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Population Growth and its Relation to Poverty, the Environment, and Human Rights
›“Population, Poverty, Environment, and Climate Dynamics in the Developing World,” in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, by Jason Bremner, David Lopez-Carr, Laurel Suter, and Jason Davis, attempts to illuminate and clarify the complex relationships between environmental degradation, population dynamics, and poverty. Population growth is a key driver for the degradation of ecosystem services which has a direct impact on livelihoods and human well-being, write the authors, especially for the poor. They argue that “population growth itself, however, remains an insufficient explanation of the relationship between population, ecosystems, and poverty.” While the field has a come a long way since its “original Malthusian roots,” they write, the relationships between these dynamics differ greatly depending on the area in question, and much work remains to be done on the less well-studied ecosystems.
In “An End to Population Growth: Why Family Planning Is Key to a Sustainable Future” from the Solutions Journal, Robert Engelman reminds us that population projections are not set in stone and that the widespread belief that population has to reach nine billion before leveling off is wrong. Nor is coercive “population control” necessary, he writes: “Population growth rates and average family size worldwide have fallen by roughly half over the past four decades, as modern contraception has become more accessible and popular.” Unfortunately, there remains a large number of people around the world without access to family planning, the majority of whom live in developing countries. Engelman points out that while the number of people of reproductive age has steadily increased in these countries over the last decade, donor support has declined. He argues that research, courage, and creativity are needed to reverse this situation, but in a world where most of all pregnancies were intended, population growth would slow long before reaching nine billion. -
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 -
In Search of a New Security Narrative: National Conversation Series Launches at the Wilson Center
›The United States needs a new national security narrative, agreed a diverse panel of high-level discussants last week during a new Wilson Center initiative, “The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center.”
Hosted by new Wilson Center President and CEO Jane Harman and moderated by The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the inaugural event was based on a white paper by two active military officers writing under the pseudonym “Mr. Y” (echoing George Kennan’s “X” article). In A National Strategic Narrative, Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC) argue that the United States needs to move away from an outmoded 20th century model of containment, deterrence, and control towards a “strategy of sustainability.” [Video Below]
Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, who wrote the white paper’s preface, summarized it for the panel, which included Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.); Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; and Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.Framing a 21st Century Vision
We can no longer expect to control events, but we can influence them, Slaughter said. “In an interconnected world, the United States should be the strongest competitor and the greatest source of credible influence – the nation that is most able to influence what happens in the international sphere – while standing for security, prosperity, and justice at home and abroad.”
“My generation has had our whole foreign policy world defined as national security,” said Slaughter, “but ‘national security’ only entered the national lexicon in the late 1940s; it was a way of combining defense and foreign affairs, in the context of a post-World War II rising Soviet Union.”
As opposed to a strategy document, their intention, write Porter and Mykleby, was to create a narrative through which to frame U.S. national policy decisions and discussions well into this century.
“America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth,” the “Mr. Y” authors write. “But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy.”It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies. [italics original]
Prosperity and Security a Matter of Sustainability
The “Mr. Y” paper is similar in some respects to other strategic documents that have promoted a more holistic understanding of security, such as the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which was partially authored by Slaughter during her time in State’s Policy Planning Office. But there’s a markedly heavy focus on economics and moving beyond the “national security” framework in Porter and Mykleby’s white paper. They outline three “sustainable” investment priorities:
“These issues have come in and out of the security debates since the end of the Cold War, but they have not been incorporated well into a single national security narrative,” Geoff Dabelko, director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, told The New Security Beat. “This piece is a positive step toward achieving a coherent and inclusive national security narrative for the United States.”- Human capital: refocus on education, health, and social infrastructure;
- Sustainable security: use a more holistic, whole-of-government approach to security; essentially, expand the roles of civilian agencies and promote stability as much as ensuring defense; and,
- Natural resources: invest in long-range, sustainable management of natural resources, in the context of expanding global demand (via population growth and consumption).
