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| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 采矿以促进变革： 奥伯特·博尔 (Obert Bore) 谈津巴布韦矿业繁荣中的人权与发展 (Mining for Change: Obert Bore on Human Rights and Development Amid Zimbabwe’s Mineral Boom) | 21 Feb 2025 | 00:28:10 | |
在本期节目中，ECSP的克莱尔·多伊尔（Claire Doyle）和威尔逊中心中国环境论坛的阮叶芬（Jennifer Nguyen）将与奥伯特·博尔（Obert Bore）共同探讨津巴布韦矿业有关的一些问题。 奥伯特是津巴布韦环境法协会（Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association）的商业与人权项目的负责人，并是国际贸易、中国在非洲的投资以及自然资源治理方面的专家。 他在推动政策改革，加强受采矿影响社区的人权保护方面一直作为领袖 English Description: (In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle and Jennifer Nguyen from the Wilson Center's China Environment Forum are joined by Obert Bore. Obert, who serves as the Business & Human Rights Program Lead at the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, is an expert in international trade, Chinese investments in Africa, and natural resource governance. He has been a leader in advancing policy reforms to strengthen human rights protection for communities impacted by mining. | |||
| Mining for Change: Obert Bore on Human Rights and Development Amid Zimbabwe’s Mineral Boom | 21 Feb 2025 | 00:27:53 | |
In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle and Jennifer Nguyen from the Wilson Center's China Environment Forum are joined by Obert Bore. Obert, who serves at the Business & Human Rights Program Lead at the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, is an expert in international trade, Chinese investments in Africa, and natural resource governance. He has been a leader in advancing policy reforms to strengthen human rights protection for communities impacted by mining. In this conversation, Obert sheds light on the critical mineral sector in Zimbabwe, highlighting recent critical mineral investments and some of the environmental and social challenges associated with them. He also shares strategies and recommendations to promote sustainable and responsible mining practices and ensure the expansion of Zimbabwe’s mineral sector is an opportunity for development. | |||
| Environmental Cooperation in the Middle East: A Conversation with Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed | 15 Jul 2024 | 00:32:31 | |
In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, Wilson Center Global Fellow and environmental journalist Anneliese Palmer speaks with longtime leader in regional environmental diplomacy and Executive Director of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed. In their conversation, Dr. Hamed unpacks the opportunities and challenges of climate and environmental diplomacy, environmental peacebuilding efforts in Gaza and the Middle East, as well as his role in Jumpstarting Hope, a project that works to provide essential services such as safe drinking water and sustainable electricity to communities in Gaza. | |||
| Sandra Ruckstuhl on Capturing Practical Lessons on Water, Conflict, and Cooperation | 13 Dec 2018 | 00:24:29 | |
We realized “there was a need for a toolkit on water,” says Sandra Ruckstuhl in this week’s Water Stories podcast, “with a focus of conflict and conflict mitigation, but also peacebuilding.” Ruckstuhl, a consultant for the World Bank who has researched water programs in Yemen and the Middle East, helped the Wilson Center produce USAID’s Water and Conflict toolkit, which documents examples of successful development interventions focused on water and peacebuilding. “We have lots of assumed peaceful outcomes from projects, but very little of it has been measured and documented,” says Ruckstuhl. “We would do a real service to the field if we really started documenting and measuring this kind of information so we can inform better and better practice in this area.” Ruskstuhl and her team worked to ensure that the toolkit could be used by practitioners without professional training or formal education in conflict studies. “When we are talking about peacebuilding,” Ruckstuhl says, “we are boiling it down to collaborative governance—and that also is transferrable to different sectors.” “When we are designing and implementing some development investment, we’re injecting ourselves into a system,” in which water management, health, food, and other public services are interconnected. Ruckstuhl calls for more incentives that would push practitioners to foster cross-sector connections, which would allow different sectors to work together more collaboratively. Project designers must consider all the stakeholders involved, including governance institutions, which in many circumstances are dominated by men. “The constructive role women can play in the household, in these governance institutions, in the decision-making for things like water allocation…that knowledge and that capacity of women can be missed,” says Ruckstuhl. Integrating gender concerns more effectively would contribute to more equitable water management, so she proposes educating communities on the value of including women in projects focused on water and conflict. | |||
| Aaron Wolf on Transboundary Water Conflict and Cooperation | 30 Nov 2018 | 00:21:50 | |
