http://www.cfr.org/publication/17638/fragility_instability_and_the_failure_of_states.html

Author:
Monty G. Marshall
Council on Foreign Relations Press

October 2008

28 pages

This Center for Preventive Action Working Paper surveys existing approaches to assessing state fragility and failure within the context of development, conflict, and governance. It examines the risk factors that have been identified through systematic inquiry and research with the goal of improving the prospects for successful conflict prevention and management, and argues that the goal of "early warning" relating to state fragility and failure should be more to inform and temper our expectations for policy response than to trigger costly and risky interventions.

" Peace-building capacity. The peace and conflict ledger combines seven indicators of general performance: four discrete indicators (self-determination, discrimination, regime type, and regime durability) with three composite indicators (human security, societal capacity, and neighborhood effects) into a single, additive measure of peace-building capacity. It was originally designed as a complement to predictive political risk models with the understanding that actual conflict outcomes are determined jointly by political risk factors and conflict management capabilities. The ledger includes a separate indicator denoting whether the country is currently experiencing, or recently ended, a serious armed conflict event. This measure has been abandoned in favor of the SFI (below).52 "

Conclusion: Incentive Structures and Sequential Dynamics in Societal Systems All ecosystems are exposed to gradual changes.... Nature is usually assumed to respond to gradual change in a smooth way. However... smooth change can be interrupted by sudden drastic switches to a contrasting state. Although diverse events can trigger such shifts, recent studies show that a loss of resilience usually paves the way for a switch to an alternative state. This suggests that strategies for sustainable management of such ecosystems should focus on [building and] maintaining resilience.... Stability domains typically depend on slowly changing variables....These factors may be predicted, monitored, and modified. In contrast, stochastic events that trigger state shifts are usually difficult to predict or control. 61

November 3, 2008
KAFR QADDUM, West Bank (AFP) — For a number of years, volunteers have joined Palestinian farmers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help pick olives and provide some form of protection against increasingly violent attacks by settlers.

"We do this because we want to defend Palestinians' rights to their land," said Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann, of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights which organises volunteer teams to work in olive groves where Palestinian farmers are under potential threat.

"As a last resort we stand between Palestinian farmers and the settlers," said Grenimann, who was born in Australia of Holocaust survivors.

Around him, half a dozen volunteers, most of them Israelis, plucked olives -- some with their fingers, others using small plastic rakes -- which they dropped onto tarpaulins laid out on the rocky ground.

That day's harvest, also just outside Qedumim, went smoothly until it was halted by a heavy downpour. In several cases it is settler attacks that prevent farmers and volunteers from picking olives in the West Bank.

"It has become worse," said Hellela Siew, 64, who has travelled from Britain for the past six year to take part in the annual harvest of the tiny fruit that is a mainstay of the West Bank economy and has come to symbolise Palestinian nationhood, not to mention peace.

For the full article, please visit: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hlhOntdpdyprzkhiGPZqNTnWs53Q

By Louise Watts
LONDON (AP) — The conflict in eastern Congo is being fueled and funded by a tussle for mineral resources that end up in cell phones, laptops and other electronics — deepening the stakes in a war that sprung out of festering hatreds from the Rwandan genocide.

Rebel militias and Congolese army troops are fighting each other for control of mineral-rich land. They can then sell the raw materials they mine and use the proceeds to fund their activities and arms — which prolongs the conflict.

"The links are very clear between the mining activity going to finance these groups, and these armed groups we know have been benefiting financially from the mining areas," said Lizzie Parsons, a member of the Congo team at London-based Global Witness, a non-governmental organization that investigates natural resource exploitation.

Congo's present conflict stems from a rebellion started four years ago by renegade general Laurent Nkunda, who claimed the country's transition to democracy had excluded the Tutsi ethnic group. Despite agreeing in January to a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, he resumed fighting in August.

He alleges the Congolese government has not protected ethnic Tutsis from the Rwandan Hutu militia that escaped to Congo after helping slaughter half a million Rwandan Tutsis in 1994.

But analysts say that the heart of conflict is the struggle for minerals.

For the full article, please visit: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g4wgdP9EjWq-rwhQ6DCChbxP7qMQD9460CI80

By The Climate Community | November 3, 2008 | In: Business, Science, Policy, Media, Social & NGOs

http://www.copenhagenclimatecouncil.com/get-informed/news/climate-disasters-a-significant-possibility-says-nobel-laureate-steve-chu.html

Since the IPCC report came out in 2007, new data point to even more alarming scenarios. We underestimate the risk and ignore the fact that the planet is threatened with "sudden, unpredictable, and irreversible disaster," says Steve Chu, one of the world's leading climate and energy experts.

