Public Health is a Security Issue

Often climate change is framed in terms of its impact on temperatures, sea levels, and ice caps; its impact on public health is often overlooked. A degradation of public health is a clear security risk. Yesterday, Paul Epstein, the Associate Director at the Center for Health and the Global Environment with Harvard’s Medical School and Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist with the National Wildlife Federation spoke at the Wilson Center on the potentially dramatic public health effects of climate change.

Climate change will increase the reach of disease. For example, the melting glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro will expose a greater population to malaria-causing mosquitoes. Without previous exposure, they are extremely vulnerable to the disease. Droughts lead to unsanitary water storage which spreads dysentery and dengue fever. Hurricanes flood low-lying areas and destroy infrastructure, which can leave refugees living in unsanitary conditions.

Climate change exposes the delicate interconnections between health and the surrounding climate. By exposing this complex relationship, Epstein explained how factors that threaten state stability, refugees, migrations, and resource scarcity, have roots often times in a public health crisis.

One key area for cooperation between developed and developing nations is on adaptation to increased disease risks caused by climate change. Climate change will increase the risk of diseases like malaria, but economic development, and public health investments can counteract these risks. Climate adaptation funding can help in these areas. At the end of his talk, Epstein said that successful adaptation to climate change will require economic development.

Uganda - The Forefront of Climate Change

Yesterday, the AFP vividly describes how climate change is dramatically changing Uganda’s climate and ecosystems. Key passage:

‘Goretti Kitutu, a climate change specialist at NEMA, said people might soon be competing for water as well.
The snow cap provides a steady trickle of water to the neighbouring communities and feeds the Nile river basin, which includes Lake George and Lake Albert.
"Once this ice disappears we shall have serious problems in the hydrology of the area. We will see reduced water in the lakes and that will impact the Nile basin," Kitutu explained.
"There are plenty of countries that depend on that water," she said. "You could easily have communities that will be fighting over water," she added.’

The article goes on to describe in personal terms how climate change concretely has impacted food production, water scarcity, flood risks and even disease control. Developing countries like Uganda are at the front lines of climate change and this just increases the pressure on major emitters, like China, the US and the EU, to agree to a binding international framework on climate change.

Deforestation on a 'J' curve

The New York Times' DotEarth blog reports that Madagascar's forests are being endangered by the political instability of the country, caused by a recent coup. A group of eleven conservation organizations have put out a letter expressing deep concern about the state of conservation efforts now that the coup has brought about a degradation of law and order. They specifically decry:

"– Open and organized plundering, sometimes using firearms, of precious wood from several natural forests, including national parks such as Marojejy and Masoala, which have been declared World Heritage Sites.

– Intensified smuggling of wild species, especially reptiles such as tortoises, to the national and international markets.

– Proliferation, due to the current impunity, of destructive practices such as illegal mining and slash-and-burn agriculture within protected areas and environmentally sensitive areas."

This event and tragedy illustrate an interesting and disturbing phenomenon: as security in Madagascar falls, poaching and deforestation should be expected to rise, but only to a point. If political instability continues to degrade, and an open civil war begins, we should probably expect less deforestation, as people and companies flee the area. Currently, lawless bands see instability as a way to make quick money, but if open warfare breaks out, they will focus their efforts on survival. I will explain.

The J Curve was a book by Ian Bremmer, published in 2006 that made the assertion that very repressive, closed states (like Cuba or North Korea) are relatively stable, and very open, democratic states (like Western Europe and the U.S.) are extraordinarily stable. However, nations that are transitioning from closed societies to open societies are inherently unstable, and are at great risk of either backsliding towards repression (like Russia over the last decade) or of collapsing into anarchy (like the collapse of Mobutu's Zaire or Milosevic's Yugoslavia). This phenomenon is best shown by the accompanying graph, shaped like a 'J.'

I would propose a corollary to Bremmer's 'J' curve, with regards to political stability and the sustainability and management practices of local forests. On the X axis I would substitute 'political stability' for openness, and on the Y axis, I would put 'forest sustainability' instead of stability. I have reproduced the graph. You can see that I'm stating that countries which are very politically unstable -- characterized by civil wars, falling populations, mass refugees, or localized famines -- will have relatively healthy forests: environmental management by a sort of 'benign neglect.' On the other hand, countries with more stable, but not necessarily effective, governments would have extremely unhealthy forests and high rates of deforestation. These governments would be characterized by corruption, the lack of a rule of law, and little environmental protection. Finally, the most stable countries would also tend to be the most able to devote scarce resources to creating national parks, policing poachers, and valuing the natural environment.

I will illustrate with examples. Returning to my introduction, we see that Madagascar's unique wildlife and rich forests are under severe threat from poaching, logging, and clearing, since a coup two weeks ago. The eleven signatories of the letter say: "During the last 20 years, Madagascar has undertaken significant and exemplary efforts to stop environmental degradation, effectively manage natural resources and preserve its unique biodiversity in the pursuit of sustainable development." This statement implies that Madagascar's relatively stable government of the last two decades was very strong in conserving its forests. Now, lawlessness is causing it to backslide down the curve, as illustrated at right.

