Darfur's Precarious Environment

Today, we’re continuing our conversation about the impacts of conflict on the environment and, in the process, beginning to recognize the impacts on rebuilding that environmental degradation brings with it.  This post has to do with over-exploitation of natural resources, mentioned on Monday as one of the three main environmental concerns.  This is an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the document Darfur: Relief in a Vulnerable Environment, which describes Darfur's environment in the context of the on-going conflict. You should be able to get to the pdf here.

From the report:

"Darfur’s environment is particularly resource poor and suffers from very high natural variability and unpredictability.

Over the last three decades demands have increased as the population has risen, and the resource base has been eroded by unmanaged intensification of farming, grazing and deforestation. Over the same period the native administration system has been eroded, rainfall has been low, populations have migrated to more fertile areas, and political instability and violence has increased.

The environment is a crucial part of the current conflict. Environmental resources are being fought over and are being destroyed as a feature of the violence. The drivers for conflict over environmental resources have been significantly exacerbated by the current crisis. Actions include the destruction of crops and water points, the restriction of livestock migration causing local overgrazing, and the destruction of trees and rangeland.

Traditional environmental management systems have collapsed in the context of conflict.

A high level of deforestation is taking place in the context of conflict.

The current crisis has caused unprecedented concentrations of demand for water, forest products, grazing and other environmental resources. This has caused significant localised depletion of these resources.

Protection provided to IDPs is significantly worsened by the depletion of natural resources, as resource collection becomes more difficult.

The humanitarian programme is heavily dependent on environmental resources. The depletion of resources already limits the delivery of the relief programme.

Livelihoods that are thriving in the context of the crisis, such as brick-making and charcoal-making, are placing unsustainable demands on natural resources. These are important livelihoods in the IDP camps.

The heavy environmental impact of prolonged displacement is degrading some of Darfur’s most valuable agricultural land. Many IDP camps are built around agricultural market towns, which means that land degradation affects prime farmland, undermining livelihoods for both the displaced and the host population, affecting the crisis as well as the future recovery period.

The demands for forestry will be considerable at the time of reconstruction. With 2 million people displaced, and a single family compound requiring 30–40 mature trees to be rebuilt, the demand for reconstruction if all IDPs returned would be 12–16 million trees.

Environment as a cross-cutting theme is not adequately integrated in the relief programme and suffers from a lack of technically skilled personnel. The omission to undertake monitoring of groundwater depletion in camps in an arid area over a three-year period is a significant one.”

Environmental resources are crucial to people’s lives, livelihoods and cultural identity in Darfur. One of the most important livelihood assets in a subsistence economy are the environmental resources."

But in response, I find this article hopeful; it illustrates that there are people looking at solutions and new ways of managing these crises. You can find the specific article by clicking the link and downloading the environment and natural resource management link.

What are your thoughts about it?

Habitat Destruction

From The Trampled Grass

“When a conflict or crisis hits, the immediate priority is to save lives and minimize human suffering. The focus is on immediate, short-term, human-centered needs. Environmental concerns are relegated to secondary importance. But, although it may seem that environmental concerns should remain a low priority during wars and human crises, the high degree of dependency on natural resources of most communities in Africa and in many parts of the developing world makes it essential that the environment remain a high priority. A degraded environment puts people’s future livelihood security at risk, setting the stage for further political instability and conflict.”

The Trampled Grass is a report produced to examine the impact of conflicts on the environment.  It's an interesting read that you can find here.

In the meantime, it sets out three main environmental concerns:

            Habitat destruction and impacts on wildlife

            Over-exploitation of natural resources

            Pollution

This report comes from NASA's earth observatory site.  The report is copied below, but you can click here to see the satellite images of the Gishwati Forest. 

"Rwanda is a small, mountainous country in east-central Africa, just a few degrees south of the equator. The country’s high elevation provides it with a tropical temperate climate, two dry and two rainy seasons each year, and relatively abundant surface water. With an estimated population in excess of 9 million, Rwanda is mainland Africa’s most densely populated country, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Although protected areas in Rwanda increased slightly between 1990 and 2005, the large population puts intense pressure on the land.

That pressure is evident in this pair of images showing deforestation in Gishwati Forest, a protected area in the northwestern part of the country, not far from Lake Kivu. NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite captured the top image on July 19, 1986. NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite captured the bottom image on December 11, 2001. Densely forested areas are deep green.

According to UNEP, the reserve’s forests were largely intact in 1978, and substantial forest cover still remained in 1986. But in the 15 years that elapsed between these images—a time that spanned the country’s tragic genocide—wave after wave of refugees arrived in Gishwati Forest and began clearing it, often for subsistence farming. By 2001, only a small circular patch of native forest remained—1,500 acres of the forest’s original 250,000.

Large tea estates occupy the central and northern parts of the reserve. The tea-growing areas are lighter green, and the dark green patches are probably plantations of eucalyptus or pine trees. (The wood boilers that produce the heat for drying tea consume huge amounts of firewood.)

Rwandan deforestation was driven by the need for food, medicine, charcoal, and timber, especially for commercial products. But the loss of so many trees in a rainy, mountainous country has had severe environmental consequences. In addition to tremendous loss of biodiversity, the region experiences soil erosion and degradation and landslides. UNEP hoped that innovative agroforestry techniques would help restore the vegetation, and reported that the forested land area in Rwanda had grown between 1990 and 2005. Reforestation efforts at Gishwati in the past few years have increased the remnant native forest to about 2,500 acres.

