Some advocates of geoengineering have touted fake, plastic “trees” as a promising technology for absorbing carbon. But other experts are promoting a solution that also filters water, encourages rainfall, prevents erosion and desertification, offers economic opportunities, and provides a vital source of food for a growing global population: real trees.

“Trees are one of nature’s most ingenious answers to many of our problems,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), at the recent World Congress of Agroforesty in Nairobi. Agroforestry—the practice of integrating trees into farmland—could be one solution to the challenges of climate change, food insecurity, and global poverty.

Storing Carbon, Mitigating Climate Change

In the lead up to Copenhagen, international climate negotiators are devising a scheme to compensate countries for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), which account for 15-20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“All REDD requires is making forests worth more alive than dead,” explained Annie Petsonk, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, at a recent event on REDD and local communities hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and several other environmental groups. Climate experts hope that assigning a monetary value to trees’ carbon stock will encourage states and citizens to better protect and maintain forest areas and plant trees to earn income through the carbon financing market.

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) estimates that agroforestry alone could remove “50 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere over the next 50 years, meeting about a third of the world’s total carbon reduction challenge.”

Buffering Food Security

“Food security is not just about food,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative Closing Plenary, “it is all about security – economic security, environmental security, even national security.” In an “unprecedented initiative,” the Obama administration has made sustainable access to adequate nutrition a top development priority.

“If we can build partnerships with countries to help small farmers improve their agricultural output and make it easier to buy and sell their products at local or regional markets, we can set off a domino effect,” Clinton explained. “We can increase the world’s food supply for both the short and the long term; diminish hunger; raise farmers’ incomes; improve health; expand opportunity; and strengthen regional economies.”

Trees and agroforestry are critical to this effort. “The right kind of trees in the right place can be enormously important for helping to increase the yield of fruit crops,” said ICRAF Director Dennis Garrity at the Nairobi conference.

“Trees often withstand drought conditions and allow people to hold over until the next season,” added ICRAF Deputy Director Tony Simmons.

As Miranda Spitteler, chief executive of Tree Aid, told BBC News, “‘Conventional’ crops are often not native and require expensive inputs, significant irrigation and land preparation in order to produce a successful harvest,” she said. “Trees, on the other hand, often survive when other crops fail” and provide sustenance in the form of fruits, nuts, seeds, leaves, flowers, sepals, and sap.

Research also suggests that the practice of agroforestry improves depleted soils and thus lessens the need for chemical fertilizers to increase crop yield.

Alleviating Poverty

“Trees throughout the world provide new opportunities for farmers to generate cash by growing fruit trees and other high value trees for both local and international markets,” Garrity told the conference.

If a REDD regime decreases illegal logging, planting and harvesting trees in a sustainable manner also “offers an opportunity for timber production and thus alternative livelihoods” for the rural poor, Steiner elaborated.

Displacing People

If REDD is done right, said Steve Panfil of the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance at the UCS event, it could benefit local communities by safeguarding essential ecosystem services; providing employment, income, and a sustainable supply of forest products; and strengthening the land rights of indigenous peoples.

However, Panfil warned, it could exclude vulnerable populations from land and resources, increase government or elite control of target areas, and displace the livelihood activities of the rural poor.

Johnson Cerda, a Quichua indigenous leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon working with Conservation International, worried that government elites bent on winning REDD funds might neglect to consult with local communities, disregard pre-existing local plans, and proceed without the free, prior, and informed consent of affected groups.

These concerns are coming to a head in Uganda, where a project intended to reduce global carbon emissions by planting 25,000 hectares of trees in Mount Elgon National Park is accused of displacing indigenous people from their homes.

A spokesman for the indigenous Benet communities, Moses Mwanga, told IPS News that “the evictions have caused indescribable suffering to the Benet who are now living as squatters, having lost their land and other belongings to armed park rangers.”

The tree-planting effort, a partnership between the FACE Foundation and the Uganda Wildlife Authority, is designed to offset the carbon emissions of a new 600 MW coal-fired power plant in the Netherlands.

In Kenya, the government is considering a measure that would force farmers to plant trees on at least 10 percent of their land. The move comes as Nairobi struggles to evict impoverished, landless settlers from the Mau Forest Complex, a critical water source for the region. Earlier this year, a Kenyan conservation group, Rhino Ark, completed a 250-mile electric fence around the Aberdare mountain range north of Nairobi. The fence is meant to discourage settlers and safeguard the region’s critical water and forest resources.