“Countries—even countries that don’t like each other much—have, and continue to have, conversations over water resources, even when they won’t about other issues,” says Aaron Wolf, Director of Water Conflict Management and Transformation at Oregon State University, in this week’s Water Stories podcast. Wolf’s research shows that water stress—instead of spurring wars between countries—can actually bring them to the negotiating table. “Water creates horrible suffering, human destruction, ecosystem degradation, and very, very little political violence,” says Wolf. Tensions can rise, however, when an upstream country wants to build infrastructure (such as a hydroelectric dam) that would impact the people downstream. “It is not that the dam itself that causes the problem; it is the dam in the absence of an agreement about how to mitigate the impacts of the dam,” says Wolf. Many treaties do not account for greater variability in flow arising from droughts or floods—both of which will be exacerbated by climate change. In the Middle East, “there are droughts that were so bad that the Israel-Jordan water agreement had nothing in text to deal with that. Fortunately, their relationship was solid enough that they could adapt based on their personal relations,” says Wolf. To identify these gaps, Wolf and his team developed the Basin at Risk project, which provides a quantitative, global-scale exploration of the relationship between freshwater resources and conflict, as well as indicators to measure cross border tension. “With those verified indicators, we were able to look at basins in the next three to five years. Fortunately, most of those are no longer at risk precisely because the global community did what it does best—they help with the institutions, they help build the river basin organizations, and the treaties, and so on,” says Wolf. | |||
| Cultivating Meaningful Youth Engagement in Sexual and Reproductive Health Programming | 07 Nov 2018 | 00:12:47 | |
“We need to mainstream young people into the decision-making process,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards, age 25, of Trinidad and Tobago at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging youth to protect their sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Where it’s not a matter of, ‘let’s bring a young person into the room as an afterthought,’ but it should be written that a young person has to be a part of the discussion or has to be contributing in a significant way.” As a young person, “your expectations have been heightened, you have been encouraged to do all of this great work, but where are the institutions, where are the support mechanisms, where are the opportunities?” asked Edwards. The panelists unanimously agreed that high expectations for young people to serve and agitate for change have not been met with endless opportunities to engage. Although many organizations have celebrated young peoples’ input, they still need to be more intentional about how they engage youth, said Cate Lane, Senior Technical Adviser at Pathfinder. Oftentimes, “we engage young people, we solicit their input, we ask them to tell us what they need and what they want,” she said. “We rev them up. They’re excited, and then we’re like, ‘thanks so much for your input,’ now we’re going to go implement our project.” “When we are talking about youth participation, we should think about the diversity of young people,” said Dr. Ilya Zhukov, Global Focal Point for Comprehensive Sexuality Education at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Bringing key populations of young people, including LGBTQ+, HIV positive, and disabled youth, to name a few, together with decision-makers can ensure that health programming is informed by those it is meant to serve. “When your opinion and your thoughts are influencing real documents that will then influence your education—that is a real thing,” said Lada Nuzhna, Youth Representative at Teenergizer!. Exchanges between young people and organizations working to promote adolescent health and rights should be a two-way street. “We need to see this not as a one-way street of us soliciting information from them, but as an opportunity for them to develop skills, networks, to gain access to things that they wouldn’t normally gain access to,” said Lane. Adolescence is a dynamic period in life that can pose challenges to the longevity of youth project engagement. “If we engage young people, we can’t expect that they are going to be with us for the next five years because they are in school, they’re working, getting married,” said Lane. However, mechanisms such as youth advisory boards and councils could enable organizations to consult periodically with young people to ensure programs are responsive to their needs. Experts agreed that a system to bring youth into the conversation on a regular basis is necessary to cultivate meaningful youth engagement, in addition to allocating resources—financial and human—to ensure that adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming is effective and responsive. “We should bring young people to the table and involve them not only in discussion but in the development and implementation of programs,” said Zhukov. Governments, leaders of organizations and policymakers should continue to think about how to meaningfully engage with young people as partners. “I think it’s something we have to tackle,” said Lane. “There has to be this sense of partnership, where we meet each other in the middle.” | |||
| Eliane Razafimandimby: Improving the Quality of Maternal and Child Care | 12 Oct 2018 | 00:08:10 | |