To provide a “blueprint” for this transition, Porter and Mykleby call for the drafting of a “National Prosperity and Security Act” to replace the national security framework laid by the National Security Act of 1947 (NSA 47) and followed by subsequent NSAs.A New Geostrategic Model?
The panel unanimously praised the white paper’s intentions, if not its exact method of analysis and proposed solutions. All agreed that globalization and technology have helped create a more interconnected and complex world than current foreign policy and national security institutions are designed to deal with. Scowcroft called the 20th century “the epitome of the nation-state system” and said he expects an erosion of nation-state power, especially in light of integrated challenges like climate change and global health.
Kagan disagreed, saying he’s less convinced that the nation-state is fading away. “If anything, I would say since the 1990s, the nation-state has made a kind of comeback,” he said, adding that the paper lacks “a description of how the world works, in the sense of ‘do we still believe in a core realist point that power interaction among nation states is still important?’” In that sense, he said, “I’m not at all convinced we’ve left either the 20th century or the 19th century, in terms of some fundamental issues having to do with power.”
“I think there are three things that really are new,” said Slaughter. “The first [is the] super-empowered individual…the ability of individuals to do things that only states could.” We saw that with 9/11, with individuals attacking a nation, and we’re seeing that with communications as well, she said. “I can tell you, Twitter and the State Department’s reporting system, they’re pretty comparable and Twitter’s probably ahead, in terms of how much information you can get.”
Second, there is a “whole other dimension of power that simply did not exist before and that is how connected you are,” Slaughter said. “The person who is the most connected has the most power, because they’re the person who can mobilize, like Wael Ghonim in Egypt.”
Third, there are a greater number of responsible stakeholders. “What President Obama keeps telling other nations is ‘you want to be a great power? It’s not enough to have a big economy and a big army and a big territory, you have to take responsibility for enforcing the norms of a global order,’” Slaughter said. Qatar’s willingness to participate in the international community’s intervention in Libya, she said, was in part an example of a country responding to that challenge and stepping up into a role it had not previously played.
These new dimensions to power and security don’t entirely replace the old model but do make it more complex. “It’s on top of what was,” Slaughter said, and “we have to adapt to it.”
Photo Credit: Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC), Captain Wayne Porter (USN), and Wilson Center President and CEO Jane Harman, courtesy of David Hawxhurst/Wilson Center. -
John Warburton, China Environment Series
UK Helping to Relieve Climate-Related Stress on China’s Agriculture
›The UK and China have been working together since 2001 to better understand how China is going to be impacted by climate change, particularly in the agriculture sector. But understanding must also lead to action, with adaptation needing to be integrated into the development process at both national and local levels. This work, which is ongoing, will increasingly provide a model for how to approach adaptation in other countries.
In my opinion, this work has also contributed to the realization among top-level Chinese officials that it is important to take global action on climate change as part of the international negotiation process; until very recently, most of the international engagement with China has focused on mitigation, with the result that the very real and urgent challenges that China faces in regards to its own adaptation needs have been sidelined.
Another Stressor for Chinese Agriculture
China’s Polices and Actions for Addressing Climate Change, issued in October 2008, state:The impacts of future climate change on agriculture and livestock industry will be mainly adverse. It is likely there will be a drop in the yield of three major crops — wheat, rice and corn; …enlarged scope of crop diseases and insect outbreaks; [and] increased desertification.
Even though assessing the likely impacts of climate change on crop yields is a complicated process, with some evidence showing that in some areas crops may benefit if agricultural technology can keep pace, the overall picture is grim for China.
Potential climate impacts are very worrying for a country which already faces so many other challenges within the agricultural sector, among them the facts that it has to feed nearly one quarter of the world’s population (1.3 billion people) with only seven percent of the world’s arable land; that it has only one-quarter of the world’s average per capita water distribution (one-tenth in large parts of northern China, which are heavily dependent upon agriculture); and that the agricultural land base is fast diminishing due to urbanization, industrialization, and the conversion of arable land to grasslands and forest.