Moving Forward

“[S]imply locking away forests to secure their carbon as if they are the Queen’s jewels, or putting up the modern equivalent of a Berlin Wall between forests and people, is almost certainly folly and almost certainly a recipe for disaster,” UNEP Executive Director Steiner urged in Nairobi.

To realize the full benefits of trees and avoid conflict, Panfil said that planners and policymakers should guarantee that in all REDD projects and similar efforts:

• Rights to land and resources are respected;
• Benefits are shared;
• Sustainable livelihoods and poverty reduction are explicit goals;
• The project is coherent with broader sustainable development goals;
• Ecosystem services are maintained;
• Full participation of all interested groups is assured;
• Affected communities are given timely and full access to all information;
• The project is in compliance with local, national, and international laws.

With this set of guidelines, trees and forests can help solve our food, climate, and poverty crises—naturally.

Photo: Kokerboom trees survive in the desolate landscape around Keetmanshoop, Namibia. Courtesy Flickr user ibeatty.

Map: “Where the undernourished live.” Courtesy U.S. Department of State and Worldmapper.

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An interactive tool from Columbia University, the Gridded Population of the World (GPW) database, makes it easy to combine population and geographic data, explains Marc Levy, director of CIESIN at Columbia, in an interview with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.

A vast symphony of natural processes sustains our life on Earth. Recognizing the complex interdependence of nature’s concert reminds us of a simple fact: the social, economic, and environmental challenges we face are not isolated from one another, and neither are their solutions. Tom Friedman drives this point home in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Connecting Nature’s Dots.”

“We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems—climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet—separately,” Friedman argues.

“[W]e need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself. Today, they are not,” he says.

Take, for example, water scarcity—a looming problem that the increasing global incidence of droughts, floods, melting glaciers, and drying rivers will likely exacerbate.

“Droughts make matters worse, but the real problem isn’t shrinking water levels. It’s population growth,” says Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About It, in a Washington Post op-ed that points out the integrated nature of our environmental problems. “Excessive groundwater pumping has dried up scores of lakes,” many of which—including Lake Superior—can no longer “float fully loaded freighters, dramatically increasing shipping costs.” Companies reliant on rivers to run their factories or discharge their wastewater have furloughed workers as low flows disrupt normal operations. “Water has become so contentious nationwide,” Glennon continues, “that more than 30 states are fighting with their neighbors over water.”

In addition, while “more people will put a huge strain on our water resources…another problem comes in something that sounds relatively benign: renewable energy, at least in some forms, such as biofuels.” Growing enough corn to refine one gallon of ethanol, for example, can take up to 2,500 gallons of water.

“In the United States, we’ve traditionally engineered our way out of water shortages by diverting more from rivers, building dams, or drilling groundwater wells,” Glennon says. “[But] we’re running out of technological fixes.”

Global food security is also affected. We need the oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, and streams to provide habitat for fish and other marine life—a vital source of sustenance for the poorest segments of our population. Furthermore, wetland areas play a critical role in mitigating the consequences of natural disasters, buffering vulnerable coastal communities from storm surges.

Addressing water scarcity thus requires a complex understanding of the hydrological cycle, its relationship to other natural processes, and humanity’s place in that system.

For years, celebrated environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken has emphasized the interconnectedness of indigenous, environmental, and social justice movements. In his 2007 book Blessed Unrest, Hawken contends that groups as disparate as land rights reformers in the DR Congo and community members fighting to protect the Anacostia Watershed share fundamental values. Grassroots campaigns of a similar bent have sprung up across the globe, all seeking to right humans’ relationships with the Earth, and with each other.

Policymakers in the U.S. and abroad should take a page from Hawken’s book, recognize the natural interdependence of our problems, and design integrated solutions. Otherwise, our strategies to confront the myriad challenges enumerated by Friedman will fall flat.

Photo courtesy Flickr user aloshbennett.

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President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have blamed sinister “foreign powers” for fomenting post-election civil unrest in Iran, but some analysts have fingered another culprit: demography. According to Farzaneh (Nazy) Roudi, program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Population Reference Bureau, two phenomena “provide a backdrop for understanding Iran’s current instability.” First is the country’s youthful population age structure, or “youth bulge”; over 30 percent of Iranians are between the ages of 15 and 29, and 60 percent are under the age of 30. Second is Iran’s surprisingly comprehensive family planning program, which has empowered women to make their own reproductive choices and enter higher education en masse.