“Even in a weak system without a quality improvement structure, it is possible to support district managers and facility providers to measure and improve quality care,” said Eliane Razafimandimby, Chief of Party of USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) in Madagascar, at a recent Wilson Center event on improving the quality of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child healthcare (RMNCH). Madagascar is currently in the early stages of improving the quality of its RMNCH care. After failing to meet the maternal and newborn Millennium Development Goals by 2015, the government created a roadmap to achieving the maternal and newborn MDGs by 2019 and mandated MCSP to support the Ministry of Health in strengthening its health system to reduce maternal and newborn mortality. In order to have an impact on quality, “we needed to engage with the health system at different levels,” said Razafimandimby. A systems approach required emphasis on policy at the national level, capacity-building and data usage at the district/regional level, and targeted service-delivery support and community engagement at the facility level. The ambitious task of assessing quality of care and implementing change involved nearly two-thirds of the country, across 16 regions and 80 districts. Quality care indicators monitored at more than 600 facilities showed promising reductions in maternal and newborn mortality. Health facilities implemented preventative measures to improve quality. Having a newborn station in the operating room after a C-section allowed midwives to care for the baby without having to carry him or her to the neonatal unit for care, which was often located in another building. This small change facilitated more immediate newborn care as well as greatly reduced the risk of infection. Other improved outcomes were linked to significant increases in antenatal screening for preeclampsia and the adoption of postpartum family planning methods before discharge from a facility. “These improved outcomes were not only seen at the primary facility level but also at district and regional hospitals,” said Razafimandimby. Despite success at the facility, district, and regional levels, national progress is slow. “Development of a national quality strategy and structure remains a high priority for Madagascar,” said Razafimandimby. “To be able to sustain and continue improvement work, national level leadership is really essential.” | |||
| Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue: Moving from Laundry Lists to Bottom Lines | 03 Aug 2018 | 00:13:31 | |
“A lot of the advocacy of family planning has been built around establishing a long list of the many ways in which family planning can be relevant” to other development goals, says Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University in our latest Friday Podcast. While comprehensive accounts of the ways family planning access benefits communities, these “laundry lists” are not “clear, synthetic, or integrative,” he says. Instead, Eloundou-Enyegue proposes that development planners focus instead on four “bottom lines” to more clearly communicate the importance of family planning across all sectors. The first bottom line is financial: “Take people through the savings that they are going to achieve with each dollar that is invested in family planning,” said Eloundou-Enyegue. The second bottom line is equity, which appeals to stakeholders who seek to promote justice in communities. Inequalities in fertility, income, and family structure “translate into very large inequality among children that will lead to even wider, larger inequality in the next generation,” Eloundou-Enyegue says. “Family planning can play an important role in breaking this intergenerational cycle.” The third bottom line Eloundou-Enyegue proposes is durability, which appeals to visionary leaders through the dividends that family planning offers over multiple generations. In addition to the immediate benefits, there is a second dividend, when the current working age population reaches retirement with greater savings, and then a third dividend comes from greater investment in the early childhood development of the next generation. The final bottom line is demand, particularly from youth: “There is actually a very large demand for family planning among youth if we return to the full meaning of ‘family planning,’” says Eloundou-Enyegue, focusing not just on births but on the course of one’s entire life. “Planning families for youth, and African youth, today, who are very concerned about their futures, is to think about how to plan their transition into work,” including developing skills and leadership. “There is room there to incorporate family planning in a large vision which is concerned about planning futures, planning families, naturally, and planning lives,” says Eloundou-Enyegue. | |||
| Jocelyn Ulrich: Enhancing Public Health to Unleash the Economic Power of Women | 27 Jul 2018 | 00:11:56 | |
