Clean, safe drinking water is scarce for over 3 billion people across the world. At least 1 billion literally never have access to clean, safe drinking water, putting them at constant risk of severe thirst-related ill health effects, infectious diseases or toxic contamination. Over 100 countries face either sporadic or chronic crisis-level problems related to clean water scarcity.
Yet, over half of the world’s population is at risk for water shortages, with far-reaching effects. Lack of adequate clean water has serious health implications, including the prevalence of water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and diarrhea. Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death and 88% of those deaths are due to inadequate sanitation and availability of clean water. Water shortages also foment civil unrest and often lead to violence and regional conflicts, as we have seen in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, among others. Lack of water perpetuates poverty, increases the risk of political instability, and affects global prosperity.
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.
Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
CafeSentido.com :: There are over 230 million people suffering from hunger or undernourishment in India. No other nation has so many people suffering chronic malnutrition, and the undernourished in India represent 27% of the worldwide hunger-stricken population. While India’s economy develops and the potential for an expanded middle class takes root, the total number of Indians going hungry has risen, despite the overall percentage of undernourished, as part of the whole population, having been reduced in recent years.
The current global economic crisis puts the most vulnerable in India at severe risk of persistent or even chronic hunger. Hundreds of millions of people living at the margins of a society in which the privileges of modern life are far from universal —people kept in a state of chronic poverty by countless socio-economic factors and often treated as the detritus of an incomplete political system struggling to comprehend its own massive responsibilities— simply do not have access to extra resources to cover worsening deficits in their food supply.
This means that a population the size of many nations may be facing the perils of a deepening condition of chronic hunger in a nation whose arable land is being diminished by huge dam projects, overuse and soil erosion, impromptu irrigation systems, hyper-expansion of water-use for non-sustenance purposes —industry, development and personal hygiene— and urban sprawl of a kind rarely seen in human history. Climate change is also putting India’s climate stability and water resources at risk, and chronic water shortage brings both the potential for tens of millions of water refugees and for outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
The population facing food shortage is roughly half the population of the expanded European Union. In fact, only China, India, the United States and Indonesia have populations larger than the 230 million undernourished within India. That population is actually about 5 million more than the combined populations of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, Malaysia, North Korea, Taiwan, Ghana and Romania — all among the 50 most populous nations. So one could say that the number of malnourished in India encompasses the entire populations of 8 populous nations.
India’s food production and food consumption are both massive, by any standards, but the huge population makes the modes of distribution intensely relevant to the quality of life of hundreds of millions who find themselves at the fringes of that system. According to Time magazine:
India’s current food-distribution system is a legacy of the 1940s and ’50s, when chronic food shortages led the government to crack down on hoarding of produce by unscrupulous cartels. In 1966 the government introduced a new law that banned farmers from dealing directly with retailers and forced them to sell through licensed middlemen, called mandis.
India’s problem may be more to do with global harvest capacity and food distribution than with the nature of the retail sector there, however. India’s central plateaus are one of the world’s most prolific grain-producing regions. The country was saved from catastrophic famine in the 1960s by the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, which used modern farming techniques and highly efficient grain varieties to vastly increase crop yields, eventually making India a major exporter of grains. But in 2006, India was forced to import 3.5 million tons of wheat.
With hospitals closing, funding non-existent, economy unraveling, political impasse and aid frozen, Zimbabwe is facing escalating risk of a severe cholera pandemic
Evelyn Winston Perez, CafeSentido.com :: The spread of cholera due to Zimbabwe’s foundering hygienic infrastructure is reaching crisis proportions. UNICEF is calling for an emergency fund of $17.5 million to fight the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe, calling the outbreak “a cholera crisis of unprecedented levels”. With 13,960 cases already declared and an estimated 589 dead to date, the UN warns upwards of 60,000 people could become infected if drastic and immediate action is not taken to contain the epidemic.
Aid groups are warning that many times more people may already have died from the disease, but that their infections and deaths are going unrecorded due to hospital closures and the collapse of Zimbabwe’s healthcare and communications infrastructure. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper:
Oxfam said there were likely to be thousands of unreported deaths. “When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it’s really just a recipe for disaster,” a spokeswoman said.
Itai Rusike, speaking for the Community Working Group, has said: “Phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died.” UNICEF is also warning that the severity of the humanitarian catastrophe cannot be underestimated, as 80% of the population of Zimbabwe has no access to safe drinking water.
The UK prime minister Gordon Brown told the press Mugabe leads “a bloodstained regime”, that the cholera outbreak means Zimbabwe’s crisis is “now not just a national emergency, it’s an international emergency”, which could “spill over, if nothing is done, into Mozambique, into South Africa”. Echoing the calls of other leaders, Brown quipped “enough is enough”.
In addition to Brown and other world leaders, South African archbishop Desmond Tutu has also called for Mugabe to “step down”, saying he should be offered a “soft landing” if he resigns and hands over power, but threatened with prosecution at the Hague for crimes against humanity, should he refuse to leave office. Mugabe is being blamed for an ongoing crackdown on dissent at all levels, which some say is worsening as the political stalemate drags on.