“Youth and women are the two agents of change in the country,” said Robin Wright, Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in an interview with The New Security Beat. “The youth bulge and the education of women create a very energetic dynamic that defines politics, the economy, security, and social mores in Iran,” she continued.

This dynamic spurred the post-election protests, a movement that Roudi labels “a manifestation of underlying frustrations” with social and political restrictions, as well as high unemployment. A significant cross-section of the Iranian population—led by but not restricted to young people and women—took to the street, demanding that their voices be heard.

But what were they calling for? And what chance do they have to succeed?

“Youth is clearly Iran’s future,” said Wright. However, she cautioned against making assumptions about what young people desire. “They want their votes to be counted, they want a normal state, and they want to work within the international order,” she explained, “[but] they’re not walking away from the Islamic Republic—not yet, at least.”

Unrest is common in youth-bulge countries, which Foreign Policy’s Richard Cincotta explains are “two-and-a-half times more vulnerable to the onset of political violence or civil conflict than relatively mature populations.” However, Cincotta emphasizes that such movements rarely if ever lead to stable liberal democracy, drawing comparisons between Iran’s current demographic and political situation and that of China twenty years ago—at the time of Tiananmen Square.

Population Action International’s Elizabeth Leahy agrees. Countries with a youthful age structure are “significantly more prone to conflict and much less democratic, on average, than those that had advanced further along the demographic transition,” she says in an article in ECSP Report 13.

However, the success of Iran’s award-winning family planning program—which requires all young couples to undergo a family planning course and makes contraception freely available to the public—has set the country “well on its way to a more balanced age structure,” Leahy reports. And “a mature age structure,” Cincotta relates, “tends to serve as a statistical bellwether for durable liberal democracy.”

So did the clerics unwittingly ensure the elevation of the Republic over Islam by making family planning prevalent in Iranian society?

“I’m very optimistic” that Iran will eventually achieve democratic reform, Wright concluded. “But the question is—how long is ‘eventually’?”

Top photo: A protest in front of the Kluczynski Federal Building Plaza in Chicago on June 16, 2009, soon after the disputed Iranian presidential election. Courtesy Flickr user JSisson.

Second Photo: A young female protester flashes the iconic “V,” a sign of solidarity for supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Courtesy Flickr user .faramarz.

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In what CNN has dubbed her “biggest trip yet,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has commenced an 11-day, seven-nation tour of Africa that will take her to many of the continent’s most volatile states, including Kenya, South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Liberia, and Cape Verde.

“Climate change may well be a predominant national security challenge of the 21st century, posing a range of threats to U.S. and international security,” said Sharon Burke, vice president for Natural Security at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Her remarks at a July 21 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on climate change and security—along with those of two retired vice admirals and former Senator John Warner—amplified the growing chorus of national security experts and military personnel urging Congress to act promptly to address the security implications of climate change.

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.), called climate change “a clear and present danger to the United States of America,” while Burke cited a 2007 report from the Center for Naval Analysis that defined climate change as a “threat multiplier.”

Security Link Could Push Senate Climate Bill

Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scheduled last week’s hearing on climate’s security links in a bid to bolster support for congressional action on climate change, which is currently stalled in the Senate. “Just as 9/11 taught us the painful lesson that oceans could not protect us from terror, today we are deluding ourselves if we believe that climate change will stop at our borders,” he said.

Former Senator John Warner echoed this sentiment, noting that the hearing was an opportunity to “educate the American public on these potential risks to our national security posed by global climate change.”

“Leading military, intelligence, and security experts have publically spoken out that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world. If we ignore these facts, we do so at the peril of our national security and increase the risk to those in uniform who serve our nation,” stated Warner, who recently launched the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate with the Pew Environment Group.

Pentagon Looks to Reduce Reliance on Oil and Drive Innovation

Burke explained that the phenomenon will not only pose “direct threats to the lives and property of Americans” from wildfires, droughts, flooding, severe storms, the spread of diseases, and mass migrations, but will also have “direct effects on the military,” including problems with infrastructure and the supply chain.