Healthy Women, Healthy Economies is a global initiative that aims to unleash the “economic power of women by bringing governments, private sector, and other civil sector actors together to improve women’s health,” says Jocelyn Ulrich of EMD Serono, the U.S. branch of Merck KGaA, Darmstad, Germany, in our Friday Podcast. Providing for women’s health needs enables them to “join, thrive, and rise” in the economy, “bringing prosperity home to their families and communities.” This partnership was established in 2014 within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum by the 21 APEC economies, led by the United States and the Philippines, and members of the private sector. The project sought to address significant barriers to women’s full participation in the workforce, which include non-communicable diseases related to reproductive health and the dual responsibility of the workplace and caregiving for children and elderly parents. The partnership engaged in a comprehensive literature review and created a toolkit for governments and private sector actors to address these hurdles, with specific recommendations: • Improve access to sexual and productive health services • Increase awareness of services for voluntary family planning • Provide high-quality maternal, sexual, and reproductive health services • Protect against discrimination Since 2015, the project has convened workshops to track progress against the toolkit’s policy goals. One of the advantages to working under the auspices of APEC is engaging high-level ministers in women’s health. The toolkit’s policy recommendations align with the Sustainable Development Goals. “Sustainable economic growth really can’t be achieved if we’re leaving half of the population behind,” says Ulrich. | |||
| Franklin Moore: Fostering Local Innovation Through Community Organization | 20 Jul 2018 | 00:15:40 | |
Africare’s work has been built on a “strong belief that community mobilization and local capacity building and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development, and that, for us, includes resilience,” says Franklin Moore, Chief of Programs for Africare, in a podcast from a recent Wilson Center event. “Community engagement, capacity building, and looking at locally driven behavior and social change is what empowers communities.” Africare organizes community committees to identify innovations and behavior changes to make themselves more prosperous and resilient, including climate-smart agricultural techniques and women’s empowerment. In Niger, agro-pastoral communities rehabilitated land through the use of zai pits and half-moons, traditional farming techniques that retain rainwater for crops. Along with planting drought-resistant cowpea and forage sorghum, these steps enabled the communities Africare worked with to stockpile 57,000 tons of animal forage. During the 2011 drought, these communities were able to feed their livestock using the stored forage even when grazing land was degraded. Livestock death rates dropped 14 percent, and communities that might have otherwise had to sell off their livestock were able to keep them. Engaging women is key. “In Niger, food security committees are required to have at least 30 percent of their members [be] women,” says Moore, and in Zimbabwe, women make up 80 percent of Africare’s food distribution committees, because in these communities, “food distribution is really something females know a whole lot more about than males.” Child spacing also contributes women’s empowerment by improving women’s health and ability to participate in livelihood activities. Africare’s “husband schools” teach men about the importance of reproductive healthcare. “When we talk about child spacing, it is critically important that the men know as much or more about this as the women do,” Moore says. Community-based capacity building programs can change lives. “The organization of the community affects what the community is doing, who the community is, and in fact the size of the community,” says Moore. | |||
| One Woman’s Story: Preeclampsia Goes Untreated in Ethiopia | 15 Jun 2018 | 00:04:15 | |
“This is a woman who did exactly what she was supposed to do; she did exactly what we encourage pregnant women to do,” said Amy Dempsey of the Population Council at a recent Wilson Center event on World Preeclampsia Day. The Ethiopian woman was suffering from preeclampsia—a preventable condition—but like many pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries, she did not receive the treatment needed to stop it. “Pregnancy was the first time she had ever stepped foot in a health facility,” said Dempsey. Preeclampsia is characterized as the rise of blood pressure during pregnancy. Symptoms include (but are not limited to) headaches, nausea, abdominal pain, changes in vision, and shortness of breath. “She had constant headaches and blurry vision…At each visit, her providers measured her blood pressure but none of them told her that it was high or why they were measuring it,” said Dempsey. “She was told that what she was feeling was normal for a pregnant woman.” Although magnesium sulfate is commonly used to prevent seizures (eclampsia) later on in pregnancy, the patient did not receive treatment for her preeclampsia symptoms. “After one contact point with the health system, she was sent home with paracetamol to treat her headaches,” said Dempsey. In her eighth month of pregnancy, she collapsed. Her husband drove her to their church, where he hoped faith would heal her. “When her condition did not improve, he took her back to their local healthcare facility,” where she was referred to a hospital, treated with magnesium sulfate for her seizures, and given an emergency Caesarean section, said Dempsey. Fortunately, the woman was able to deliver a healthy baby boy. But five months later, she still experiences the same symptoms of headaches and abdominal pain, and has not been back in contact with her health providers since her initial postpartum visits. “She was never told that what she was experiencing were symptoms of preeclampsia,” said Dempsey. “What she went through is fairly common for women in low- and middle-income countries, where challenges that they encounter are quite different from the barriers that women in high-income countries deal with.” Sources: Healthline, Population Council, Preeclampsia Foundation | |||
