Friday Podcasts From ECSP and MHI

“There’s a common myth that migrant girls are forced to move against their will, but in fact what we’ve found through our research is that most migrant girls are involved in the decision to move,” said the Population Council’s Miriam Temin in this week’s podcast. Temin spoke at the launch of her and her colleagues’ new report, Girls on the Move: Adolescent Girls and Migration in the Developing World, about the economic incentives for girls to migrate and the risks involved for them. The common myth is that girls and young women are forced to be on the move, either by their families or their communities, she said. However, some do migrate by their own volition, often to earn income for their families back home. Temin explained that this voluntary tendency is usually caused by “adolescent girls internalize[ing] family obligations, community obligations” and “gender norms.” Migration for girls exacerbates social isolation, she said: “It is a chilling fact that the most vulnerable adolescent girls have the fewest friends [and] the least access to social support through their families.” The preface of the report says that without proper support, girls can become more and more isolated and more prone to abuse and economic exploitation. “Migrant girls need safety nets which help them gain access to social support, recognizing that they’re less likely to have it than others,” said Temin. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“What I found in Bangladesh was that [climate migration] wasn’t a straight line,” says Lisa Friedman in this week’s podcast. It’s “a far more complicated story.” Friedman is the deputy director of ClimateWire, a news service that brings readers daily information related to climate change and its effects on business and society. At the launch of ECSP’s new report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation, Friedman discussed her experiences reporting on climate-induced migration in Bangladesh – one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in the world, due to its low-lying geography, dense population, and high poverty levels. “One of the things that stood out to me in my reporting was my own bias,” she says. “The sexy story was the potential for transboundary conflict between countries, when a real issue within Bangladesh was the number of people having to leave coastal areas for cities.” Although climate migration is often characterized as primarily involving the crossing of international borders – Bangladeshi migrants pouring into India, for example – internal movements within a country can strain already burdened infrastructure, give rise to urban slums, and increase the potential for domestic conflict. “The challenge remains to explain to people not just the big stories – the potential for thousands of people to leave one country and go to another and the conflicts that might produce – but why does it matter it matter to Ohio or any other place if people leave coastal areas in a desperately poor country and move to an urban area?” says Friedman. “This sort of internal migration is something that doesn’t get a lot of attention from the news media.” Friedman spoke at the Wilson Center May 16. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes. 