As a massive consumer of energy—110 million barrels of oil and 3.8 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2006 alone—the Pentagon has recognized its vulnerability to disruptions in fossil fuel supplies, as well as its potential to develop alternative technologies. As ClimateWire’s Jessica Leber writes in the New York Times: “The long logistics ‘tail’ that follows troops into the war zone—moving fuel, water and supplies in and waste out—risks lives and diverts major resources from fighting.”

According to Leber, two-thirds of the tonnage in Iraq convoys was fuel and water. To mitigate such vulnerability in the future—not to mention in arid, mountainous Afghanistan—DoD has begun testing ways to turn waste into energy, distribute power through “microgrids,” develop jet fuel from algae, desalinate water using little energy, and purify wastewater on a small scale.

“While the military by itself won’t make a market for plug-in vehicles or algae-based jet fuel,” notes Leber in an earlier ClimateWire article, “its investment power can bump emerging climate-friendly technologies onto a larger commercial stage.”

At the hearing, Burke warned against the possible knock-on effects of switching dependence from fossil fuel to other resources like lithium for lithium-ion batteries in electric cars.

The Military Must Manage Uncertainty

Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret.), a member of the CNA’s Military Advisory Board, dismissed the argument that climate data and projections are too uncertain to form a solid basis for action. “As military professionals,” he told the Senate committee, “we were trained to make decisions in situations defined by ambiguous information and little concrete knowledge of the enemy intent. We based our decisions on trends, experience, and judgment, because waiting for 100% certainty during a crisis can be disastrous, especially one with the huge national security consequences of climate change.”

“The future has a way of humbling those who try to predict it too precisely,” Kerry said at the hearing. “But we do know, from scientists and security experts, that the threat is very real. If we fail to connect the dots—if we fail to take action—the simple, indisputable reality is that we will find ourselves living not only in a ravaged environment, but also in a more dangerous world.”

Photo: A convoy of the U.S. Army’s 515th Transportation Division moves fuel around Baghdad, Iraq. Courtesy Flickr user heraldpost.

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The growing concentration of atmospheric carbon has punctured Earth’s climate equilibrium, said Dr. Paul Epstein, pushing the planet toward rapid transitions with serious implications for human and ecological health. Epstein, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, spoke with Amanda Staudt, a climate scientist from the National Wildlife Federation, at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 16, 2009.

Climate Change Is Accelerating

Global warming appears to be advancing more quickly than predicted, Staudt cautioned, because “the developed world isn’t reducing their emissions as quickly as anticipated…there are more and more emissions from the developing world, and they’re increasing faster than expected…[and] some of our natural sinks are less efficient than what we had thought.” Epstein cited a 2000 NOAA study showing that “the oceans have warmed 20 times as much as has the atmosphere” over the past half-century, altering Earth’s hydrological cycle and thus accelerating climate change.

No matter how drastically greenhouse gas emissions are cut, both experts warned, a litany of irreversible changes—including an increase in global average temperature and extreme weather events, desertification, sea-level rise, and species extinction—will continue.

Infectious Disease Increases

A warming climate will increase the range of many diseases, Epstein explained. “The clearest signal we have in terms of infectious disease is in the mountains of Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” he said. “What we’re seeing in Kilimanjaro, in the Tibetan Plateau, in the Andes, is that glaciers are retreating, plant communities are upwardly migrating, and mosquitoes that cause malaria, dengue fever, and so on are circulating at higher altitudes” and latitudes further from the equator. For example, malaria has appeared in Nairobi, a mile-high city, and chikungunya fever—previously confined to Indian Ocean littoral states—induced panic and warranted a front-page New York Times article when several residents of a small Italian town contracted it in 2007.

Extreme weather events help diseases proliferate. Heavy rainfall drives sanitation into clean water supplies, spreading E. coli, cryptosporidium, and other waterborne pathogens. Drought, meanwhile, has facilitated meningitis epidemics in Africa’s Sahel region and the spread of disease-bearing mosquitoes that breed in buckets of water stored during periods of water scarcity.

Assault on Forests, Agriculture

Climate shifts have important consequences for the health of forests and agriculture. The “absence of killing frosts means that [mountain pine] beetles are overwintering, moving to higher altitudes, moving to higher latitudes, even getting in more generations each year,” Epstein said. Drought “dries the resin that drowns the beetles as they try to drive through the bark,” leaving pines trees in the Rocky Mountain Range vulnerable and posing acute economic and ecological challenges to dependent communities.