Catastrophic damage to ecosystems because of global warming is "a significant possibility." We can expect "disasters in orders of magnitude different from anything we've experienced thus far," like abrupt, large-scale shifts in the climate system, collapse of ocean circulation and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and heat waves killing thousands of people. It is most likely that cities such as Tokyo, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, New York, and London must be protected behind sea walls because of rising sea levels and extreme weather.

These are some of the conclusions in an interview published today with Nobel Laureate Dr. Steve Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California. In the interview, the physicist and Copenhagen Climate Councillor evaluates the current scientific knowledge on climate change and the developments since the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report was published in 2007.

His conclusion is that the IPCC report understates the problem, and the rise in global average temperature is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C and will most likely fall in the range of 2-4.5°C. He adds that due to lack of preventive measures so far, current levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere "puts us on track for temperature increases of more than 6.1°C by the end of the century," an increase of catastrophic proportions.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 10, 2008
The president-elect of the Maldives, a nation of 1,200 low islands in the Indian Ocean, is planning to establish an investment fund with some of its earnings from tourism so it can buy a haven for its citizens should global warming raise sea levels at a dangerous pace, according to several news reports.

By Brigitte Weidlich

WINDHOEK, Nov 12 (IPS) - Almost two decades after independence Namibia's land reform shows positive results and is guided by fair laws, but bureaucracy, slow progress in transformation of land ownership and unclear criteria for expropriation are overshadowing successes.

Government plans to spend 370 million dollars over the next 12 years to acquire 10,3 million hectares of commercial farmland to resettle 6,730 families by 2020.

Another five million ha of communal land will be portioned off into small farming units for citizens previously disadvantaged by colonialism and South Africa's imposition of apartheid policies on the territory.

This will require an additional 5,3 million dollars a year, says a report of the ministry of lands and resettlement.

Agriculture contributes around 6.5 percent to the country's gross domestic product.

According to the ministry of lands, 240,000 applicants are on its list for resettlement, but the list has never been made public. Any previously disadvantaged Namibian, rich or poor can apply.

Government has bought 256 farms since independence and 2,000 families have been resettled. The land ministry's annual budget for land acquisition increased from two to five million dollars in 2003.
During the financial year 2007-08, ending in March, 17 commercial farms were bought for eight million dollars. Prices averaged between 100,000 dollars to one million dollars per farm.

''This figure clearly demonstrates that the allocation of five million dollars annually for land acquisition is not sufficient, given the high prices of land,'' lands minister Alfeus Naruseb told Namibia's parliament recently.

For the full article, please visit: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44666

Weekend Edition Sunday, November 16, 2008 -

Back in the 1950s, the Americans, the British, the French and the Russians tried to impress each other by "testing" atomic weapons. This involved blowing up multi-megaton bombs in the air in remote places, but the explosions didn't stay local.

A Couple Of Extra Neutrons...

Each atomic blast released lots of neutrons into the atmosphere, many of which slammed into carbon atoms floating by with the result that lots of carbon atoms gained a couple of extra neutrons. If you remember your Periodic Table of Elements, carbon ordinarily carries 12 protons and neutrons. Add a couple of extra neutrons, and the 12 becomes 14. Which means during the 1950's the world got a boost of carbon-14 atoms.

There was, says Professor Nadlini Nadkarni, an ecologist at Evergreen State College in Washington, "a tremendous spike of carbon-14 — actually 100 percent more carbon-14 coming into the atmosphere than what we'd had previous to those [atom bomb] tests."

Leaving The Neighborhood

Those clouds of carbon-14 atoms didn't stay at the bomb sites. "This cloud of carbon-14 went round and round and round the Earth and was persistent for quite a while," says Professor Nadkarni.

When President Kennedy signed a test ban treaty with the Russians in the early 1960s, nations stopped blowing up bombs above ground and the population of carbon-14 in the atmosphere went down, but, from around 1954 to around 1963, trees all over the world sucked in extra dollops of carbon-14.

Trees don't know the difference between regular carbon and carbon-14. They just breathe in carbon dioxide and use the sunshine to turn that CO2 into plant food stored in their trunks, so that if you look inside a tree, any tree, you can measure the carbon within. And here comes the big surprise.

For the full article, please visit: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96750869&ft=1&f=1025

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk, Saturday November 22 2008 00.01 GMT
The Guardian, Saturday November 22 2008

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.

"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.

...

According to diplomats, the Saudi Binladin Group is planning an investment in Indonesia to grow basmati rice, while tens of thousands of hectares in Pakistan have been sold to Abu Dhabi investors.

Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have also bought direct stakes in Sudanese agriculture. The president of the UEA, Khalifa bin Zayed, has said his country was considering large-scale agricultural projects in Kazakhstan to ensure a stable food supply.

