Energy and Environment

In recent weeks, the Chinese and western media have been all atwitter over the shocking levels of air pollution in Beijing and a number of other Chinese cities. But it really shouldn’t be all that shocking. After all, in 2007, the World Bank and China’s own State Environmental Protection Administration (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) found that that as many as 700,000 people die prematurely annually from respiratory disease related to air pollution. And more recently, Greenpeace Beijing reported that in 2011 in four major cities, more than 8,000 people died prematurely as a result of just one pollutant, PM 2.5. Anyone who spends any time in Beijing knows that the city has not yet found a way to tackle the myriad sources of air pollution from construction to cars to coal. As frightening as the country’s smog-filled skies might be, the country’s water pollution is easily as alarming.  According to one 2011 report, in 2010, “up to 40 percent of China’s rivers were seriously polluted” and “20 percent were so polluted their water quality was rated too toxic even to come into contact with.” Part of the explanation may rest in the “estimated 10,000 petrochemical plants along the Yangtze and 4000 along the Yellow rivers.” (And the Yellow and Yangtze are not even the most polluted of China’s seven major rivers.) On top of whatever polluted wastewater might be leaching or simply dumped into China’s rivers from these factories, the Ministry of Supervision reports that there are almost 1,700 water pollution accidents annually. The total cost in terms of human life: 60,000 premature deaths annually. While the macro picture is concerning, even more worrying is that individual Chinese don’t know whether their water is safe to drink or not. A Chinese newspaper, the Southern Weekly, recently featured an interview with a married couple, both of whom are water experts in Beijing (available in English here). They stated that they hadn’t drunk from the tap in twenty years, and have watched the water quality deteriorate significantly over just the past few years, even while state officials claim that more than 80 percent of water leaving treatment facilities met government standards in 2011. It is difficult to get the straight story. According to one report by Century Weekly, there are a number of reasons for differing assessments of the country’s water quality: 1) the frequency of testing at treatment plants is too low, and only 40 percent of the treatment plants in China’s thirty-five major cities have the capacity to test for all 106 indicators in any case; 2) there are only a few independent water-quality monitoring bureaus, and most water testing is done in-house by the same water-treatment plant being evaluated; 3) there is weak transparency from local governments as to the results of the tests; and 4) no water testing accounts for the contamination that occurs from the aging and degraded pipes through which the water is transmitted to Chinese households. China’s environmental challenges are long in the making, not simply a function of the past thirty years of reform. As one reporter has noted, Beijing in the 1950s transformed from a city that “did not produce even pencils” to one that boasted “700 factories and 2000 blast furnaces belching soot in the air.” In his 1991 book Environmental Management in China, Qu Geping, China’s first director of the country’s National Environmental Protection Agency, further commented about that time: “The environmental situation quickly deteriorated. A lot of places were polluted by either smog, sewage waters or rubbish. Biological resources, forests in particular, were seriously damaged, causing several losses to the ecosystem. There was extensive destruction of the natural environment of our country.” In the 1950s, China, like other countries, neither understood well nor had the capacity to deal effectively with the environmental and health challenges its rapid development was creating. Today, however, China has both the knowledge and the capability. In the midst of the recent air pollution crisis, Premier-elect Li Keqiang said it would take time to address the air pollution problem: “There has been a long-term buildup to this problem, and the resolution will require a long-term process. But we must act.”  In the meantime, the Chinese people can only wear their masks, buy their bottled water, and hope they are not in this year’s batch of pollution-related casualties.

Yesterday on CFR’s Asia Unbound blog, CFR fellow Joshua Kurlantzick suggested that resource nationalism could threaten Indonesia’s economic development. As he argues: There is certainly nothing wrong with Indonesians, and Indonesian ministers, wanting to control how their infrastructure is developed, and how their abundant resources are extracted and used; too often in the past, before the devolution process of the 2000s, Indonesians in many parts of the country felt that they saw little benefit from the natural resources extracted from Indonesian waters and soils. Still, Indonesia has enormous deficits in physical infrastructure, and if it is to retain the 6-7 percent annual growth rates it expects over the next decade, taking its place among the highest-powered developing economies, this huge infrastructure gap must be addressed. You can read the full post here.

