mira. -
Environmental Action Plans in Darfur: Improving Resilience, Reducing Vulnerability
›Many villagers in Baaba, a community of 600 in South Darfur, remember a shady forest of mango and guava trees that provided food and a valuable income for the villagers and a pleasant picnic spot for people in Nyala, the nearby state capital. Over the last decade, that forest has degraded into eroded brush dotted by the occasional baobab – a transformation that is unfortunately a familiar sight throughout Darfur.
Most of Baaba’s trees have become firewood and charcoal for the people living in nearby internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Baaba’s residents, who themselves returned from the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home, struggle to coax enough food from the soil, which has largely eroded away following deforestation. Afraid to venture any further than necessary from home for fear of violence and banditry in the countryside, they farm and graze the same land year after year without fallow periods – further depleting the soil and driving yields ever lower.
Baaba is like hundreds of Darfuri villages, which face a brutal mix of insecurity and environmental decline that leaves them one poor harvest away from being forced into the IDP camps. Baaba, however, is also a pilot participant in a new approach – the Community Environmental Action Plan – that aims to rehabilitate the local environment, enable people to sustainably manage natural resources, and ultimately to make communities more prosperous and resilient.
Most of Darfur has always been marginal land where farming and herding provide a meager livelihood and natural resources are few. Even before war broke out in 2003, soaring population growth (total population has quintupled since the 1970s) was putting intolerable pressure on the land, water, and trees of Darfur. The conflict in Darfur has since heavily disrupted traditional methods for sharing and maintaining natural resources, leading to environmental devastation. The worsening effects of climate change – though hard to separate from local environmental depletion – are also beginning to disrupt weather patterns and farming. The disheartening result is that even where fighting has subsided and displaced persons return home, they often find that the land no longer sustains them.
Traditional humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects are ill-suited to help, since persistent insecurity deprives humanitarian actors of access to communities for weeks or months at a time. Environmental decline didn’t start the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, but it threatens to prolong it and put a sustainable peace out of reach.
Community Environmental Action Plans
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), mandated to work on IDP and return issues in Darfur, aimed to address these challenges with Community Environmental Action Plans (CEAPs) in three pilot villages. CEAPs build comprehensive local capacity, enabling communities to manage natural resources sustainably and address environmental problems themselves without relying on outside support. The ultimate goal is to build the resilience and adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities. IOM worked with Baaba and two other villages to implement CEAPs, in partnership with the Swiss-based environmental NGO ProAct, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the government of South Darfur, and Darfuri environmental organizations. The project, funded by the Government of Japan, ran from early 2009 until mid-2010.
The CEAP process trains communities to understand the connections between a healthy ecosystem and a prosperous community and to promote livelihoods by rehabilitating the environment. Each participating village formed a CEAP governance committee, which was then trained to understand the environment as a single integrated system and to see how damaging one resource like trees can devastate other ecosystem services – such as pollination, groundwater retention, and soil fertility – that enable and promote human livelihoods. The communities then identified essential needs, including reforestation, water harvesting, and improved sanitation, and worked with IOM to develop appropriate responses. These activities were all implemented by the villages themselves, with technical and material support from IOM and its partners.
Building Local Capacity
The communities built low-tech but highly productive tree nurseries, producing and planting over 200,000 seedlings to restore damaged land and provide a sustainable wood supply. Local women learned how to make highly fuel-efficient stoves using locally available materials, cutting their need for firewood and allowing them to sell stoves in the nearby Nyala market.
Farmers received extensive training in sustainable agriculture techniques, including water harvesting, composting, agro-forestry, and intercropping (mixing complementary plant species together in the same fields). Volunteers were trained in effective hygiene practices and built latrines for each household. Water committees were trained to repair and maintain the villages’ indispensable but fragile water hand pumps, ensuring a more reliable source of drinking water. Each of these activities was governed by a community committee, including women and youth, trained to manage the projects for the benefit of the entire community and continue the work after the project’s end.
Through this approach, all three villages significantly boosted their livelihoods and agricultural productivity while becoming less dependent on the unsustainable exploitation of their fragile environment. The CEAP approach benefits greatly from focusing on capacity-building and local implementation, which fosters a strong sense of community ownership that persists after the project ends. Equally important, CEAPs attempt to address most or all of a community’s environmental issues simultaneously, reducing the risk that neglected environmental problems – particularly agricultural failure – will critically destabilize and displace a community in the future.