“We can’t talk about a ‘green economy,’ ‘green technologies,’ or ‘green energies’ only by talking about technologies that are stamped out at one end of a large global process and deployed for cleaner energy,” says Stacy VanDeveer in this week’s podcast. “The green economy, or green energy transition, requires a lot of metals, and a whole lot of things that are mined,” he says. “Because of the scale of the industry now, the scale of the environmental and social change being driven by mining globally is actually quite stunning.” VanDeveer is an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, and co-author of ECSP’s recent report, Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation. In his chapter, “Resource Curses: Redux, Ex-Post, or Ad Infinitum?,” VanDeveer writes that an unintended “backdraft” of the green economy may be more cases of the “resource curse” – the tendency of valuable natural resources in developing countries to bring more bad (corruption, pollution, violence, etc.) than good to the population. Coltan, Lithium, and other rare earth metals associated with green technologies operate on the same boom-and-bust mining cycles that coal and other valuable resources have in the past, he says, creating the potential for instability, conflict, or misery in new countries coming into quick, commodity-driven riches without the ability to harness them for equitable growth. Once established, VanDeveer says, the legacy of patron-client interactions, violent coercion, and corruption often prevalent in mining communities does not go away. “Even though Coltan goes out of fashion, violence and money do not go out of fashion,” he says, pointing to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for example. “The legacy of those vicious politics persists.” “Without a focused attention on where the stuff of the green economy or green energy transition comes from, ‘greening the resource curse’ is the most likely outcome,” VanDeveer says. VanDeveer spoke at the Wilson Center on May 16. Download his slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“Sustainable food security means that food production has to be climate smart,” says Susan Bradley in this week’s podcast. “In order to achieve climate smart food security, we are going to have to build resilience and adaptive capacity into agriculture.” Bradley, division director for the USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, is working to implement the U.S. government’s Feed the Future Initiative. Unveiled by the Obama Administration in 2009, the $3.5 billion “whole of government” initiative aims to alleviate hunger and increase food security around the world. Understanding the linkages between climate change and food security has been one of Bradley’s top priorities. “Climate change and its impacts are completely cross-cutting and will impact almost everything that we are trying to do in Feed the Future,” she says. Bradley discusses a number of key “lessons learned” through her time with Feed the Future, including her work with drought-resistant crops, flood resilience, and post-harvest storage. However, she also says that broader human development efforts are necessary to compliment agricultural interventions, describing the need for increased micro-savings and women’s empowerment programs. “Almost every social outcome has greater positive impacts when a woman is empowered to be controlling resources and influencing decisions within the household,” she says. “We therefore consider empowering women to be at the heart of facilitating household adaptation to climate change.” Bradley spoke at the Wilson Center on May 7. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“All through Papua New Guinea, in every province, there is logging and mining, but we are the first conservation area,” says Lisa Dabek in this week’s podcast. Dabek is the director of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Project (TKCP), an effort of the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo that works to protect tree kangaroos while empowering communities in Papua New Guinea’s YUS Conservation Area to manage their natural resources, health care, and food security. “It is the people of YUS’s job to preserve the environment for their grandchildren,” she says. But “because these are such remote communities, they are not getting the services they’re supposed to get from the provincial government.” TKCP began a process of outreach to help meet existing needs for better food security and health care, including reproductive and child health. The two-way engagement between communities and the conservation effort was important for its success. “From the very beginning we’ve talked about each clan setting aside a portion of their hunting land, so that we were not going in and telling them to stop hunting, but we were saying there’s a need for creating a sustainable natural resource for them, for food and for cultural aspects,” Dabek said. “It’s been very fascinating for all of us to have these discussions in the communities,” she continued, “because you can talk about how you need healthy water, you need enough wildlife in the forest to be able to hunt to feed your family – all of these links that sometimes don’t get talked about in conservation projects.” Dabek spoke at the Wilson Center on May 30.

“Exposing young people to information about PHE [population, health, and environment] and food security dynamics can be a powerful tool to steer their interests and commitment to care for the environment and become sexually responsible individuals,” says PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. (PFPI)’s Joan Castro in this week’s podcast. PFPI’s Youth EMPOWER project has trained close to 300 “youth peer educators” in the southern Philippines to promote environmentally sustainable livelihoods, clean up the environment, raise awareness of reproductive health, and encourage participation in local government. Read more: http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2013/05/joan-castro-engaging-youth-create-change-philippines

