Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI

Twenty thousand girls under the age of 18 give birth each day, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Two million girls age 14 or younger give birth each year. Societal norms often frame adolescent pregnancy as the result of promiscuous behavior, but this year’s State of the World Population Report encourages “a shift away from interventions targeted at the girl toward broad-based approaches that build girls’ human capital, protect girls’ rights, and empower them to make decisions,” says Dianne Stewart, director of the information and external relations division of UNFPA, in this week’s podcast. “When a girl’s behavior is erroneously seen as the problem, changing her behavior may be wrongly seen as the sole solution,” Stewart says. “The reality is that pregnancy often has less to do with girls’ personal behavior and more to do with the behavior of their families, their communities, and governments.” Stewart argues that the vast majority of adolescent pregnancies are not the result of poor decisions or risky behavior, but a lack of control. “Really, adolescent pregnancy equals powerlessness,” explains Stewart. The report notes that 9 out of 10 mothers under the age of 18 are married. “Girls who have no say about whether, to whom, and when they marry likely have no say about whether or when to begin childbearing.” The report’s recommendations include better access to education for girls; youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health information centers; new legislation against child marriage and proper enforcement of legislation where it already exists; creating an atmosphere of equity at a young age for boys and girls; and community support for girls who do become pregnant. UNFPA believes that “childhood must never be derailed by motherhood,” Stewart concludes.  Stewart spoke at the Wilson Center on October 30. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Compared to East Asia and Latin America, the “demographic transition” in Africa has been slower to date, prolonging rapid growth rates and creating very youthful populations. But, explains David Canning in this week’s podcast, “the high level of fertility in Africa doesn’t seem to be something that is set in stone.” It is still possible, says Canning, a professor of economics and international health at Harvard University, for African countries to earn the “demographic dividend,” a phenomenon that occurs when shifts in age structure, from youthful to more mature, align with certain policies and boost economic productivity. While others have recently cast doubt on the continent’s ability to harness this demographic gain any time soon, “the result of the research that we have done has made me much more optimistic,” Canning says. “I think it will not be all countries in Africa that benefit from demographic dividend, but actually some really do have the potential to do it.” National statistics and aggregate data suggest fertility is not changing much, but within Africa there is “enormous heterogeneity,” Canning says. For example, in Ethiopia, the fertility rate – number of children per woman – in the capital of Addis Ababa is below replacement rate (2.1), he says, while women in rural communities are having more than five children on average. His optimism stems from two trends. First, sub-Saharan Africa has successfully reduced child mortality over the last few decades, and lower child mortality often precedes lower fertility rates as parents feel more secure that their children will survive to adulthood, he points out. Second, Canning’s research with partners shows that female education plays a key role in lowering fertility rates. “Throughout Africa, women with higher levels of education are having very low fertility. There aren’t that many of those women yet, but actually education levels are going up,” Canning says, and the research shows “evidence that this effect is causal” by delaying marriage for many women. Once a demographic transition occurs, Canning says foreign direct investment in Africa will help absorb the subsequent youth bulge and provide jobs for young graduates in the early stages. Later, high levels of domestic savings will be key. “There is though the real prospect that some countries may be really successful and some [will] really fail in terms of this,” warns Canning. “Economic growth and economic success will lead to lower fertility, and that lower fertility leads to more success.” But slower transitions may also lead to political instability, if high rates of underemployment frustrate young populations. Sources: Population Reference Bureau. Canning spoke at the Wilson Center on October 15. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Developing countries with youthful populations may have the opportunity to take advantage of a phenomenon called the “demographic dividend,” when a decline from high to low fertility rates leads to slower population growth and a large working age population. But “age structure alone isn’t going to make it happen,” says Jay Gribble of Abt Associates in this week’s podcast. “There have to be other investments and policies that support an enabling environment,” Gribble says, including complementary efforts to strengthen human capital and economic infrastructure. For example, improved health care and education results in a healthier, more productive workforce and improves a country’s overall economic output. “A population without access to health won’t achieve its economic potential,” says Gribble. Similarly, investments in education “also contribute to more critical thinking and better analytical skills that can improve performance on the job, and allow people to take on more complex, higher paying jobs.” Reaching the point where a demographic dividend is a possibility in the first place involves investing in reproductive health and girls’ education in particular. Providing access to family planning services and enabling girls to stay in school reduces teenage pregnancy and allows couples to choose the number and timing of their children, thus decreasing fertility rates, he says. Coming from a period of rapid growth, lower fertility rates increase the size of the working population relative to the total population, thus helping to stimulate and prolong economic growth associated with the dividend. As seen in many East Asian countries during the latter half of last century, policies that strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of state governance are also needed to attract investment. “Foreign investors need to have confidence that laws are enforced, corruption is minimal, and contracts that are signed are enforceable,” says Gribble.  By strengthening the building blocks of a youthful country’s economy – namely its workforce and investment climate – well devised policies can “contribute to an enabling environment for a demographic dividend,” he concludes. Gribble spoke at the Wilson Center on October 15. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes. 