| Fragile Families: Scaling Up Healthcare in Conflict Settings | 08 Jun 2018 | 00:07:35 | |
“How do our interventions provide an opportunity to really work at some of the core drivers of instability or lack of resilience?” said Larry Cooley from Management Systems International at a recent Wilson Center event on scaling up reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health interventions. In fragile settings—countries in conflict or crisis—scaling up healthcare is increasingly complex, yet incredibly urgent. Maternal mortality in fragile states is almost quadruple that of other low- and middle-income countries, and infant mortality is double. And 60 percent of the countries with the highest maternal and neonatal mortality rates are classified as fragile, conflict, and violence impacted by the World Bank. Understanding the context in fragile states is key, said Cooley. “Governments and markets”—the two main platforms for scaling up health interventions—“are both compromised.” Interventions and programs are often politicized along battle lines. Countries experiencing conflict or instability often cannot rely on public financing, and international support is inconsistent. “Resources tend to flow in very quickly around a crisis,” said Cooley, “and they flow out equally quickly.” Consequently, financing organizations such as the Global Financing Facility (GFF) invest in non-governmental organizations and humanitarian aid programs to secure stable ground. “Always—even within fragile systems—there are people and points of strength that can be built upon,” said Laura Ghiron, vice president of Partners in Expanding Health Quality and Access. “For example, there are those who know the limitations of the system,” said Ghiron, “but are trying…to work around them.” Most importantly, scaling up in fragile settings requires a heavy focus on the system, and not the details of the intervention in and of itself. “We need to be giving appropriate attention to the system that is going to have to deliver that intervention,” said Dr. Stephen Hodgins, associate professor for Global Health at the University of Alberta and editor-in-chief of Global Health: Science and Practice. “Sometimes the interventions that we are introducing make relatively heavy demands,” said Dr. Hodgins, “and we need to make a determination whether that is realistic given the system that we actually have to work with.” At the end of the day, scaling up interventions should be doing no harm, said Cooley, and should be seen as “a chance to really advance some of the building blocks of peace and stability.” Sources: Global Financing Facility, World Bank | |||
| Halvard Buhaug: Climate Changes Affect Conflict Dynamics | 04 May 2018 | 00:18:24 | |
“Climate is unquestionably linked to armed conflict,” says Halvard Buhaug, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, in the latest Wilson Center podcast. “If we produce a map of the world with locations of ongoing and recently entered armed conflicts, and we superimpose on that map different climate zones or climatic regions, we would very easily see a distinct clustering pattern of armed conflicts in warmer climates.” Since 1950, countries that have experienced at least one civil conflict have been an average of 8 degrees Celsius warmer than countries that have remained peaceful, reports Buhaug. Furthermore, rates of conflict are 10 times higher in dry climate zones than in continental climate zones. While these statistics show a clear correlation between climate and conflict, they do not prove that severe climates or changes in climate can cause conflict. Does such a causal connection exist? Maybe, says Buhaug: “There is emerging evidence that climate changes can affect the dynamics of conflict,” including duration, likelihood of a peaceful ending, and the severity of conflict. Extreme weather in particular “can make conflict resolution harder [and] can make it easier for rebel organizations to recruit soldiers.” However, there is yet “no scientific consensus that climatic changes can cause the outbreak of new conflicts,” he says. To identify causal mechanisms, we need more research: We “need to study dogs that don’t bark: societies that regularly experience extreme weather events…but where we do not observe a violent outcome.” Whether or not climate causes conflict, “adaptation and development can be very important in lessening the human costs of that conflict,” he says, especially because “conflict is an important cause of vulnerability to climatic changes.” “Ending armed conflict is the most effective strategy to lower the human consequences of climate change and to create facilities compatible with sustained growth,” says Buhaug. | |||
| NATO’s Paul Rushton on the Alliance’s Climate Security Efforts | 02 Jul 2024 | 00:37:34 | |
When senior officials from 32 countries meet in Washington, DC next week for the NATO Summit, deterrence and defense, as well as Ukraine and global partnerships, are at the top of the agenda. Under Secretary General Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has recognized that climate change is also reshaping the security landscape. In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, Wilson Center Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman speaks with NATO’s Paul Rushton about the Alliance’s efforts to integrate climate security across its core priorities. | |||
