by Alex Evans | Aug 29, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on “the looming food crisis”:
A “perfect storm” of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world’s big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals [in order to grow crops for biofuels instead], the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. “Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer,” says the US Department of Agriculture.
We first posted on this subject on Global Dashboard back in March, and Vidal’s right to be worried. Here’s a link to the one page table we published a few months back showing how the major scarcity trends reinforce one another – and how it’s absolutely the issue of food security we really need to be worrying about.
What’s alarming isn’t just the scale of the challenge, but the extent to which managing it requires a degree of policy coherence both within and between governments that just isn’t there.
by David Steven | Aug 9, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Some few months ago, I had dinner with a State official who tried to convince me that George Bush was a ‘thought leader’ on climate change – yes really. Time will tell what the Decider thinks we should do about the problem. But in the meantime, Steve Clemons has a useful briefing on what the US President hopes to get out of his climate change summit…
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Celebrated climate scientist James Hansen has blunt tidings in the last edition of New Scientist: “I find it almost inconceivable that ‘business as usual’ climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century.”
(Wondering how a 5 metre rise would affect you? This excellent hacked version of Google Maps has the answer.)
Bottom line on what needs to be done to avoid this, according to Hansen:
The global community must aim to restrict any further global warming to less than 1 °C above the temperature in 2000. This implies a CO2 limit of about 450 parts per million or less.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Lots of hopeful coverage last week about the find, made by Boston University researchers, of a massive underground lake in Darfur. The Independent was pretty typical:
In the dry wasteland of Sudan’s war-racked Darfur region, the imprint of an ancient 8,000sq-mile underground lake has been discovered by geologists from Boston University. If confirmed, a lake as big as the area of Wales could replenish the region for a century. It is also raising hopes that one cause of the devastating civil war could be alleviated if drinking water is pumped to the surface.
The Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz, who led the research, hopes up to 1,000 deep wells would bring some relief to an area where conflict between nomadic herders and farmers has been exacerbated by climate change and dwindling water supplies.
But a thoughtful article in the New York Times yesterday argues that the find may, if confirmed, be as much a curse as a blessing. Alex de Waal is quoted as saying,
Like all resources water can be used for good or ill … If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.
Exactly right. In resource-scarce contexts, environmental goods are assets: so the key questions are ones like: who owns them? Who gets to use them? Who gets to lend them? And who gets to trade them? Unfortunately, most donor agencies these days are pretty bad at integrating these kinds of question into their development programming. But as resource scarcity takes centre stage in an increasing number of developing countries, watch this space…
by Alex Evans | Jul 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, given at Chatham House earlier today, is worth watching (transcript on the FCO website here). He’s proposing to simmer the UK’s ten current international priorities down to perhaps three, mooting radicalisation, climate change and the EU as his “starters for ten”.
Especially welcome was the emphasis on Foreign Office reform, policy coherence and the need for a new theory of influence for 21st century diplomacy (which, regular readers will know, David Steven and I both have a tendency to bang on about). In his conclusion, he noted that:
The Foreign Office is a unique global asset. But diplomacy has to be allied to other assets across government, in particular, aid, trade, investment and military intervention. How can we improve coordination across the FCO and other departments on particular countries and challenges?
[…and there’s the question of] how can we engage beyond Whitehall, with faith groups, NGOs, business and universities. The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters.
But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun farmer, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.
But the real stroke of genius here was to ask Avaaz to co-host: an awesomely smart piece of positioning. Rather than waiting for Avaaz to dump a global petition on him during some crisis still to come, Miliband has actively set out to court their global network of supporters – and succeeded. Having been invited to co-host and canvass questions for Miliband from their global roster of members and supporters, Avaaz are now positively purring about David – titling their coverage of his speech, “David Miliband – a new diplomacy?”