Emerging Voices features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is from Amanda Richardson, an attorney and land tenure specialist with Landesa. She discusses the benefits that secure land rights can bring to women and their communities. The Council on Foreign Relations Development Channel recently posted an exciting article by Stephanie Hanson of the One Acre Fund on empowering female smallholder farmers. The article highlighted four obstacles women farmers in the developing world face: poor quality seed and no fertilizer, no access to credit, limited education and training, and no access to markets. We at Landesa agree strongly with this assessment. However, we would add one fundamental obstacle that presents a significant burden for women across the developing world: their lack of secure land rights to the land they rely on. The fact is that women make up only a fraction of the agricultural landholders in most developing regions. In fact, the number is often less than 5 percent and generally less than 20 percent. This means the overwhelming majority of women farmers in the developing world don’t have secure rights to the land they till. As Hanson’s article points out, women are often unable to access credit in rural communities because they do not have a formal title to their land. In fact, studies have shown that women with land rights are more likely to receive credit. However, secure land rights mean more than just access to credit. When women have secure rights to the land they use, they have incentives to make the land more productive with, for instance, better seeds and fertilizer. In Rwanda, a study found that women are the primary farmers but are granted only temporary, insecure use rights to the land they farm. These weak land rights contribute to a lack of investment in land that has led to severe problems with soil erosion. Furthermore, women with secure rights tend to practice traditional conservation methods, such as mulching and intercropping. In many countries government services cannot be accessed without a title deed. In India, for example, the government provides many agricultural extension services, from education to seeds to fertilizer, but only if the recipient has a land title. And as we know, the vast majority of women don’t have a title and therefore can’t access these services. In fact, in India, women own less than 10 percent of the land. When women have secure rights to land, it also improves their status in both their households and their communities. This enhanced status can empower women to participate more effectively and fully in community-level organizations, such as collectives that negotiate with traders, making those institutions more responsive to women’s needs. Improved status can also render women less vulnerable to domestic violence. A study in India indicates that women who own land or a house face a significantly lower risk of marital violence. Furthermore, these benefits accrue to the next generation. Women with land rights contribute a greater proportion of their own income to the household and exercise greater control over the household’s agricultural income in general, according to a study in Nicaragua and Honduras. They are also more likely to spend these funds on food for the family, leading to better nutrition for children. In fact, a study in Nepal found that the odds that a child is severely underweight are reduced by half if the mother owns land. Furthermore, when women in the household have land rights, as the Nicaragua and Honduras study found, children are more likely to go to school and have higher levels of educational attainment. Organizations must recognize the importance of targeting women and tailor their programs to meet their needs, as the One Acre Fund does so admirably. However, secure rights to land are of fundamental importance to women smallholders. In many ways they are a foundational first step. Organizations looking to help women farmers would enhance their impact by incorporating this issue.

Mathew Burrows, counselor to the National Intelligence Council, may have the most fascinating job in Washington. Every four to five years he coordinates the U.S. intelligence community’s crystal-ball gazing exercise, which imagines what the future will bring fifteen to twenty years hence. The sixth and most recent installment, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, offers an eye-opening  glimpse into the turbulent world we will inherit as middle classes grow, power shifts to developing countries, demographics change, and humanity confronts daunting ecological constraints. The NIC report  identifies four “megatrends”—or drivers—shaping the world of 2030. The first is a dramatic expansion of the global middle class. From antiquity poverty has been humanity’s dominant condition. That is poised to change. Not only will extreme poverty (defined as earning less than $1.25 per day) drop by up to fifty percent, but the proportion of individuals moving into the middle class will explode in the developing world, and particularly in Asia. Individual empowerment—driven by advances in education, health, and communications technology,including social media—will have dramatic social, economic, ecological and political impacts. Consumers will demand new lifestyles, generating economic growth but placing strains on the global environment. Wealthier, more educated citizens will demand open, accountable and democratic governments. Closed regimes will attempt to fight back, but the future of authoritarianism looks dim. The second major trend is a dramatic diffusion of state power from the West to the “Rest.” While some commentators have questioned this reality,Global Trends illustrates just how profoundly—and abruptly—it is occurring. By 2030 China will pass the United States as the world’s largest economy while other economies continue to grow. Goldman Sachs predicts that the so-called “Next Eleven”—Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam— will overtake the collective global power of twenty-seven members of the European Union by 2030. The world has experienced earlier power transitions, of course. But historically “only one or two countries have been rising at the same time, shaking the international system rather than reordering it wholesale in a compressed time frame.” Now, the world faces the unprecedented emergence of multiple power centers at once. This shift, at a time of relative U.S. decline and European and Japanese stagnation, will place intense stress on regional orders, particularly in Asia, and embolden rising power demands that multilateral institutions—from the UN Security Council to the IMF—be transformed to reflect their preferences and weight.  