The higher frequency of droughts, floods, and heat waves, coupled with the spread of weeds, pests, and pathogens, could reduce agricultural production. In addition, studies have shown that many food crops (including cassava) contain higher levels of cyanide at earlier stages of growth as carbon concentrations rise, putting people who ingest them at risk.

Healthy Solutions to Climate Change

To address these challenges, several “stabilization wedges” with inherently healthy characteristics—forest conservation and restoration; agriculture reform; energy efficiency; and wind, solar, and geothermal power production—should be prioritized, Epstein advised. Other, less healthy options—including biofuels, nuclear power, and fossil fuel-based technologies—should undergo thorough lifecycle analyses before winning endorsement, he said.

The design and construction of healthy cities—“green roofs, green buildings, tree-lined streets, biking lanes, walking paths, open space, smart growth, public transport”—as well as a smart energy grid is an essential part of the solution, said Epstein. Countries should also move away from deregulation, privatization, and liberalization of the economy in favor of a system that contains sufficient regulation, public-private partnerships, and appropriate constraints.

“If we do this right,” Epstein concluded, “it can be good for public health, good for security, good for the economy, and we certainly hope it’ll stabilize the climate.”

Top Photo: Red, dying trees signal the spread of beetle infestations in the pine forests of Manning Park, British Columbia. Courtesy Flickr user Tim Gage.

Photos of Amanda Staudt and Dr. Paul Epstein courtesy Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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Climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back” for California’s precarious water system, said W. Michael Hanemann of the University of California, Berkeley, at an event hosted by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 15, 2009. He was joined by Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne, who discussed some of Australia’s policy responses to its increasingly dry, variable climate.

Australian Maladaptations

According to Barnett, Australia has been in an extended drought since 1999, and climate scientists expect it to experience a two-to-seven degree temperature increase by 2100. Higher temperatures and lower rainfall will greatly reduce surface streamflow, which “is what really matters in terms of water,” said Barnett.

Furthermore, climate change is likely to increase weather variability, with extreme events like droughts and floods becoming more frequent. “The problems that we’re having now are not going to go away,” Barnett cautioned. “They’re probably going to get worse.”

In response to a hotter, drier, more variable climate, the Australian government has pursued a number of programs Barnett categorized as “maladaptations.” He focused on three projects in the drought-afflicted Murray-Darling Basin, a region responsible for 40 percent of the country’s agricultural output.

First, Canberra’s Exceptional Circumstances Policy, an agricultural drought-relief funding program, “doesn’t help farmers improve their self-reliance…doesn’t help famers improve drought preparedness, and…doesn’t help climate-change management,” Barnett argued.

Second, the government is “effectively now trading energy for water” by investing in large-scale, expensive, energy-intensive water infrastructure projects—namely, desalination plants and cross-basin transfer pipelines—that will increase greenhouse gas emissions, said Barnett.

Third, Australia’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme “doesn’t necessarily send the price signals to the heavy-polluting sectors of the economy that it needs to,” said Barnett, because it caps the price of carbon permits, lowers fuel taxes, and subsidizes permits for high emitters.

Structural Failures in California

The current U.S. water system “isn’t a system in any meaningful way. It’s a conglomeration of things that happen. It’s fragmented, it’s decentralized, it’s largely public, [and] it’s very parochial,” said Hanemann.

In the western United States, “we depend heavily on the snowpack for water,” explained Hanemann. Yet as much as 89 percent of the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada range could disappear by the end of the century, “which means a loss of water supply unless it’s replaced by equivalent storage.” Poorly defined water rights and inadequate measurements of water use complicate the task of adapting to changing climate patterns, he said.

Correcting Mistakes, Addressing Future Challenges

However, governments can take immediate steps to correct past mistakes and mitigate climate change’s future consequences. Barnett endorsed a proposal for Australia to reduce its emissions 25 percent below 2000 levels. In addition, he called for “structural changes in irrigation,” and said “demand reduction, recycling, and urban water harvesting could go much, much further and would be much, much cheaper…than pipelines and desal[ination].”

Hanemann stressed that the U.S. government’s role must be to “create a record of a [water-use] baseline, and to have clear property rights, in order to allow adaptation to occur.” He proposed that a National Water Commission be created to coordinate water management across the United States.

Top Photo: Flooding rains hit the drought-stricken Outback of South Australia. Courtesy Flickr user Georgie Sharp.

Photos of Jon Barnett and W. Michael Hanemann courtesy Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

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