Collaboration on Adaptation
Much of the evidence that supports the understanding of the likely adverse impacts on Chinese agriculture from climate change stems from collaborative work between the UK and China which started in 2001. A joint project, Impacts of Climate Change on Chinese Agriculture (ICCCA), has combined cutting-edge scientific research with practical development policy advice. Although national in scope, the project included pilot work to develop a stakeholder based approach to adaptation in the Ningxia region of northcentral China. ICCCA was successfully completed in December 2008. The UK-China collaboration is now continuing with a major new project which is going beyond agriculture and looking at additional socioeconomic sectors and geographic areas.
Continue reading in the China Environment Forum’s China Environment Series 11, from the Wilson Center. Other articles in the series can be found on CEF’s website.
John Warburton is a DFID senior environment adviser and is currently based in Beijing.
Photo Credit: “Field,” courtesy of flickr user totomaru. -
Eric Zuehlke, Behind the Numbers
Building a Gender Strategy for the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health
›March 25, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Eric Zuehlke, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.
Recent media reports have focused on the stalled progress for women in Afghanistan and the shift in the international community’s focus as they take steps towards an eventual military withdrawl. Although there’s much work to be done, it’s important to note that there has been tangible improvement for women in Afghanistan. A decade ago, women weren’t allowed to go out in public alone. Girls weren’t allowed to attend school – now 57 percent of girls are in school. And gender issues are now being integrated into government policy.
At an Interagency Gender Working Group (IGWG) Plenary in honor of 2011 International Women’s Day hosted by PATH in Washington DC, Karen Hardee, a senior fellow at PRB and president of Hardee Associates, presented her involvement towards developing the National Gender Strategy for the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health for 2011-2015. Much international development program and policy advocacy calls for attention to “gender,” but what does the term mean? “Gender isn’t just about women,” said Hardee, but is defined as the social roles that men and women play because of the way society is organized. But these roles aren’t set in stone; they can change over time.
Funded by USAID, the Health Services Support Project worked with the Afghan government to create a plan to integrate gender considerations into all public health programs and policies, focusing mostly on mental health and gender-based violence. Interestingly, the impetus of the process stemmed the initiative of a male official in the Ministry of Public Health who requested assistance to write a plan to integrate gender into the Ministry’s policies and programs. Having participated in WHO-sponsored gender training workshops in the past, he understood the importance of mainstreaming gender awareness for both men and women. It’s a great example of the tangible effects of the work being done on gender by NGOs and international donors.
Continue reading on Behind the Numbers.
Sources: The Guardian.
Photo Credit: “PRT, ADT women help celebrate Women’s Day in Kunar,” courtesy of flickr user DVIDSHUB. -
Congressional Hearing: Clean Water Access Is a Global Crisis, Human Right, and National Security Issue
›March 17, 2011 // By Hannah MarquseeUnsafe drinking water causes nearly 1.8 million deaths each year from diarrhea, “a number that dwarfs the casualties associated with violent conflict,” said U.S. Representative James McGovern at a congressional human rights commission hearing earlier this month on water as a basic right. Nearly all of these deaths are children under the age of five, he said. “This is a war against families, children, and women on an ongoing basis,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer, also speaking at the hearing, titled “Realizing the Right to Safe Water and Sanitation.”
There are currently 884 million people in the world without access to safe drinking water, according to UNICEF, and 2.6 billion without improved sanitation. As population growth and climate change place added stress on fresh-water systems, by 2025, two thirds of the world’s population will live in water-stressed conditions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. “This is a severe global crisis,” said McGovern.
“A Human Right”
With 2011 World Water Day only weeks away, the hearing harkened back to Secretary Clinton’s widely quoted statement from World Water Day 2010, marking a commitment by the Obama administration to address global water issues:It’s not every day you find an issue where effective diplomacy and development will allow you to save millions of lives, feed the hungry, empower women, advance our national security interests, protect the environment, and demonstrate to billions of people that the United States cares. Water is that issue.