The Associated Press is reporting “Brian Raftopoulos, organizer of the Solidarity Peace Trust, said a number of activists have been abducted and protests violently quashed by riot police.” While the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai —who has been abducted and beaten multiple times this year by security forces— seeks to enter into a failing power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, the regime has refused to relinquish or share control of the police, leading to accusations Mugabe will use the police to impose his will indefinitely.
Mugabe’s government claims the cholera epidemic is being used to scapegoat the perennial president and blames sanctions imposed by “western” powers. Today, Zimbabwe’s information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu complained “the cholera issue has been used to drive a wedge among us,” said the disease had been brought “under control” and blamed sanctions for the deaths experienced to date.
World Health Organization officials and regional governments suggest otherwise:
468 cholera cases had been detected in South Africa, nine of whom had died, and that Zimbabwe’s epidemic also had spread to Mozambique and Botswana. WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said the cases in South Africa were probably a mix of cholera already found in South Africa and spillover from Zimbabwe.
Experts say cholera is common in the region, as compared to other parts of the world, but that Zimbabwe had been better able to contain outbreaks before the startling collapse of its economy in recent years. Until now, the worst outbreak had seen roughly 3,000 recorded cases, according to Peter Lundberg, of the International Red Cross. By sheer number of infections, this outbreak is already 4.5 times as bad.
Joining the voices of Gordon Brown, Desmond Tutu, and Kenyan pres. Raila Odinga, US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice has called on Mugabe to “leave”, blaming him for political violence, a “sham election”, and for sabotaging the process of forming a joint governing coalition with the opposition, who won more votes than his party in the first round of voting in this year’s election. Rice also blamed Mugabe for the socio-economic hardship and humanitarian crisis now facing the people of Zimbabwe.
Feature excerpted from Sustainable Development Update, Issue 5, 2008, by kind permission of Albaeco : Stockholm, Sweden
Fredrik Moberg, Albaeco :: Earlier this year UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank teamed up with World Resources Institute to publish a report focusing on the concept of resilience “for cushioning the impacts of climate change and delivering continuing benefits to the poor”. Recently, the Volvo Environment Prize was given to the “father of resilience theory”, C.S. Holling. But what is this resilience-thing really all about? We thought it was about time to try to sort this concept out once and for all.
Building economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushions the impacts of climate change is becoming increasingly important. Photo by Annette Löf/azote.se: thunderstorm approaching over Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Resilience has become one of the new buzzwords of sustainability. This is not only due to the fact that the father of resilience theory, Canadian ecologist Crawford “Buzz” Holling, recently won the Volvo Environment Prize, it all started much earlier. The concept of resilience was introduced by Holling already back in 1973 as: “a measure of the ability of systems to absorb change… and still persist”. In an ecological context, resilience is generally described as the long-term capacity of an ecosystem to cope with and adapt to change and perturbation, such as storms, fire and pollution. Hence, it is both the capacity of a system to withstand pressures and to rebuild and renew itself if degraded.
– Resilience is the answer to the question: how can things change and persist at the same time, explains Steve Carpenter, Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Loss of resilience tends to lead to more vulnerable systems, and possible ecosystem shifts to undesired states that provide fewer ecosystem goods (like fish and crops) and services (like flood control and water purification). Clear lakes can suddenly turn into murky, oxygen-depleted pools, grasslands into shrub-deserts, and coral reefs into algae-covered rubble. It is often caused by gradual loss of biodiversity making the ecosystem progressively more susceptible to disturbances like hurricanes or pollution.
Resilience is the capacity of a system to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks or disturbances and regaining functions afterwards. In human systems, this is closely linked to the ability to adapt to changing conditions through learning and innovation or even transformation.
International development cooperation
The report, World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience: Growing the Wealth of the Poor, which we highlighted in SDU 4/08, is a clear sign that resilience thinking is becoming increasingly mainstreamed in the international development community. It is a joint effort produced by the World Resources Institute, UNEP, UNDP and the World Bank, which argues that properly designed ecosystem-based enterprises can create economic, social, and environmental resilience that cushion the impacts of climate change, and deliver continuing benefits to the poor.
– Economic and social progress rests on a healthy environment, from local ecosystems to the biosphere as a whole. Maintaining the resilience of ecosystems is not only a question of saving the environment. It is about securing human development, explains Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
A perspective – not a measure
In recent times, many resilience scholars have started to put much more emphasis on the social side of the resilience theory and also focused more on the adaptability and renewal of coupled systems of humans and nature – so-called social-ecological systems (SES).
Following this, the resilience concept has developed more into a perspective than a measure, a perspective recently defined to encompass the three aspects: (1) Persistence: the capacity of a system to maintain structure and function when faced with shocks and change (e.g. for a forest to withstand a storm); (2) Adaptability: the collective capacity of people in SES to adapt to changing conditions in order to stay within a desired state (e.g. the ability to safeguard current food production systems under climate change); and (3) Transformability: the capacity of people in SES to learn, innovate and transform in periods of crisis in order to create a new system when ecological, social or economic conditions make the existing system untenable (e.g. turning the current financial crisis into an opportunity to transform the global economy).
