GECHS

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office has recently begun talking about the challenge of ‘climate security’, and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that “Global climate change must take its place alongside the threats of conflict, poverty and the proliferation of deadly weapons that have traditionally monopolized first-order political attention”. Climate change poses clears risks to Australia’s interests in trade, aid and political stability in Asia. This not inconsiderable risk poses some complex challenges to Australian foreign policy. GECHS SSC member Jon Barnett has recently published a policy note exploring the risks climate change poses to security in Asia and the options for Australian foreign policy.

[Download PDF, 172 k]

Issue 2 of the GECHS newsletter is now available for download. Contributors, writing on the topic of water, include:

• Karen O’Brien on Understanding the Global Water Crisis
• Lyla Mehta on Water Scarcity: Measuring the price of perception
• Jinxia Wang, Jikun Huang and Scott Rozelle on Groundwater Challenges in Northern China
• Kwasi Nsiah-Gyabaah Lessons from Ghana: Sustainable watershed management
• Claudia Pahl-Wostl, Joyeeta Gupta, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Daniel Petry on Water Governance: Global Thinking in Bonn

Download the PDF [746k]

GEHCS associate Siri Eriksen is the lead author of GECHS Report 2007:1 on climate change adaptation and poverty reduction, prepared for the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). The report analyses interactions between poverty and climate change, and recommends measures for incorporating adaptation to climate change in poverty reduction efforts. The main message from the report is the urgency of integrating climate change considerations in all parts of development cooperation, not only in the environmental related activities. Development measures in all sectors influence the vulnerability to climate change of poor people, as well as their capacity to adapt to climatic changes.

A summary in Norwegian can be downloaded here, and paper copies of the report and the Norwegian summary can be provided from the GECHS IPO.

Lyla Mehta, GECHS SSC member, was one of the contributors to the Human Development Report 2006, and her background paper “Water and Human Development: Capabilities, Entitlements and Power” is now available online. The paper highlights how the multifaceted aspects of water are often neglected in official policy debates. It looks at a human development approach to water scarcity and asks what entitlements and capabilities would mean with respect to water. Efforts are made to explore the entitlements framework for both water as a basic need/right and for the wider and more productive uses of water.

See also the full Human Development Report and all background papers, thematic papers and issue notes.

Two policy briefs written by GECHS SSC member Patricia Kameri-Mbote are now available from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In the newest brief of the Navigating Peace series of the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), Kameri-Mbote lays the historical foundation of water management in the Nile River Basin, and recommends policies for facilitating cooperation among the region’s many water users. In her second brief, published by the Africa Program, she argues that rather than being a source of competition, Africa’s dependence on natural resources can facilitate dialogue and provide a pathway to peacebuilding in the troubled Great Lakes Region.