The Wilson Center's Director for the Environmental Change and Security Program Roger-Mark De Souza discusses the role the Wilson Center plays in talking about population and its connections to health, development, the environment, resilience, and security. De Souza spoke to graduate students at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University on October 25. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.  

“Population-related data from census, surveys, and other administrative data can and must be used for adaptation to climate change,” says José Miguel Guzmán in this week’s podcast from the book launch for The Demography of Adaptation to Climate Change last month at the Wilson Center. As the devastation from Typhoon Haiyan shows, population density, poverty levels, and even building construction quality can have a huge impact on how vulnerable a particular area is to extreme weather, flooding, and other effects of climate change. There’s a wealth of existing socioeconomic and geographic data that can help determine human vulnerability and fill critical gaps in climate research, according to Miguel, regional coordinator of demographic health surveys at ICF International, an international consulting company. But it’s often in different places or unavailable to the general public, including other researchers. Miguel and his team work to aggregate data from disparate sources, classifying by common vulnerability indicators, such as household income, and physical, household-specific indicators, such as air conditioning. Finally, the team organizes each indicator further into one of three categories: demographic, human and social capital, or the built environment. “What we propose here is a need to recreate, reprocess, or rearrange existing individual and household data to map and analyze the differential vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities to climate change impacts,” he says. For example, many countries have already built poverty maps by linking household income surveys with census data, he says. The same can be done with climate change and socioeconomic data to develop resilience indicators; understand vulnerability; and inform planning, monitoring, and evaluation of adaptation programming. “[The data is] available, but in order to use [it] effectively for planning for adaptation and building resilient communities, cities, and countries, we need first to identify and define which are the best indicators and know how we can use them in a consistent framework,” Miguel explains.        “This is an important area of research and practical work that can help to connect the dots between individual and community adaptation; between demography and geography; and between environment and population dynamics.” Miguel spoke at the Wilson Center on October 2. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

When it comes to coping with the effects of climate change, cities will be a crucial proving ground for adaptation efforts. Over the next few decades, the percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas is projected to increase to 67 percent – 6.3 billion people by 2050, according to the UN. But because three-quarters of the world’s major cities are located on coastlines, the growing percentage of urban residents means more people will be vulnerable to environmental stressors such as sea level rise and storm surges. “How the world adds 2.5 billion new urban residents in the coming decades is going to shape enormously the livelihoods, the wellbeing, and the environmental security of those urban residents and indeed of our societies and our economies overall,” says the United Nations Population Fund’s Daniel Schensul in this week’s podcast. Urban planning for climate change tends to focus primarily on physical threats – such as flooding and water contamination – he says. But there’s a gap in the climate community’s understanding of human vulnerability. Who is most affected? Why? What financial or social conditions build or diminish adaptive capacity? To fill this gap, Schensul suggests closer attention be paid to population and socioeconomic data, much of which can be found in census and survey results. “The discussion around adaptation…continues even now to be oriented to ‘what’ rather than ‘who,’ to the physical environment and vulnerability and impacts therein, without always the recognition that the end we are trying to achieve is resilience, security, and well-being for people,” Schensul says. “The population perspective can really bring that. To put it very simply, knowing the size, density, composition, and characteristics of the people in exposed areas is critical for finding ways to help them adapt.” Schensul also cautions against paying exclusive attention to the world’s mega-cities, at the expense of smaller, less capable urban areas. With 1.9 billion people currently living in cities smaller than 500,000, these secondary and tertiary cities may in fact face greater challenges to implementing adaptation programs than their larger counterparts. “The majority of the population in coming decades will continue to live in cities under a million people, and these cities are precisely those that don’t necessarily have the enormous resources, the capacity, and the ability to engage with international partners to conduct international adaptation activities,” he says. Schensul spoke at the Wilson Center on October 2. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes. 