Four months after that statement, the UN passed a resolution to make access to water and sanitation a human right, not just a development priority. Said Catarina de Albuquerque, a UN independent expert who testified at this month’s congressional hearing, the resolution stipulates that water must be “available, accessible, affordable, acceptable and safe.” A “right to water” is an important “sign of political will,” that will place increased obligations on governments to improve access to water and sanitation, she said. But in the meantime, for the millions without access to safe water, “there is no change.”
According to the UN, the world is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the number of people without access to an improved water source by 2015. But de Albuquerque noted that the reality is not quite so optimistic. On a UN fact-finding mission, she encountered at least one family who by UN definitions had access to an “improved drinking water source,” yet their tap water was literally black. “Water quality is not being monitored” and for many of the people who do have access, it is simply “undrinkable,” she said.
In developed countries as well, there are significant barriers to access, especially for marginalized communities. On a recent mission to the United States, de Albuquerque found that America’s “voiceless” – people of color, Native Americans, and the homeless – face significant discrimination in access to water. “Society closes its eyes to them,” she said. Thirteen percent of Native Americans lack access to safe water, in comparison to 0.6 percent of non-native Americans, she said in a statement to the press releasing her findings. And in Boston, “for every one percent increase in the city ward’s percentage of people of color, the number of threatened cut-offs increases by four percent.” To make the necessary improvements to fill these gaps in America’s aging water infrastructure would cost $4 to $6 billion annually, she said.
A National Security Issue
Water “is a security issue as well as a human development issue,” said Blumenauer. Since, according to UNEP, 40 percent of the world relies on river basins that share two or more political boundaries, water management has enormous potential for both conflict and cooperation. Echoing Clinton’s World Water Day statement, McGovern championed the cross-cutting nature of water:The right to water is inextricably linked with other basic rights…including the right to food, the right to health, and the right to education.
The burden of collecting water in underdeveloped countries often creates a gender gap and exposes women and girls to violence and rape, he said. And it “has been the basis for many territorial and violent disputes between various peoples and even nations.”
Last month, a staff report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed a similar sentiment with the publication of their report, Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The report commends the Obama administration for recognizing the importance of water: “For the first time, senior government officials are recognizing the critical role that sound water management must play in achieving our foreign policy goals and in protecting our national security.” However, by exclusively focusing on Pakistan and Afghanistan’s water issues and “neglecting the interconnectivity of water issues between Central and South Asia, the U.S. approach could exacerbate regional tensions,” the report says.
To be more strategic about water assistance, the report recommends the United States: (1) provide technical support in data collection to better manage water; (2) help increase water efficiency and reduce demand for water; (3) recognize the transboundary nature of water issues and “provide holistic solutions;” and (4) “safeguard institutions against shocks to water supply and demand.”
Moving Forward
The Obama administration’s commitment to water issues, the UN’s recognition of water as a human right, and the 2005 Water for the Poor Act have all been important steps towards fulfilling the pledge of making access to safe water a human right. “We’ve come a long way,” Blumenauer (who authored the Water for the Poor Act) said at the hearing, but there is still significant work ahead.
“We’re going to have to be more strategic moving forward” in order to meet global water shortages, said Aaron Salzberg, special coordinator for water resources for the U.S. Department of State who testified at the hearing. Salzberg recommended that the U.S. government take steps to integrate water management with the food and health sectors; build political will; mobilize financial support; promote science and technology; and form partnerships with other governments and aid organizations. The United States must also “be smarter” about allocating funds based on the dual criteria of “need” and “opportunity.” Balancing efforts with partners to find out which countries have the greatest need and the least resources will allow limited U.S. funds to make the deepest impact, he said.
John Oldfield, managing director of the WASH Advocacy Initiative, urged Congress to increase funding for foreign assistance, continue appropriations for the Water for the Poor Act, and improve the effectiveness of existing water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) assistance. “Each dollar invested in water and sanitation leads to an 8:1 return from reduced healthcare costs and time savings,” he said. “The world does not need to bury millions more of its children in the coming years when we know how to prevent waterborne disease today.”