| Dr. Belen Garijo: “I Believe We Need To Do Better” For Caregivers Across The World | 05 Apr 2018 | 00:13:06 | |
“As many as 865 million of our mothers, daughters, [and] sisters across the globe are not reaching their full potential to contribute to their national economies,” said Dr. Belén Garijo, CEO for healthcare and executive board member of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, at a recent Wilson Center event. The act of caregiving, and the physical and mental health impacts that accompany it, often disproportionately rest on the shoulders of society’s women. These negative health impacts often hold women back from achieving their full potential, according to Dr. Garijo. “When health costs rise, households may not tighten the belt as much for men as for women,” she said. “We are advocating for policies that enhance productivity, and most importantly, advance equity.” Merck KGaA has been investigating their own employee productivity and retention of female workers. According to Dr. Garijo, the pharmaceutical company has implemented policies to support career pathways for women, such as unconscious bias trainings for senior executives, sponsoring high-potential women within the company, and flexible work arrangements. The “Healthy Women, Healthy Economies” toolkit, developed in partnership with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and other partners, analyzes “traditional healthcare access barriers, as well as broader topics, like the impact of unpaid work,” said Dr. Garijo, and relates these issues to “economic impact and success in the workplace.” Accompanying the toolkit is “Embracing Carers,” a global initiative launched by EMD Serono, the branch of Merck KGaA in North America, which is “actively engaging in quantifying the impact of the role of caregiving and advocating for progress on behalf of those filling these rewarding and challenging roles,” said Dr. Garijo. With the support of progressive policies, private and public sector leaders, and male counterparts, we can not only achieve gender equity, but also create a more productive workplace. “We are very committed to addressing the challenges,” said Dr. Garijo, “but we cannot do this alone.” | |||
| Maternal Health Experts: Strategic Partnerships and Data Key to Strengthening Health Systems | 16 Mar 2018 | 00:07:54 | |
“We need to think differently about how we invest in our country programs, and what outcomes we are interested in,” said Dr. Koki Agarwal, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program (MCSP) and a Vice President with Jhpeigo, at a recent Wilson Center event. USAID’s “Acting on the Call” report recommended 29 evidence-based maternal health interventions, though Kelly Saldaña from USAID’s Bureau of Global Health said that with enough research and data, there are likely many more. “There’s a need to study further interventions…to have a better understanding of how we can link health systems directly to the outcomes we are trying to achieve.” To improve maternal, child, and adolescent health systems globally, we need to “have the ability to use that data to make changes within a health system,” said Dr. Agarwal. Strategic partnerships are essential to building stronger health systems. Donors, in tandem with their country partners, have to bring all the players together, said Dr. Agarwal: “Bringing in that partnership, understanding what is happening across the country at the onset, is a much more successful way of building a sustainable program at the country level.” Supporting country leaders to strengthen health systems is a crucial part of development partners’ jobs, said Mary Taylor, a professor at the Arctic University of Norway. “Country leadership is a process.” | |||
| 2.6 Million Babies Are Stillborn Every Year | 12 Jan 2018 | 00:07:17 | |
Every day, 7,100 babies are stillborn. A tragic, complicated problem, stillbirth—which the WHO defines as a baby born with no signs of life at or after 28 weeks' gestation—remains difficult to control and to assess. Some hospitals hide data on stillbirth, due to the shame and stigma associated with it. However, as White Ribbon Alliance CEO Betsy McCallon said at a recent Wilson Center event marking the 30th anniversary of the Safe Motherhood Initiative, stillbirth “had been hidden and neglected, but that is changing.” Distinguishing a stillbirth from a neonatal death can be challenging, particularly when the lack of a skilled birth attendant prevented adequate resuscitation. Despite the complexity, “we need to measure it,” said Barbara Kwast, one of the pioneers of the Safe Motherhood Initiative. While stillbirth was not included in the original SDGs, after strong advocacy by the international global health community and bereaved families, stillbirth is now part of the SDG’s Every Woman Every Child framework. UNFPA’s Petra ten Hoope-Bender cited a new “people’s movement” that is bringing “dynamism, new energy into that agenda.” To reduce the rate of stillbirths, Kwast urged the maternal health community to decrease the rate of birth asphyxia and to use a partograph to help make decisions during labor. “The international community has done an extraordinary amount of work around third stage [of labor] to prevent postpartum hemorrhage,” but now “we need to pay more attention to the first and second stages of labor,” where 50 percent of stillbirths occur. | |||