“I have been amazed and inspired by the youth that I’ve worked with, with their dedication and motivation to help their countrymen and to try to make their communities better places,” says Leslie Mwinnyaa in these week’s podcast. When Mwinnyaa arrived in the Ellembelle district of coastal Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer she found a multitude of development challenges. Fishermen routinely use illegal techniques like chemicals, lights, and dynamite that decimate fish stocks; “sand winning” and mangrove clearing increases erosion, leaving communities vulnerable to flooding and reducing breeding grounds for local fish; poor waste and refuse management contributes to disease and poor health; and teenage girls have twice the national rate of pregnancy. To address these connected issues she enlisted the help of the BALANCED Project, an NGO based out of the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center, and reached out to local partners, including a local nursing school, to develop an integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) program. The resulting Hen Mpoano, or “our coast,” project trains young nursing students to be advocates for reproductive health (especially for other young people), natural resource management, and sanitation. Hen Mpoano has established clubs in four high schools and 26 junior high schools. “Communities have continued to express their appreciation for the PHE project. It has really been a vehicle for outreach programs at the community level,” Mwinnyaa says. “It has opened the door for communication about illegal fishing, sand winning, reproductive health, and environmental sanitation.” Mwinnyaa spoke at the Wilson Center on April 30 as part of a conversation about youth and PHE. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“Improving the equity of women, the treatment of women and girls, the value of women and girls in society is a very important means of improving population health,” says Dr. Anita Raj of the University of California, San Diego. Traditional societal expectations on women and girls in India contribute to high early marriage rates, low birth spacing, high rates of sexually transmitted infections, and high rates of abuse. Efforts to improve maternal and child health should take these and other gender inequities into consideration. “The need to work on these issues and work on them immediately cannot be overstated,” she said. Raj spoke at the Wilson Center on April 18; download her slides to follow along. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“Violence against women is obviously a major factor in maternal and reproductive health,” said Jay Silverman, codirector of the Program on Gender Inequities and Global Health at University of California, San Diego. Silverman touched on issues ranging from hypertension to early delivery – “all of these things occur at significantly higher rates among women who have an abusive partner,” he said. Silverman spoke at the Wilson Center on April 18. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“We know that a number of these countries in Africa have the least to do with climate change in terms of emissions, but they are the most vulnerable, and they are the ones with the least capacity to deal with the effects of climate change,” says Clive Mutunga in this week’s podcast. Mutunga, a senior associate at Population Action International, discusses the results of a study PAI conducted looking at the entwined and related impacts of climate change and population growth, as well as other factors like water scarcity, on Kenya and Malawi.

“[Family planning] has great value for women’s health, for children’s health, but it also has great value for the environment, and it can also help…to promote economic development,” says Eliya Zulu in this week’s podcast. Zulu talks about the research he has conducted as executive director of the African Institute for Development Policy and emphasizes the need to pay attention to population and climate issues both at higher levels of development policy discussion and grassroots action. “We need to make sure we integrate at all levels,” he says.

There’s renewed interest in looking at future trends at USAID, said Steven Gale, a senior advisor at the agency. But “we’re always asking ourselves, ‘what is the development goal that [USAID] wants to achieve, and how is this megatrend going to increase or decrease the actual probability’” of that goal will be met? In this week’s podcast, Gale describes the role of futures analysis at USAID, including the history of past efforts and similarities to other forward-looking projects, like the National Intelligence Council’s quadrennial Global Trends reports. Gale spoke at the Wilson Center on  Feburary 26 about Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Download his slides to follow along with the presentation. Friday podcasts are also available for download from iTunes.

“The proliferation of disasters has gotten a lot of people talking about resilience, about how we can lessen our risk, and how we can recover more quickly from disasters of all kinds,” says Laurie Mazur in this week’s podcast. Mazur, who has contributed to the Toward Resilience series, describes the qualities of communities that can weather adversity, including social cohesion and the ability to make decisions for themselves. Above all, she reiterates that “humans are nothing if not resilient,” and the governance structures and disaster mitigation schemes we employ should focus on capitalizing on the native resilience, rather than infringe upon it.

“We believe that if you want to respond to critical development issues like climate change, that you need to address the social dimensions of resilience,” says Roger-Mark De Souza of Population Action International (PAI) in this week’s podcast. “If you want to address climate change and you only look at mitigation, you are missing some of the important components,” he said. PAI, which advocates for family planning in developing countries, starts from the standpoint that allowing couples to decide how many children they have leads to “investments in education and technology, providing opportunities for additional economic growth, enhanced development, and ultimately helping to build resilience and adaptive capacity.”  

In this podcast, Imelda Abano, who writes for Eco-Business in the Philippines, discusses her experiences reporting on population and environmental issues. “It’s a very tough job for us to be reporting on these issues, but we have the responsibility to raise awareness…and we have to push for government action,” Abano says. She describes the challenges facing Filipino journalists, especially when writing on controversial topics like population, and the opportunities for her country after the passage of a reproductive health bill in January (though this bill was recently delayed by the Supreme Court).