Sources: FAO, UNEP, UNICEF, United Nations, WHO.
Image Credit: Adapted from “School girl drinks water from new handpump,” courtesy of flickr user waterdotorg. -
Shannon Beebe, Los Angeles Times
Somali Piracy Shows How an Environmental Issue Can Evolve Into a Security Crisis
›March 14, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffIt has become apparent that real piracy is far different from the lighthearted subject sometimes portrayed in popular culture, and the problem is growing much worse. Besides the tragic cost in lives, the United States, many other nations, and NATO spent roughly $2 billion combined last year to safeguard the busy international sea lanes off the Horn of Africa from Somali pirates. According to the International Maritime Bureau, “hijackings off the coast of Somalia accounted for 92 percent of all ship seizures last year,” and the price tag does not include the costs of reallocating critical military resources.
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Celebrating Ordinary Women Doing Extraordinary Things to Improve Gender Equality and Maternal Health Worldwide
›As coordinator of one of the few forums dedicated solely to maternal and reproductive health in Washington, D.C., I am particularly excited about this year’s 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. This day commemorates ordinary women doing extraordinary things and acknowledges both the progress made and barriers still faced by women worldwide.
“When it comes to the boardroom meetings, government sessions, peace negotiations, and other assemblies where crucial decisions are made in the world, women are too often absent,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her remarks for International Women’s Day. “It is clear that more work needs to be done to consolidate our gains and to keep momentum moving forward.” [Video Below]
For mothers worldwide, some momentum has indeed been gained: Maternal mortality rates dropped from 526,000 a year in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008, according to a report by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. In September of last year, a group of international leaders – including the UN and other multilateral institutions, donors, the business community, and NGOs – launched the “Global Strategy for Women and Children’s Health” and committed $40 billion to save the lives of 16 million women and children in developing countries.
At the sixth meeting of the Wilson Center’s Advancing Policy Dialogue on Maternal Health Series, Mayra Buvinic, sector director of the World Bank’s gender and development group, said: “Investing in women and girls is the right thing to do. It is not only fair for gender equality, but it is smart economics.” She said the World Bank has found that empowering women allows families to better endure economic crises and leads to better futures for their children as well.“When women have better education and health, mothers have greater household decision-making power and prioritize the well-being of their children,” said Buvinic. “In return, children have better educational attainment and are productive adults, building long-term economic growth.”
However, increased investment will only pay off when money is translated into action and stakeholders are held accountable for empowering women.
Since the inauguration of International Women’s Day 100 years ago, the low status of women in many parts of the world has remained relatively unchanged. Many women are still subject to male-dominated values that preclude them from making basic decisions about “who to marry, when to marry, when to have children, and how many children to have,” said Nafis Sadik, special envoy of the UN Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS, in an interview with the Population Reference Bureau. To change this, international development strategies need to prioritize improving gender equality, women’s status, and women’s voice in the political process.
I am grateful to be working in collaboration with extraordinary institutions such as the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who take real steps every day to help improve the lives of women and girls. In collaboration with these institutions, the Wilson Center’s Global Health Initiative is please to announce that it will partner with the African Population Health Research Center in Kenya to co-host a three-part dialogue series with local, regional, and national decision-makers on effective maternal health policies and programs. These in-country dialogue meetings will create a platform for field workers, policymakers, program managers, media, and donors to share research, disseminate lessons learned, and address concerns related to policy, institutional, and organizational capacity building for improved maternal health outcomes.
It is our goal that programs like these will continue to highlight neglected maternal health and issues and galvanize the community everyday – and not just on International Women’s Day.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UN, UN Population Fund, U.S. State Department.
Photo Credit: Afghan girl, courtesy of flickr user U.S Embassy Kabul Afghanistan, and Secretary Clinton’s video address courtesy of the U.S. State Department.
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