| “It Can Be Done”: Address Malata’s Dream for Safe Motherhood in Malawi | 11 Jan 2018 | 00:22:54 | |
“Women still die…and they die preventable deaths,” said Address Malata, vice chancellor of the Malawi University of Science and Technology, at a recent Wilson Center event honoring the 30th anniversary of the Safe Motherhood Initiative. Malata—a midwife and the former vice president of the International Confederation of Midwives—told the heart-wrenching story of a pregnant woman who, like so many others, died waiting for transportation. “[Her mother] asked me…‘why was it that we waited for two days before my daughter was transferred to a decent hospital, but it only took a short time to take my daughter back home, and this time she was dead?’” said Malata. “My life has never been the same.” Malawi’s government has started to build new maternity waiting homes, develop community-based interventions, and provide family planning, as well as other programs intended to improve health outcomes for women and mothers. “At the end of the day,” Malata said, “the question is: Is this good enough progress?” Malawi still struggles with retaining an adequate health workforce, especially when it comes to midwives. Malawi needs to increase not only the quantity of midwives that stay in the country, but also the quality of their training and working conditions. “Do they have adequate time to practice when they are going through a midwifery program?” Malata asked. “As an advocate for midwifery, I would like to start protecting the profession,” she said. “There is so much money going to maternal health…but why are women still dying?” she asked, “We are not addressing the core issues that can change women’s lives.” By holding leaders accountable for fulfilling the needs of people on the ground, Malawi can address issues of quality, equity, and dignity for mothers. “If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.” Malata’s dream—that no woman dies while giving life—is big. “It is scary,” she said, “but it can be done.” | |||
| Peter Yeboah on Faith-Based Approaches to Global Health | 14 Dec 2017 | 00:13:48 | |
Peter Yeboah, Executive Director, Christian Health Association of Ghana, offers his perspective on faith-based approaches to global health | |||
| Tonny Tumwesigy on Faith-Based Approaches to Global Health | 14 Dec 2017 | 00:12:03 | |
Dr. Tonny Tumwesigye, Executive Director, Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau, gives his remarks on faith-based approaches to global health. | |||
| An Unlikely Ambassador: Ghana Gurung on Snow Leopards and Community Resilience | 22 Nov 2017 | 00:14:45 | |
As a child growing up in Nepal’s mountainous Upper Mustang region, Ghana Gurung understood that his survival depended on the mountains and his community. Today, as senior conservation program director at World Wildlife Fund-Nepal, he works to protect the endangered and elusive snow leopard by improving local communities’ livelihoods and the mountains’ ecosystem. “Survival of the snow leopard is…important for our own survival,” Gurung says in a podcast of his remarks at a recent panel discussion, “Securing the Third Pole: Science, Conservation, and Community Resilience in Asia’s High Mountains,” at the Wilson Center. He didn’t always believe this. As he herded his families’ goats, Gurung knew that in the harsh mountain climate, livestock is livelihood. When a snow leopard attacked and ate his goats, he was angry: “A loss of one animal is a loss of your economy, cash in the bank,” he says. But through his Buddhist faith and his ecological education, he came to see the important role played by snow leopards; as an umbrella species, the leopards are a top predator and indicate the overall health of the ecosystem. Climate change also threatens the snow leopard and its habitat, says Gurung. The tall grasses of his youth are now degraded, as are the habitats that support wild blue sheep, the snow leopards’ primary prey. “It’s not only wildlife and ecosystem that suffers; it’s people [that] suffer a lot,” says Gurung. To adapt to the changing climate, people are resettling alongside riverbeds that are vulnerable to flooding. And more catastrophically, water from melting glaciers could potentially impact billions of people downstream. Just a few months ago, one day of rain flooded 300,000 households. Climate change knows no political borders, and neither do snow leopards. They can travels more than 2,000 kilometers between countries, said Gurung. Twelve countries have joined together to create the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program, a global forum that brings together “countries that don’t normally sit side-by-side to talk too much in political terms,” says Gurung. But the snow leopard—acting as an “ambassador”—brings them together, he says. “You can call it adaptation, or you can call it mere survival strategies,” Gurung says of community-based efforts to protect snow leopards. For example, citizen scientists from local Sherpa communities set up camera traps, collect scat for DNA analysis, and help put radio collars on the the cats. “It’s not all about ecology of conservation for snow leopards, it’s about community,” he says. “The community holds the key to the survival of the species.” | |||
| As Fiji Leads COP-23, Camari Koto Reflects on Climate Resilience in the South Pacific Islands | 18 Nov 2017 | 00:08:55 | |