“Everyone uses the word ‘empowerment.’ It’s now such an overused word,” says UN Foundation Senior Fellow Alaka Basu in this week’s podcast. “You are empowered if you have a choice of 10 different shampoos in the grocery store; you are empowered if you have 100 kinds of cereals to buy; you are empowered by virtually anyone wanting to sell you something.” Rather than addressing societal structures and attitudes that entrench gender inequality, Basu, who is contributing to a new white paper from the UN Foundation on women’s economic empowerment and reproductive health, sees many efforts to empower the most marginalized women around the world as too focused on the idea of creating marketplace options. “I’m trying to think beyond that way of looking at empowerment and ask, ‘What is meaningful empowerment?’” While NGOs and governments have begun to incorporate women’s empowerment in many development programs, including the post-Millennium Development Goals agenda, popular metrics have struggled to adequately convey whether or not progress is really being made. “How does expansion of women’s choices lead to outcomes in other fields?” Sometimes the answer to that question is not what people think, Basu says. For example, gains in access to the labor force and reproductive health care don’t always lead to gains for women elsewhere in society: Data shows that women who are working are very good at achieving many kinds of gross reproductive health outcomes, but when you look at their attitudes, attitudes towards domestic violence for example, the majority of them still think it’s justified for a man to beat his wife…if she doesn’t produce a hot meal, or if she refuses sex, or if she talks to strangers. “Empowerment in the…sense of just expansion of choices can occur in many ways which do not touch the patriarchy, which do not touch women’s status,” she says, “and therefore to assume women are empowered…[and] ideologies have changed, doesn’t make sense.” Basu urges policymakers to consider women’s empowerment initiatives from the perspective of changing the core attitudes that shape gender inequities. “Ideological change really requires you to question the patriarchy…and here it appears a lot of these so-called empowering factors aren’t quite as effective as we think they are,” she says. In Basu’s eyes, empowerment is best defined as an expansion of agency throughout women’s lives, not in individual sectors. “We mean expansion of choice according to our rules,” she says. “Even bad behaviors can be an outcome of expanded choice.” More women entering the labor force could prove problematic for the family lives and personal goals of some women, for example, but creating a culture where women know they can always seek a job or higher education, if they chose, is an attitude that can create long-term ideological change, she says. Basu also sees property ownership as a pivotal means of core empowerment, by giving women an autonomous position of decision-making authority. “Women become empowered when they can choose from a larger set of options than before…empowerment is a verb, not a noun, so it’s a process, moving from a situation of little or no power... to a situation where you have agency, and have options to apply that agency too.” The key, Basu says, is to try to see the sum of individual components in a greater overall effort: “Life is not a randomly controlled experiment – we need to have a story line that links all of these issues.” Basu spoke at the Wilson Center on October 10. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

“Maps are inherently compelling because they contain a high resolution of information and most people have really been trained since grade school on how to read a map,” says Population Action International’s mapping specialist, Gina Sarfaty, in this week’s podcast. “At PAI we were creating traditional publications and realized that climate change findings scattered across different publications would be useful and compelling to show in one place.” Sarfaty has helped PAI, a reproductive health advocacy NGO, build an interactive website illustrating overlapping data sets on climate change vulnerability, projected declines in agricultural production, and rapid population growth to show “hotspots” where improved access to family planning could help alleviate a number of pressures. “The effects of rapid population growth, high agricultural decline, and low resilience to climate change will pose challenges in many parts of the world,” she says. “We actually identify 30 population and climate change hotspots…where greater attention needs to be paid to the relationship between population and climate change.” The intention of the website, Sarfaty explains, is to bridge PAI’s advocacy campaigns with its research. A guided tour section of the site has a set of pre-made maps accompanying a specific narrative. The linear format keeps “the messages clear and accessible to users, so that they aren’t left trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together to really figure out what the key takeaways are,” she says. But there is also a do-it-yourself explore section where users have access to additional data and can draw their own maps and conclusions. The site also serves as a dissemination tool for PAI’s partners in developing countries, says Sarfaty. “Often there was a challenge of a mutual understanding of terms, but it was great