In 2008, the Rwandan government and the American conservation group Great Ape Trust of Iowa began a partnership to restore a corridor of native forest between Gishwati and the much larger Nyungwe Forest National Park, in southern Rwanda. They hope the corridor will preserve the genetic diversity of Rwanda’s remaining populations of chimpanzees."

Call for Action -- Congo

Before your weekend, take a minute to support efforts to make a difference in Congo.  Your action now WILL make a difference. The link to the petition is at the bottom of the post.

From the Change.org call for action:

Civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo is the planet’s deadliest conflict since World War II. Four million people have died in the last thirteen years. Rape is so frequent, it’s been called the “worst place in the world to be a woman.” 

You can help. The first step to ending the mass killing, widespread rape, and child trafficking in Congo is ensuring free and fair elections this Fall. That’s why a coalition of student, religious, and human rights organizations is using Change.org to ask President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to immediately appoint a Special Envoy to the Congo. 

(The groups are Africa Faith & Justice Network, A Thousand Sisters, Enough! Project, Falling Whistles, Free the Slaves, Friends of the Congo, Jewish World Watch, STAND)

If the envoy isn’t appointed in the next few weeks, he or she will likely arrive too late to help ensure the elections go smoothly, so we have just a short time to act. 

With 5.4 million dead, 1.9 million people in displacement camps, elections fast-approaching, and armed groups committing mass atrocities every day - like rape, slavery, child-soldiers, & conflict mining - we want President Obama and Secretary Clinton to fulfill the mandate of their own law and finally show that they are serious about ending violence in Congo.

Ask the President to appoint a Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region now.  Sign the petition here!

Information Sources

Here are a couple organizations that study and work to ameliorate the impacts of war and conflict on the environment.

Green Cross International (GCI)

“In January 1990 during an address to the Global Forum on Environment and Development for Survival held in Moscow, President Mikhail Gorbachev brought up the idea for an organization that would apply the medical emergency response model of the International Committee of the Red Cross to ecological issues and expedite solutions to environmental problems that transcend national boundaries.

Developing this idea, delegates at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (June 1992), approached Mikhail Gorbachev (the former President of the USSR) mandating him to create and launch this organisation. At the same time Swiss National Council MP, Roland Wiederkehr founded a ‘World Green Cross' with the same objective. Both organisations merged in 1993 to form Green Cross International.

Green Cross International (GCI) was formally launched in Kyoto, on the 18th April 1993. Upon the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev, many renowned figures joined its board of directors and its honorary board.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

“UNEP seeks to minimize environmental threats to human well-being from the environmental causes and consequences of conflicts and disasters. Since the start of the new millennium, the world has witnessed over 35 major conflicts and some 2,500 disasters. Over two billion people have been affected, and millions have lost their lives. Not only do these tragic events destroy infrastructure, cause population displacement and fundamentally undermine human security, they also compound poverty and tear apart the fabric of sustainable development.

In addition, at least 18 violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources since 1990. As the global population continues to rise, and demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades. The consequences of climate change for water availability, food security, prevalence of disease, coastal boundaries, and population distribution may further aggravate existing tensions and generate new conflicts.

In response to increased global awareness of the environmental dimensions of crises, and to growing demand for services that address them, UNEP has identified “disasters and conflicts” as one of six priority areas of work. Through the Disasters and Conflicts programme, UNEP provides four core services to Member States:

— Post-crisis environmental assessments

— Post-crisis environmental recovery

— Environmental cooperation for peacebuilding

— Disaster risk reduction"

And this program ended in 2001 but has left many interesting publications:

Biodiversity Support Program

"The Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) operated from 1989-2001 as a consortium of World Wildlife Fund (WWF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and World Resources Institute (WRI) and was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

BSP's mission was to promote conservation of the world's biological diversity believing that a healthy and secure living resource base is essential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations.

BSP carried out its mission by supporting projects that combined conservation with social and economic development. Specifically it undertook:

• •                Analysis
• •                Neutral facilitation
• •                Capacity strengthening
• •                Technical assistance"

On Friday, I’ll share some excerpts from a BSP publication called Trampled Grass: Mitigating the Impacts of Armed Conflict on the Environment.

May Advocacy Focus on the Environment

Those of us who take the time to celebrate Earth Day might also want to take a few minutes to consider the consequences of war, genocide and conflict on the environment.  OMB’s May advocacy focus will be on the environmental devastation that results from conflicts around the world, and from the poor environmental practices perpetuated by the worldwide desire for gems, minerals and other resources. While there’s not so much specific to genocide, there is plenty of information about war, conflicts and spectacularly bad environmental practices that are perpetuated to appease the worldwide desire for gems, minerals and other resources.

The following is excerpted from a longer article.

“Rwanda is stunning. Its terraced hills are covered in a patchwork quilt of greens - the dark green of banana plants, the neon green of bean fields, the lighter green of sorghum stalks. This is the most densely populated country in Africa, and it seems like every inch of land is cultivated. The quilt drapes over the mountaintops and falls to within an inch of the tar roads and to the stoop of every house. It covers the hilly green islands that speckle cobalt blue lakes.

I kept wondering, when the slaughter started, did anyone notice the view?

We were in Rwanda to explore the connections between conflict and environment, and how these intersecting forces affect Africans, a huge percentage of whom rely on natural resources for day-to-day living.

We had realized by now that few people focus on environment during war - in large part because it seems unimportant compared with human concerns such as hunger, death and homelessness. But we were also finding that environmental devastation inflicted during conflict often has a long-lasting impact on an area's chances for recovery.”

  “What Follows Genocide”              Stephanie Hanes

Let us know what you think of this topic, and if you have questions you’d like us to look into for you. And check back often.  The blog posting schedule should be back on track for Monday, Wednesday and Friday.