A Replicable Model
CEAPs aren’t a panacea, particularly in the conflict-prone areas where they are most needed. Insecurity, particularly a series of abductions of humanitarian workers from several organizations in 2010, cut off IOM’s access to the communities late in the project. Though the core activities were completed by working through local partners with more reliable access, the security situation left few opportunities for follow-up activities. Longer-term threats, particularly unrestrained population growth – which requires a comprehensive approach that includes addressing unmet need for family planning services – could undo much of the good that CEAPs accomplish.
Though insecurity prevented IOM from continuing the project, other organizations including UNEP are implementing and refining the CEAP approach elsewhere in Darfur and other regions in sub-Saharan Africa. As climate changes intensifies and the potential for related conflicts looms, the CEAP approach should be considered as a powerful and flexible tool to rehabilitate the environment and strengthen vulnerable communities.
Paul Rushton is a consultant for the International Organization for Migration, Sudan, and worked as a Programme Officer managing the CEAP projects in South Darfur from 2009 to 2010.
Sources: International Organization for Migration, UN.
Photo Credit: Camels graze in a destroyed and degraded village in Western Darfur, courtesy of UNEP; and pictures from CEAP sites in Southern Darfur, courtesy of Paul Rushton. -
Climate Change, Development, and the Law of Mother Earth
Bolivia: A Return to Pachamama?
›May 20, 2011 // By Christina DaggettIn Bolivia, environment-related contradictions abound: shrinking glaciers threaten the water supply of the booming capital city, La Paz, while unusually heavy rainfall triggers deadly landslides. The government is seeking to develop a strategic reserve of metals that could make Bolivia the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” while politicians promote legal rights for “Mother Earth” and an end to capitalism.
This year has been particularly turbulent. In La Paz, landslides destroyed at least 400 homes and left 5,000 homeless. While the rain has been overwhelming at times, it has also been unreliable – an effect of the alternating climate phenomena La Niña and El Niño, experts say, which have grown more frequent in recent years and cause great variability in weather patterns. Bolivia has endured nine major droughts and 25 floods in the past three decades, a challenge for any country but particularly so for one of the poorest, least developed, and fastest growing (with a total fertility rate over three) in Latin America.
Environmental Justice or Radicalism?
Environmentalism has become a major force in national politics in part as a response to the climatic challenges faced by Bolivia. A new law seeks to grant the environment the same legal rights as citizens, including the right to clean air and water and the right to be free of pollution. (Voters in Ecuador approved a similar measure in 2008.) The law is seen as a return of respect to Pachamama, a much revered spiritual entity (akin to Mother Earth) for Bolivia’s indigenous population, who account for around 62 percent of the total population.
Though groundbreaking in its scope, the new law may prove difficult to enforce, given its lack of precedent and the lucrative business interests at stake (oil, gas, and mineral extraction accounted for 70 percent of Bolivia’s exports in 2010).
On the global stage, President Morales has issued perhaps the most aggressive calls yet for industrial countries to do more about climate change and compensate those countries that are already experiencing the effects. Bolivia refused to sign both the Copenhagen and Cancun climate agreements on grounds that the agreements were too weak. In Cancun, Morales gave a blistering speech:We have two paths: Either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!
Bolivia’s stance has alienated potential allies: In 2010, the United States denied Bolivia climate aid funds worth $3 million because of its failure to sign the Copenhagen Accord.
Going… Going… Gone
Bolivia’s Chacaltaya glacier – estimated to be 18,000 years old – is today only a small patch of ice, the victim of rising temperatures from climate change, scientists say. Glaciologists suggest that temperatures have been steadily rising in Bolivia for the past 60 years and will continue to rise perhaps a further 3.5-4˚C over the next century – a change that would turn much of the country into desert.
Other Andean glaciers face a similar fate, according to the World Bank, which estimates that the loss of these glaciers threatens the water supply of some 30 million people and La Paz in particular, which, some experts say, could become one of the world’s first capitals to run out of water. The populations of La Paz and neighboring El Alto have been steadily growing – from less than 900,000 in 1950 to more than 2 million in 2011 – as more and more Bolivians are moving from the countryside to the city, putting pressure on an already dwindling water supply.