to be able to customize maps and send them over to our partners to make sure that they were getting things that were effective.” Because many of their partners work in places with poor or unreliable internet access, Sarfaty says they made sure the maps can be distributed via hardcopy, USB drives, or email. The site has a clear goal – to make the connection between access to family planning and adaptation to climate change – but Sarfaty cautions against deciding on a narrative and then cherry-picking data to fit it. “I would really recommend starting with the data and seeing what story it tells…Often times if you look at the data first, you may find that it tells a completely different, but also compelling, story that you may not have thought about before.” Sarfaty spoke at the Wilson Center on September 30. Download her slides here. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.  Sources: Population Action International.

More than four decades ago, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren said complacency concerning the impact of human population growth is “unjustified and counterproductive.” More than two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus made the case that “the way we have to reduce the birth rate is family planning and delaying marriage, [thus] expanding the number of years between births,” says Duke University’s William Pan in this week’s podcast Both, though controversial in some respects, are part of the historical arch of population, health, and environment (PHE) studies, he argues. “Everyone knows about Thomas Malthus. He’s the father of demography; he’s probably the father of PHE as well,” says Pan. Malthus is perhaps best known for his apocalyptic predictions of famine and disease, but Pan says his pioneering study of population-environment dynamics laid the groundwork for more nuanced and advanced scholarship today. Still, when it comes to population, “the investigation of synergistic effects is one of the most neglected areas of environmental research,” says Pan. “And that is still true today.” He suggests there is a disconnect between practitioners and academic scholars that needs to be addressed in order to further advance the field. Over the course of a series of seminars at Duke, on “where are the intersections that are most fruitful between academics, researchers, and implementers,” Pans says they concluded “we should be pushing forward with some more NGO-academic partnerships, either through increased training or some other kind of program that can start creating PHE degrees.” He pointed out as a positive example that Cornell is currently advertising for the very first “PHE faculty” appointment. He also recommended standardizing data collection methods to enable better research: When you collect data, we need to have minimum standards for how data are collected and how we define variables that we’re collecting, so that when you’re looking across sites – whether it’s in Africa or Latin America – you can collect a similar variable and hopefully it will mean the same thing, and if it doesn’t mean the same thing hopefully you’ll be able to figure out why it doesn’t mean the same thing. In many ways, the challenges of bringing together development practitioners working on PHE in the field and academics studying these dynamics in the classroom mirror the difficulties of the PHE model itself, which relies on innovative partnerships and interdisciplinary collaboration for success. But failing to address the disconnect blunts the momentum for expansion of the approach, Pan says. “To ignore population, health, and environment today because the problem is tough is to commit ourselves to even gloomier prospects 20 years hence, when the easiest synergies to reduce environment and health impacts will have been exhausted,” Pan says, paraphrasing Ehrlich and Holdren. “Almost word for word this is what they wrote in their paper in 1971, and it’s almost identical to what we should be saying today,” he concludes. “We have to act now.” Pan spoke at the Wilson Center on September 26. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka never expected to be so deeply involved in family planning when she started Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) 10 years ago. CTPH began with a simple mission: to help preserve endangered mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. But, as Kalema-Zikusoka explains in this week’s podcast, they quickly found that to help the gorillas, they had to help the people living around them. CTPH’s initial goal was preventing cross-species cases of scabies and tuberculosis, which at the time were affecting both human and mountain gorilla populations. Gorillas, whose historical ranges stretch beyond the confines of the parks, were entering the land of farmers living on the edges and eating their crops, resulting in cross-infection from shared contact and sometimes-violent responses from villagers. CTPH formed “village health and conservation teams” (VHCT) to promote improved sanitation and treat disease in the human communities to help prevent these cross-species vectors. They also created response teams trained to peacefully deal with gorilla incursions. But the community health teams in particular opened up a new world for CTPH. Kalema-Zikusoka notes that a USAID officer at the time said, “We have money for family planning, but we don’t have money for