The United States, accustomed to global leadership, will need to adjust to its new status as primus inter pares. This crowded geopolitical landscape will complicate multilateral cooperation, given the proliferation of actors able to block progress. It may also encourage more informal forms of collective action through ad hoc coalitions and public-private networks. The third driver is demographic change. The world is aging—not only in advanced industrial democracies, but also in China and much of the developing world. With its working age population set to peak in 2015, China faces the challenge of getting rich before it gets old. In wealthy countries, meanwhile, a growing “pensioner bulge” will strain creaky welfare states, particulary in Europe and Japan. (The U.S. dilemma is less acute, given continued high immigration and a near-replacement birthrate). Strikingly, declining fertility will allow most developing countries, provided they are decently governed, to reap a demographic dividend: As youth bulges recede and working age populations rise, including in the Arab world, growth prospects will increase and political instability will decline. India is especially well positioned for sustained growth in this scenario. By contrast, Russia’s population will contract sharply from 143 to 130 million, accelerating its geopolitical decline. To be sure, the world’s population will continue to grow—reaching 8.3 billion in 2030. But it will be increasingly urbanized with more than sixty percent of people (up from fifty percent today and thirty percent in 1950) living in cities. Thanks largely to migration from rural areas, the global urban population will swell by a 1.4 billion by 2030. A third of this increase will occur in China and India, but another quarter will occur in just nine countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, DRC, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the United States itself. Worryingly, these surging urban populations are likely to create huge demands on fragile infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and often corrupt municipal governments. At the same time, urban centers will become the motor of economic growth, and, in some cases, powerful international actors in their own right. The final megatrend—exacerbated by the other three—is growing competition for food, water, and energy, particularly in the context of global climate change.  Global Trends predicts that demand for food will rise by more than thirty-five percent by 2030, thanks to population growth and changing dietary preferences, but productivity gains will continue to lag. The result could be disastrous shortages and persistent price volatility. Already, the report notes, “the world has consumed more food than it has produced in seven of the last eight years.” Likewise, the world’s annual water requirements are predicted to climb forty percent by 2030, when the OECD predicts that “nearly half of the world’s population will live in areas with severe water stress”—thanks in part to accelerating global warming. The dual challenge before humanity, as I have written, is to feed the world without killing the planet  and to fashion sustainable strategies for using—and sharing—increasingly scarce fresh water resources. If there is a bright spot in this resource picture, particularly for the United States, it is in the energy field. Although global demand for energy may rise fifty percent by 2030, technological breakthroughs in unconventional oil and gas extraction offer extraordinary opportunities, particularly for the United States. (The downside of this revolution, of course, is in reducing market incentives for investment in clean, alternative energy sources like hydropower, wind, and solar). How these four powerful megatrends will interact in practice depends, the NIC argues, on six “game-changers”—or uncertainties. These include whether the global economy remains crisis-prone or stabilizes; whether domestic and global governance arrangements wither or adapt; whether number of interstate conflicts rise or decline; whether the world’s regions become more stable or unstable; whether new information, manufacturing, resource and health technologies advance peace and prosperity or prove disruptive; and whether  the United States retreats from the world or remains committed to global engagement. One frustration of the NIC report is that rather than offering probabilities on each of its “game-changers,” it outlines several plausible scenarios, or “alternative worlds.” But we shouldn’t be too judgmental. As astute observers from Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra have noted, “predictions are difficult, particularly about the future.” The NIC’s own history bears this out. In a commendable gesture, the Global Trends 2030 actually begins with a candid assessment of biases and blind spots that marrred previous editions. These shortcomings include focusing on gradual change rather than abrupt discontinuities, ignoring ideology, failing to analyze the shifting influence of state versus non-state actors, focusing too little on the U.S. global role and its impact on others’ behavior, and, finally, neglecting to discuss second- and third-order consequences of major trends. For all its uncertainties, Global Trends 2030 confirms another of Yogi Berra’s pearls of wisdom: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”