If the water scarcity situation continues to worsen, residents of the La Paz metropolitan area may migrate to other areas of the country, most likely eastward toward Bolivia’s largest and most prosperous city, Santa Cruz. Such migration, however, has the potential to inflame existing tensions between the western (indigenous) and eastern (mestizo) portions of the country.
Rising Prices, Rising Tension
The temperature is not the only thing on the rise in Bolivia; the price of food, too, is increasing. According to the World Food Program, since 2010, the price of pinto beans has risen 179 percent; flour, 44 percent; and rice, 33 percent. Shortages of sugar and other basic foodstuffs have been reported as well, leading to protests.
In early February, the BBC reported President Evo Morales was forced to abandon his plans to give a public speech after a group of protestors started throwing dynamite. A week later, nation-wide demonstrations paralyzed several cities, according to AFP, closing schools and disrupting services.
The Saudi Arabia of Lithium?
One way out for Bolivia’s economic woes might be its still nascent mineral extraction sector. Bolivia possesses an estimated 50 percent of the world’s lithium deposits (nine million tons, according to the U.S. Geological Survey), most of which is locked beneath the world’s largest salt flat, Salar de Uyuni. The size of these reserves has prompted some to dub Bolivia a potential “Saudi Arabia of lithium” – a title, it should be noted, that has also been bestowed upon Chile and Afghanistan.
Demand for lithium, which is used most notably in cell phones and electric car batteries, is expected to dramatically increase in the next 10 years as countries seek to lower their dependence on fossil fuels. Yet, some analysts have wondered if Bolivia’s lithium is needed, given the quality and current level of production of lithium from neighboring Chile and Argentina.
Others have questioned whether Bolivia has the necessary infrastructure to industrialize the extraction process or the ability to get its product to market, though Bolivia recently signed an agreement with neighboring Peru for port access. In an extensive report for The New Yorker, Lawrence Wright writes that “before Bolivia can hope to exploit a twenty-first century fuel, it must first develop the rudiments of a twentieth-century economy.” To this end, the Bolivian government last year announced a partnership with Iran to develop its lithium reserves – a surprising move, given Morales’ historical disdain for foreign investment.
Nexus of Climate, Security, Culture, and Development
The Uyuni salt flats are both a potent economic opportunity and one of the country’s most unspoiled natural wonders. How will Bolivia – a country of natural bounty and unique indigenous tradition – balance the need for development with its stated commitment to environmental principles?
Large-scale extraction may be worth the environmental cost, a La Paz economist told The Daily Mail: “We are one of the poorest countries on Earth with appalling life-expectancy rates. This is no time to be hard-headed. Without development our people will suffer. Getting bogged down in principles and politics doesn’t put food in people’s mouths.”
“The process that we are faced with internally is a difficult one. It’s no cup of tea. There are sectors and players at odds in this more environmentalist vision,” said Carlos Fuentes, a Bolivian government official, to The Latin American News Dispatch.
Sources: American University, BBC News, Bloomberg, Change.org, Christian Science Monitor, The Daily Mail, Democracy Now, Green Change, The Guardian, Instituto Nacional de Estadística de Bolivia, IPS News, Latin America News Dispatch, MercoPress, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Population Reference Bureau, PreventionWeb, Reliefweb, Reuters, SAGE, Tierramerica, USAID, U.S. Geological Survey, UNICEF, Upsidedownworld, Wired UK, The World Bank, Yahoo, Yes! Magazine.
Photo credit: “la paz,” courtesy of flickr user timsnell and “Isla Incahuasi – Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia,” courtesy of flickr user kk+. -
Momentum Magazine
Where Does It Hurt? Climate Vulnerability Index
›The original version of this article appeared in the University of Minnesota’s Momentum Magazine. Text by Mary Hoff, page layout by Todd Reubold.
The punch climate change packs varies from one country, region, or continent to another. DARA, a Madrid-based humanitarian advocacy organization, recently partnered with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, comprising countries particularly vulnerable to climate change, to create Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010, an atlas of vulnerability. This infographic presents a small portion of the picture the Climate Vulnerability Monitor paints.