Even China, which has plenty of land but is now getting short of water as it pursues breakneck industrialisation, has begun to explore land deals in south-east Asia. Laos, meanwhile, has signed away between 2m-3m hectares, or 15% of its viable farmland. Libya has secured 250,000 hectares of Ukrainian farmland, and Egypt is believed to want similar access. Kuwait and Qatar have been chasing deals for prime tracts of Cambodia rice fields.

GENEVA, 21 November 2008 (IRIN) - As part of the UN's US$2.2 billion humanitarian appeal for Sudan, officials said their agencies would work to better manage natural resources in the African nation in the upcoming year.

"This year [2009], there will be more emphasis on recovery and more attention paid to natural resource management," Toby Lanzer, the UN's deputy humanitarian coordinator in northern Sudan, said on 20 November, in light of the desertification taking place in the country.

Tree-planting projects were under way to help stave off environmental changes, which were considered a major contributor to the violence in Sudan's west, and to offset the carbon emissions of peacekeeping missions.

For the full article, please see: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81593

Published: Monday 24 November 2008   
The European Union on 20 November announced its intention to become an important stakeholder in the Arctic, mainly by promoting an environmental agenda. The European Commission also indicated that Arctic multilateral governance "could be upgraded and adjusted" to changing realities.

The Commission has decided to apply for observer status in the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for countries and peoples, including the Arctic indigenous communities. 

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU's external relations commissioner, announced the initiative on Thursday (20 November), presenting a much-anticipated Communication on the Arctic. 

Ferrero-Waldner said it was the first time the Union had presented a comprehensive review of its interests in the vast spaces of the Arctic, which are believed to host large amounts of oil and natural gas. 

Member states of the Arctic Council include Canada, Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. 

For the full article, please see: http://www.euractiv.com/en/energy/environment-pushes-eu-arctic-player/article-177438

http://www.wri.org/publication/building-local-democracy

by Payson Schwin

In practice, everything but democratic decentralization has taken place in the name of 'democratic decentralization' reforms: privatization, administrative deconcentration, NGOization, selective civil society inclusion, participatory processes, co-management, and committee-based project implementation.

The interventions being chosen by environmental policy makers or projects in the local arena are not empowering 'democratic' local partners. They do not support local democracy because they usually lack the two key elements of effective democratic decentralization: downward accountability and significant discretionary power.

While many interventions increase local participation in natural resource decisions, they may do so in non-sustainable ways or in ways that hinder the institutionalization of local democracy within local government. We still have a lot to learn about the best ways for governments, donors, and large NGOs to support local institutions to foster the emergence and consolidation of local democracy, and the research for this brief yields a number of important initial recommendations.

The brief includes detailed case studies of Benin, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malawi and Senegal.

Alec Crawford, Arthur J. Hanson, David Runnalls -
Arctic sovereignty is a complicated business. Promises of vast resources and fabled shipping lanes set free by a melting ice pack have triggered a competition for land and influence across the region. Climate change has made it clear that the Arctic environmental transformation poses some very real security concerns for Canada. There is a danger, however, that these perceived security threats, the shared expectations of what lies beneath the Arctic ice and the race to define our northern sovereignty could overshadow some of the current and expected environmental challenges to be faced by the Arctic ecosystem and the communities that depend upon it.

This short report focuses on the important northern issues that Canada should be focusing on beyond those currently grabbing the headlines. In addition to increasing its defence spending in the North, Canada, to guarantee its Arctic sovereignty and the health of its northern ecosystem, must:

Engage indigenous and northern communities, NGOs, international organizations and countries outside of the Arctic Council in the debate and decision-making on Arctic sovereignty and security;

Take the lead on environmental stewardship in the North;

Invest more money in Arctic research and the capacity to turn research into meaningful policy;

Go beyond the Ilulissat Declaration to cement cooperation on a number of issues with the other Arctic stakeholders; and

Update its Northern Foreign Policy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7747692.stm

Digital Planet
Alka Marwaha
BBC World Service

The Democratic Republic of Congo is struggling to recover from a lengthy civil war in which an estimated three million people have died, mostly through starvation and disease.
Since the country gained independence in 1960, its vast mineral wealth has been a key factor in the country's civil wars and instability.

It has huge reserves of gold, cobalt, tantalite and cassiterite all used in the manufacture of consumer electronics.
Illegal trade

"Since this war stared in 1998, we have seen all the main warring parties, the various rebel groups as well as the Congolese security forces involved in widespread plundering and looting of minerals", said Carina Tertsakian from lobby group Global Witness on BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

...
Tracking ore
Many ideas have been touted to try and identify where mineral components have been sourced.
In March this year, DRC Deputy Mines Minister Victor Kasongo said the government hoped to set up a scheme to certify columbite-tantalite produced within its borders by 2009.