zoonosis.” She says her initial thought was, “No, family planning that’s not what we’re doing, how could we be distributing condoms to people around the national park?” But after taking note of how many impoverished families in the region were stretched thin by having more children than they could handle, Kalema-Zikusoka says they saw how meeting existing demand for family planning could advance their conservation goals by creating healthier families. VHCT began distributing contraceptives and easy-to-understand narratives about families with fewer children that are all able to go to school, families with many children with only some going to school, and the different life outcomes of the children as a result, she says. Expanding CTPH’s programming beyond conservation to health led to other poverty-reduction efforts. “The [VHCT] volunteers came to us and said, ‘Can you give us goats, and can you give us cows? ...We want to sustain ourselves,’” Kalema-Zikusoka says. “So we gave them group goats and group cows, and they went ahead and developed their own income-generating projects.” They also brought internet access to the area via a new telecenter. The result, she says, is tremendous community buy-in for their initial conservation goals and a much wider impact on people’s lives. There are 120 VHCT community volunteers in Bwindi and Virunga, reaching as many as 44,000 people, she says. “We’ve had over a twelvefold increase in new family planning users and…over 60 percent of women are on family planning now [in Bwindi]…a 50 percent increase in hand washing facilities…and an 11 fold increase in TB suspects referred.” However, the integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approach has its own obstacles, as Kalema-Zikusoka explains. “When you tell a conservation donor, they’re like, ‘So, what’s ‘new family planning users?’ Has the family size decreased?’...It’s hard to measure it in a few years…they don’t understand.” In the future, Kalema-Zikusoka says they hope to create a community health and gorilla conservation center and develop a curriculum in PHE studies. The approach has much to offer in remote, underserved areas like Bwindi and Virunga, she says: “Gorillas are very good at family planning; if we were like them, we’d be much better off.” Kalema-Zikusoka spoke at the Wilson Center on September 26. Do(continued)

“Food is really fundamental to people’s daily existence, and the price or the access to that food is clearly important to them, and people will turn out in the streets when that price spike is unanticipated,” says Emmy Simmons, author of Harvesting Peace: Food Security, Conflict, and Cooperation, in this week’s podcast. Simmons gives an overview of the latest edition of ECSP Report, which examines how conflict affects food security, and how food security affects conflict. The first question, Simmons says, is easy to answer. Conflict affects food security “in every way,” she says. ”It affects availability; it affects access; it affects utilization of food; it affects the predictability and certainty with which people can access their food supplies.” The second question – how food security affects conflict – “is a heck of a lot harder to answer.” For example, the 2008 global food price spike provoked instability in more than two dozen countries, but food prices were just part of the issue. “Part of the rest of the picture had to do with trends in urbanization,” Simmons says. More than half of the population of Asia and a growing proportion of Africa live in cities, not producing their own food, which means they have no fallback when markets change. Conflict nearly always has multiple, complex causes, she says. “The conflict people have actually made a coherent and focused effort to understand causality, whereas I think the food security side…our rigorous understanding of causality of food insecurity or food security is actually somewhat deficient.” Simmons says she found quantitative data on both food security and conflict during her research, but the data is “rarely brought together.” She classified five ways in which food can affect conflict: triggering conflict, catalyzing recurring conflict, building momentum toward conflict, providing incentives to join or support conflict, or sustaining conflict. For example, in Darfur “the strategy of war was the strategy of destruction of food and the capacity to produce food,” Simmons says. In conflicts like these, agencies like USAID intervene to help under humanitarian imperatives to feed the hungry and rebuild lives, but they “tend to have short attention spans,” she says, despite the fact that “the literature is so strong on this, that recovery from conflict is the work of a generation or more.” Simmons concludes by encouraging USAID to think more long term and more think micro-economically in their humanitarian interventions in places like Darfur. “How are the communities doing? How are the households doing?” she urged. Paying attention to improving access to food in these contexts is crucial. She also encouraged more collaboration with the academic world. The conflict analysis community “could contribute through joint analysis to our understanding of how to go forward to address issues and challenges of food security in a time of fragility and conflict and weak governance in so many countries.” Simmons spoke at the Wilson Center on September 12. Download her slides to follow along.