Vulnerability is grouped into four categories: health impacts, weather disasters, habitat loss and economic stress. Circles on the left side of each set indicate relative magnitude of vulnerability in 2010. Circles on the right indicate the same for 2030.
See the full “Where Does it Hurt?” infographic on the Momentum site or download the Climate Vulnerability report from DARA.
Image Source: Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010: The State of Climate Crisis, published in December 2010 by DARA (daraint.org). Used with permission. -
Climate Adaptation, Development, and Peacebuilding in Fragile States: Finding the Triple-Bottom Line
›“The climate agenda goes well beyond climate,” said Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert at a recent Wilson Center event. “In the last 60 years, at least 40 percent of all interstate conflicts have had a link to natural resources” and those that do are also twice as likely to relapse in the five years following a peace agreement, said Neil Levine, director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. [Video Below]
Development, peace, and climate stability are “the triple-bottom line,” said Smith. “How would you ever think that it would be possible to make progress on one, while ignoring the other two?” Levine and Smith were joined by Alexander Carius, managing director of Adelphi Research, who pointed out that climate change is both a matter of human security and traditional security. For example, as sea-level rise threatens the people of small-island states, “it also affects, in a very traditional sense, the question of security and a state’s sovereignty,” he said.
The Triple-Bottom Line
Conflicts are never attributable to a single cause, but instead are caused by “a whole pile-up, a proliferation, a conglomeration of reasons” that often include poverty, weak governance, traumatic memory of war, and climate change, said Smith. “Climate adds to the strains and the stresses that countries are under,” and works as a “risk-multiplier, or conflict multiplier,” he said.
Focusing development and peace-building efforts on those regions experiencing multiple threats is both a “moral imperative” and a “self-interested imperative,” said Smith. “We benefit from a more prosperous and a more stable world.”
There are currently one and a half billion people in the world living in countries that face these interlinked problems, said Smith, “and interlinked problems, almost by definition, require interlinked solutions.” Responding to the needs of these people requires developing resiliency so that they can respond to the consequences of climate change, which he called “unknown unknowns.”
“What we need are institutions and policies and actions which guard us not only against the threats we can see coming… but against the ones we can’t see coming,” said Smith. The strength and resilience of governments, economies, and communities are key to determining whether climate events become disasters.
Interagency Cooperation
“Part of making the triple-bottom line a real thing is to understand that we will have to be working on our own institutions, even the best and most effective of them, to make sure that they see the interlinkages,” said Smith.
But even though individuals increasingly understand the need to address security, development, and climate change in an integrated fashion, “institutions have only limited capacities for coordination,” said Carius. Institutions are constrained by bureaucratic processes, political mandates, or limited human resources, he said. “Years ago, I always argued for a more integrated policy process; today I would argue for an integrated assessment of the issues, but to…translate it back into sectoral approaches.”
Levine expressed optimism that with “a whole new avalanche of interagency connections” being established in the last few years, U.S. interagency cooperation has become “the culture.” However, if coordination efforts are not carefully aligned to advance concrete programs and policies, they run the risk of “getting bogged down in massive bureaucratic exercises,” he said. “‘Whole of government’ needn’t be ‘all of government,’ and it needn’t be whole of government, all of government, all the time.”
Building Political Will
Europe has a “conducive political environment to making [climate and security] arguments,” said Smith, but the dialogue has yet to translate into action. In 2007, the debate on climate and security was first brought to the UN and EU with a series of reports by government agencies and the first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change on security at the UN Security Council, said Carius. However, none of the recommendations from the reports were followed and “much of the political momentum that existed…ended up in a very technical, low-level dialogue,” he said.
More recently, the United Kingdom included energy, resources, and climate change as a priority security risk in their National Security Strategy. And Germany, which joined the UN Security Council as a rotating member this year, is expected to reintroduce the topic of climate and security when they assume the Security Council Presidency in July. These steps may help to regain some of the political momentum and “create legitimacy for at least making the argument – the very strong argument – that climate change has an impact on security,” said Carius.