Research on fingerprinting tantalum is currently being carried out by the Federal Institute for Geosciences in Hannover Germany.
"The principle is somewhat inspired by the Kimberley process put in place for diamonds," said Ms Wickens.
"It is really making use of scientific techniques to track the tantalum ore back to its deposit."
Consumer pressure

"The very first thing that we can do as consumers is, if we are buying a mobile phone or a computer, we can ask the retailer where the various components coming from," said Ms Tertsakian.

"Consumers could also write to some of the bigger multi-national companies.

"The more longer term technical measures, such as certification and fingerprinting could be useful but they take a long time to set up," she added.

"In the meantime, the war in Congo is raging and thousands of people displaced from their homes are being raped and killed.
"If buying the right electronics could stop this from getting worse, try and find out where what you buy has come from," added Ms Tertsakian.

Haitians are no strangers to hunger. But even the resilience of the hemisphere's poorest citizens can be pushed too far, and with world food prices spiking this year due to shrinking harvests, burgeoning demand and skyrocketing fuel prices, it should be little surprise that Haiti is once again erupting in angry violence.

As unrest spread from the countryside, protesters shut down the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday to decry lavi che — the Creole term for the high cost of living. Gunshot wounds have killed several people this week and injured a Haitian journalist. Rioters broke down two gates to the National Palace before they were stopped by United Nations peacekeepers; Haitian National Police, who number around 8,000, are securing government buildings but have not yet been able to dismantle the barricades of rocks and burning tires that have closed off most of the major roads.

All businesses, schools and government activities have ground to a halt, reminiscent of bloody protests that have plagued this country for the last several decades — most recently in 2004, when former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown. President Rene Preval, respected for his probity but criticized for his lack of leadership and statesmanship, has been trying to improve Haiti's squalid conditions since taking office in 2006, but demonstrators squeezed by spiraling food costs say they're tired of waiting for a solution to their constant hunger. "We used to be hungry enough to drink Clorox," a local mechanic told TIME by phone from Port-au-Prince. "Now it's battery acid — it gets the job done quicker." Last week, Preval had said he understood the frustrations, and quipped that if people started to protest, they should stop by the palace and pick him up. In an ironic twist, that may have prompted them to break into the palace Monday. Preval did not join the protesters, and he's yet to say anything publicly since then.

from War & Health by Christopher Albon

Science Daily is running a story on a new technique using satellites to predict and map cholera outbreaks. Researchers have found a relationship between sea surface temperature, sea surface height, and cholera epidemics. Professor Rita Colwell proposes that satellites could be used to measure the latter two and thus predict regions at risk.

While Professor Colwell's work is interesting and I am a big fan of satellite based analysis, as a political scientist, I wonder if this could be applied to conflict zones. Cholera and armed violence have always been linked. Almost all major armed conflicts in human history are accompanied by cholera outbreaks. Given this close connection, can satellites help predict and map cholera during conflicts? I think so.

http://warandhealth.com/using-satellites-to-map-cholera-epidemics/

http://www.IRINnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=81628

AKAR, 24 November 2008 (IRIN) - An apparent coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau on 23 November has underscored the country's chronic political volatility.

In recent years political decay has meant the increasing vulnerability of Guinea-Bissau's population, who face some of the world's highest levels of maternal mortality, under-five malnutrition and lack of access to clean water and sanitation, according to the latest UN human development index.

Gunfire broke out at President Joao Bernardo Vieira's home in the early hours of 23 November, two days after the results of parliamentary elections that had been anticipated with guarded optimism by diplomats, donors and some Guinea-Bissauans.

Just before the poll one woman told IRIN: "We are tired of the politicians quarrelling. We want water, we want electricity... we just want to have a normal daily life."

The country's lack of a water and sanitation infrastructure turns deadly every year, as the rainy season brings cholera to Guinea-Bissau. Only some 20 percent of residents of the capital, Bissau, have access to tap water, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). More than half the rural population get their water from rivers or unprotected wells. (Cholera contained but source still unknown)

Infant mortality stands at 119 per 1,000 live births, and malaria, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea and malnutrition remain the major killers of children, UNICEF says. Life expectancy in 2006 was 46 years. Compounding Guinea-Bissau's chronic unrest and blocked development is drug-trafficking. The West African nation is a hub for drugs flowing from South America to Europe and the USA.(Assistance not sanctions needed to fight drug trade)

Local drug consumption has also become a problem. (Cocaine to Europe produces addicts locally)
Even as the parliamentary poll was taking place, Guinea-Bissau's teachers were in the third month of a strike over salary arrears. Civil servants' strikes are common. (Government workers strike for back pay)