When Tropical Cyclone Haruna struck in February 2013, leaving thousands without shelter and tens of thousands without water, it was a test for Blue Venture’s integrated approach to development in southwest Madagascar. But they passed with flying colors. “By the time the first aid organization arrived just to collect information, we had distributed to 17 villages already,” Vik Mohan says in this week’s podcast. “We were the mouthpiece of the community, and because of our infrastructure on the ground, because of our good relationships with the community, we were able to procure and disseminate supplies that the community needed.” Mohan, medical director of the London-based NGO Blue Ventures, spoke at the Wilson Center this summer during a discussion on integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs in coastal Madagascar and The Gambia.  Over the past decade, Blue Ventures has worked on marine conservation and ecotourism in the remote Velondriake region of Madagascar, beginning with a focus on octopus fisheries. “Blue Ventures, thanks to this initiative, manages the largest network of locally managed marine areas in the Indian Ocean, all designed to enable communities to live and manage their marine resources in a sustainable way,” Mohan says. And their programming soon expanded. “Through our work with those communities, we unearthed a huge unmet need for health care, and health education, and family planning in particular,” he explains. According to Mohan, girls in the region have sex as young as 8 years old and give birth as young as 11 – he met a woman in one village with 26 children. This growth rate meant the population was doubling every 10 years and maternal and child health indicators were poor. In response to this demand, Blue Ventures started operating clinics that, among other basic health interventions, offer voluntary access to and information about family planning. Now, “women who live in our 40 villages are no more than five kilometers away from a service point for family planning,” Mohan says. “The proportion of women using contraception has gone up five-fold in the six years since we’ve been operating this program, and mirroring that the birth rate has fallen by 40 percent.” Offering both health and environment services, Blue Venture’s holistic approach and community outreach puts them in a position to help when the communities need it most. “Working in an integrated way creates so many synergies that we’re now reaping the rewards of,” Mohan explains, “[because the communities] value our health education work, we get buy-in for our conservation work because they trust us as an organization.” When Haruna made landfall, the biggest cyclone to hit the area in more than 35 years, Blue Ventures’ local distributors were already in communities and immediately able to gather information about damage and needs. They then reached out to their national and international network and – as the only functioning aid organization in the area – were able to distribute valuable supplies in a timely manner. So, “how well can a conservation organization do at providing health care? Can we have an impact? We think so,” Mohan says. “Not only does working holistically, working in an integrated way, offer huge amounts of benefits in terms of enabling us to achieve our conservation and health goals more effectively,” he concludes, “we’re building capacity and ability to adapt to situations as communities experience them.”