Sources: AFP, UK Cabinet Office, Telegraph, United Nations
Image Credit: “Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan” courtesy of flickr user DFID -
‘The Fence’ on U.S.-Mexico Border: Ineffective, Destructive, Absurd, Say Filmmakers
›April 5, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe documentary The Fence, directed by Rory Kennedy, “shows a strong case against a single-minded approach to securing the border,” said Mexico Institute Program Associate Robert Donnelly at a Wilson Center screening on March 23. Part of the DC Environmental Film Festival, the screening was co-sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program and the Mexico Institute.
The film documents the $3 billion dollar construction of a 700-mile-long fence, which runs intermittently along the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. The barrier, a result of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, was intended to keep out terrorists, drug traffickers, and unauthorized border-crossers. Yet, according to the film, it is a solution in search of a problem. No terrorist has ever entered the country by illegally crossing the southern border; the 9-11 hijackers all had visas and arrived in the country by air, the film notes.
Physical barriers also have not reduced the rates of contraband drug smuggling into the United States, in spite of the claims of fence hawks, the film argues. And the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the United States actually rose over 1994-2009, the period covered in the film. At the same time, the construction and maintenance of physical barriers along the southern border have had adverse humanitarian, environmental, and fiscal consequences.
The film’s wry narration pokes fun at the “absurdity” of a fence that stops and starts at different places along the border. But this absurdist tone does not detract from one of the film’s more serious messages: that border fencing has coincided with an increase in migrant deaths from 1994 through 2009.
In a discussion following the screening, Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environment Change and Security Program, said that it is unlikely the fence will be torn down anytime soon given the money spent on its construction. Donnelly pointed out some adverse environmental effects of border fencing, such as the disruption of migration patterns for certain animal species. The film notes that the normal environmental review process for projects of its kind was waived by the Department of Homeland Security, which cited the importance of the border fence to national security.
The discussants acknowledged that the border fence is ill equipped to single-handedly stop the traffic in contraband or to significantly stem unauthorized migration. Instead, immigrant-sending and -receiving countries should work together to develop policy options that better address the root economic causes that prompt unauthorized migration.
Dana Deaton is an intern with the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center. -
The Impact of Environmental Change and Geography on Conflict
›“Environmental Change, Strategic Foresight, and Impacts on Military Power,” published in Parameters by Chad M. Briggs, the Minerva Chair of Energy and Environmental Security at the Air University, USAF, tackles the changing definition of “environmental security” and how the concept can help planners better prepare for the effects of climate change and an elevated focus on energy security. New potentially destabilizing issues like glacial melt, sea-level rise, and Arctic ice melt are on the horizon, writes Briggs. China and others are already planning for these events, and it’s important that the United States does the same, starting with a greater appreciation for the impact of environmental security on vulnerability and risk. “Due to past practices and bureaucratic stovepipes, implementation is limited more by initiative and imagination than actual resources,” he writes.
Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College Dublin and the International Peace Research Institute finds in “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Does Physical Geography Affect a State’s Conflict Risk?” that a region’s geography does not have a uniform effect on its likelihood of experiencing conflict. Raleigh’s conclusions, published in International Interactions, run counter to traditional histories which often emphasize the importance of physical geography, specifically with regard to civil war and insurgencies. Focusing on the Great Lakes region of Africa, Raleigh finds that other factors – like how populated an area is and its proximity to valuable natural resources – correlate higher with an area’s propensity for violence than any other factor. -
Watch Michael Renner on Improving Environmental Peacebuilding by Moving From the Technical to the Social
›“When we think about environmental peacebuilding opportunities…at a certain level it seems like a very straightforward, almost technical task,” said Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, in this interview with ECSP. “But really stepping back, in a sense, this is far more than just a technical issue – it’s a broader social and, ultimately, political issue.”
As well as reducing tensions in conflict-prone areas, environmental peacebuilding – like reforestation and land/water management initiatives – can have a great impact on local livelihoods. Renner discussed the importance, therefore, of working alongside affected communities to address specific, long-term needs. “You need to have a buy-in from the local communities,” he said. “If you don’t, you may well undertake these efforts, but it’s not very clear how long they can last and how successful they can be.”
“I think it’s very important to understand these as challenges from an interdisciplinary point of view, that really require us not to think in terms of just ‘what’s the best technology, what’s the best practice,’” Renner said. “But also ‘how do we ensure really that this links up with the needs on the ground of specific communities?’”