On the other hand, a country that would be as close to 'zero' on the political stability curve is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since 1998, the Congo has suffered through a long, intractable, and deadly civil war. One of the unexpected consequences of this civil war, however, has been that the Congo has some of the largest tracts of unspoiled natural rainforest in the world. A few weeks ago, I was doing research on rates of deforestation in tropical forests, and I was surprised to see that, according to a new report from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, the Congo's rate of deforestation was only .2% per annum during the 2000-2005 period. For comparison, the same report states that the Brazilian rainforest was deforested at three times that rate, and Indonesian forests were cleared at 10 times that rate. However, during that same time period, the IISS's Armed Conflict Database reports that over 30,000 people were killed directly in armed conflict during the 2000-2005 period in a war that some estimates claim caused the death of 5.4 million people.

This evidence, therefore, shows that the Congo has been a very bad place to be a commercial logger. Most of the deforestation in the Congo has been localized around population centers as part of slash and burn subsistence agriculture. However, this is changing. Mongabay.com reports that "Logging in the Congo Basin has increased significantly as peace has returned to the region." With peace and increased political stability, the great forests of the Congo will be opened to logging. However, in a country with great corruption, little culture of conservation, few legal limits on logging, and no ability to enforce those laws deep in the jungles, we should expect loggers to quickly move in. This can be illustrated graphically at left. It is paradoxical, therefore, that with increased stability in the Congo we should expect greater deforestation.

The implications of this for the Congo are several: to help alleviate and mitigate that period of transition, aid agencies and foreign governments should help to improve political stability, as well as to implement institutions capable of protecting tropical forests. For Madagascar, however, the implications are that the country should seek a return to political stability and openness. In the meantime, donors should remain vigilant in their efforts to protect forests as much as possible.

Piracy and climate change

Bill Rammell, a junior minister in Great Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, recently suggested that maritime piracy could increase ten-fold around the world as a result of climate change.

The links between piracy and climate change are by no means direct or obvious, but they are nevertheless a source of concern. Climate change can act as a ‘threat multiplier’ by severely eroding natural resources (such as fish, farmland and freshwater) that many coastal communities rely on for livelihoods.

Erosion of natural resources is especially worrisome when combined with weak, corrupt or non-existent local government and law enforcement. The piracy problem in Somalia, although not directly linked to climate change, provides an extreme example of how fishermen can turn to piracy in a country that has not had an effective government for almost two decades.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 80 percent of the world’s fish stocks are either depleted or fished at their limits. Population growth and climate change are likely to exacerbate the pressures in the coming decades.

‘Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime’ is a well-known adage in the foreign aid field. However, when the fields are flooded and the fish stocks are depleted, there is a real danger that poverty-stricken fishermen may turn to less savoury forms of employment.

Korea's Food in Africa

ForeignPolicy.com's Passport blog has a good explanation of how South Korea's Daewoo company has gotten itself wrapped up in an ongoing power struggle in Madagascar. In short, Daewoo leased a huge amount of land (said to be about the size of Qatar) for nothing: the only benefit for Madagascar would be the employment that it would provide.

Many people involved in climate change have been pointing to this and other similar deals whereby richer, mostly East Asian or Middle Eastern, countries set up bilateral deals, in the name of food security. A big fear is that, in a warmer world, patterns of agricultural growth will necessarily change, causing countries to scramble in order to feed their population.

On first glance it is understandable for countries to seek long-term stability for their necessary food imports. However, each deal like this only serves to further segment the world into competing blocks. Moreover, if countries prevent their farmers from seeking the high prices in the global marketplace, they will only reduce the long-term incentives to farm in their country.

A better option for Madagascar in a warmer world is to upgrade agricultural productivity so that it can sell its food on the open market to the highest bidder. Maintaining a free and open market for vital commodities like food will be critical to global adaptation to climate change. While it will always be tempting for wealthier countries like South Korea to monopolize a source, they should resist the temptation. Such a one-sided, neo-mercantalist policy will only serve to antagonize the locals, who must become stakeholders in such a system. However, it is a shame that Madagascar -- a desperately poor and underdeveloped nation (ranked 143 by the UNDP) -- will be deprived of desperately needed foreign investment for upgrading its agricultural sector.

What Zimbabwe's Hyperinflation has to do with Climate Change

The BBC reports today that Zimbabwe is chopping 12 zeroes off of its bank notes. This means that a Z$1 trillion note will now be worth Z$1. This hyperinflation, with annual inflation rates in the millions, is an ongoing tragedy that has devastated what was once one of the strongest states in Africa. Let me be clear, climate change is not responsible for a 1 trillion dollar bank note (this was a human-caused catastrophe), it could be a cause in the future of similar disasters in Africa.

Unfortunately, massive state-level failures, like Zimbabwe's hyperinflation, happen far too often across the continent. While there have been notable exceptions, like Ghana's recent election, too often the news is about war in Sudan, piracy in Somalia, a botched election in Kenya, or war crimes in the Congo.

Into this combustible mix, we will throw the very real threat of a warmer climate. The IPCC's 2007 chapter on Africa explains the particular and unique vulnerability of Africa to climate change. Fully 1/3 of Africans already live in already drought prone areas, and climate change will aggravate that problem. Furthermore, the IPCC makes clear that Africa's poverty and its political divisions will undermine many efforts to adapt to climate change.

However, in Africa, it will seldom be clear whether any single problem, whether it's hyperinflation, piracy, famine, or crop failure, are related to global warming. Rather, it will become clear that climate change will be just one of the many factors, included among poverty, disease, lack of clean water, economic isolation, corruption, and many others which could be underlying causes for Africa's misery. As the IPCC says: "The impact of climate variability and change on food security therefore cannot be considered independently of the broader issue of human security."

There are so many problems that Africa faces, and the challenges of climate change will only make each of them worse.