“It seems to me the food security linkage suffers from the same problem that an awful lot of the environment and conflict literature suffers from: There are more negative cases than positive cases,” says Edward Carr in this week’s podcast. “In other words, you have a lot of cases where there is a [food] price spike and no violence or no conflict – more than cases when that does happen.” Carr, professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and a former AAAS Fellow at USAID, spoke at the Wilson Center on September 12 during the launch of Harvesting Peace: Food Security, Conflict, and Cooperation. Authored by Emmy Simmons, the latest edition of ECSP Report probes the linkage between food security and conflict, an issue that rose to prominence following the 2008 global food price spike that touched off violent riots around the world. Although there is a robust body of research supporting the idea that conflict leads to food insecurity, the extent to which food insecurity causes conflict is less understood. According to Carr, the difficulty of making that link arises in part from the wide array of factors that precipitate the emergence of political instability or conflict. “What if [food security] is the seventh, eighth, or tenth most important thing going on in a particular conflict situation?” he asks. “If it’s that far down the line, is this something that USAID or any other donor organization should be looking at, or should they be dealing with the first six problems?” At a time of shrinking budgets and fiscal sequestration, the development community must carefully focus its limited resources, says Carr. “While root causes aren’t always addressable…we need to understand what we’re trying to address when we are designing and implementing development programs.” Carr describes a hypothetical scenario in which an unusually heavy rain, followed by drought, leaves farmers in a sub-Saharan African village without crops or alternative income, and therefore unable to meet their food needs. To demand assistance from their government, the community marches on a local government office. When the government is unresponsive, the march turns into a violent riot.   “In this scenario, do we want to say that food security was the cause of the riot?” asks Carr. “Or was it a state that lacked the capacity to maintain its infrastructure in the face of climate variability or meet the emergency needs of its people?” Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes. 

Although major global action remains stymied in many respects, policymakers around the world are increasingly at least recognizing the need to increase resilience to the effects of climate change. But are the consequences from hastily implemented initiatives being adequately considered? Perhaps not. “As we develop ways to respond to climate change, we need to go in with our eyes open and understand that there are ways to do that well and ways to do that poorly,” says former ECSP Director and current Director of Environmental Studies at Ohio University Geoff Dabelko in this week’s podcast. “If we do not get beyond our narrow, siloed approach to climate change…we can actually exacerbate existing lines of conflict or create ones that weren’t there before.” For example, when the European Union mandated in 2008 that 10 percent of transportation fuels must be biofuel-based by 2020, the decision was initially lauded as an aggressive move to diversify transportation energy usage and curb CO2 emissions. But, Dabelko points out, the sudden demand for biofuels contributed to unforeseen environmental and social stressors, including a doubling of palm oil prices in Malaysia and Indonesia, which subsequently accelerated deforestation and ignited conflict associated with land usage. Dabelko emphasizes that more cross-sectoral and forward-thinking approaches are needed to prevent destructive, unintentional outcomes of climate policy. “We think it’s critical to have these issues on the table upfront,” he says. “Because if we don’t, and we pretend to be surprised when some of these interventions unwittingly or unexpectedly create problems in these other dimensions of conflict, then we really run the risk of undercutting both the larger rationale for making this transition, as well as potentially delegitimizing or undercutting specific tools for how to do it.” Dabelko spoke at the Wilson Center on May 16 at the launch of ECSP’s report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation. Friday podcasts are also available for download on iTunes. 

“If I ask you to consider the image in your mind of a migrant girl, probably you – like me – have a vision of a girl embarking from a rural village on a trek to the city,” says Mark Montgomery of the Population Council in this week’s podcast. But, “Is that what the empirical realities show?” Perhaps not, he explains: “It is far more common for urban and migrant girls to come from other cities and towns than it is for them to come from rural villages.” Montgomery spoke May 14 at the launch of a new Population Council report, Girls on the Move: Adolescent Girls and Migration in the Developing World. Among other issues, the report underscores a lack of research on the motivations and condition of adolescent girls migrating between cities and towns. A majority of the world’s population already lives in urban areas and cities will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Particularly in developing countries, young women are drawn to cities in search of social and economic opportunities, and the decision to relocate can have dramatic consequences, Montgomery says, and “the research community has not caught up to and recognized these demographic realities.” Girls on the Move encourages researchers to not only focus on the vulnerability of rural-to-urban migrants, but also on those who move between cities. “We must know: Are girls coming from other cities and towns advantaged and savvy about cities and city life?” Montgomery asks. “Or do they suffer from many of the same disadvantages that rural girls might experience? Today, we simply don’t know.” “This is one of the many evidence gaps, and one of the most important, that really must be addressed if we are to set policies and programs on a proper foundation of evidence.” Download Montgomery’s slides to follow along.                                                                              Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.