Climate change poses an undeniable threat to small island states, but many islanders do not even know what climate change is, says Camari Koto, an indigenous Fijian academic and educator at the University of the South Pacific and member of the Resilience Academy, in our latest podcast. “They know it’s happening, they are unconsciously [taking] adaptive responses,” and certainly feel the brunt of its effects, she says. “But they don’t see climate change as an immediate threat.” As Fiji presides over the 23rd UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP-23), perspectives in the South Pacific are beginning to shift. The first island nation to host the conference, Fiji is showcasing its leadership on climate change issues for both the global community and Fijians themselves, Koto says. “Our government was able to engage right [at] the grassroots level in creating awareness” within Fijian communities, says Koto, an advocate for building sustainable livelihoods and community resilience. It is especially important for the younger generation to be sensitized to climate risks “to start thinking about the threats that we have now,” she says, “and about ways in which they can help to make things better.” We must “prompt them to think about ways forward.” “It’s the community working together, collaborating, and valuing their relationship” to one another that is at the core of livelihood resilience, says Koto. Community is “the platform of our forefathers.” | |||
| Can We Fall in Love With the Problem? Monica Kerrigan on Innovations in Maternal Health | 20 Oct 2017 | 00:18:33 | |
“Innovation happens when there are pioneers that stick with it,” says Monica Kerrigan, vice president of innovations at Jhpiego in a podcast from the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative. At a recent panel discussion on “Reaching the Farthest Behind: Facility-Level Innovations in Maternal Health,” Kerrigan shone a light on some of the challenges facing innovators trying to change the way we care for mothers and their children. According to Kerrigan, one of the key components of delivering truly innovative solutions is partnership. “We need to use our partnerships to bend the curve,” Kerrigan says. “We at Jhpiego are good at things; other people are better at other things.” Effective partners harness one another’s comparative advantages to plan for scalability and adaptability. “When we think about scaling up,” she says, “we have to think about it now, in the design process.” Even as these developments are being rolled out, Kerrigan warns against “falling in love with the solution”—investing time, energy, and money into just one idea. Instead, she urges innovators to “fall in love with the problem” first. After years of work in maternal health innovations, Kerrigan admits that one of her biggest challenges is learning to more effectively use data to change plans. Innovations are not always shiny and new products; they may be restructured business models or processes. For example, the Low Dose High Frequency model, developed by Jhpiego, incorporates “targeted spurts of training that would allow people to learn faster, better, more affordably, and sustainably,” she says, preventing the loss of productivity often caused by removing healthcare personnel from their positions to train in classrooms. “[Change] is part of prototyping and adapting, and willingness to look at what you are doing well and continue to do it,” says Kerrigan. “Let’s deliver on our promises to mothers and newborns.” | |||
| Backdraft #9: Joshua Busby on Mapping Hotspots of Climate and Security Vulnerability | 29 Sep 2017 | 00:17:18 | |
Maps help us to grasp complex ideas, such as patterns of risk and vulnerability, but the stories they tell can have significant implications. “It’s very difficult to validate that what you’re capturing in the maps is representative of real-world phenomenon,” says Joshua Busby in this week’s “Backdraft” episode, describing his efforts to map climate and security hotspots in Africa and Asia. “You have to be modest in what you think the maps can tell policymakers, but also realize there is some seductive power in the way maps simplify complex reality.” The maps produced by Busby’s Climate Change and African Political Stability and Complex Emergencies and Political Stability projects are designed to help planners, donors, and national governments “shore up resilience on the ground.” “The real question that we have to ask and answer all the time is, ‘Do the maps have any basis in reality? Are they useful?’ ” says Busby, associate professor from the LBJ School at the University of Texas, Austin. When Busby and his team traveled to East Africa, they found that some of the challenges associated with chronic water scarcity were missing from their work, so they incorporated new indicators and updated the maps to more accurately represent the current situation. Without this “groundtruthing,” the maps could be misinterpreted and used to support interventions and other policy actions that could produce negative results, such as conflict. Building Consensus on Climate Action With proper groundtruthing, maps can be useful tools for reaching new audiences—and for reaching across the aisle. To build political consensus on climate change in the United States, Busby suggests focusing on related challenges, like water’s connection to security. “Because of its centrality to human wellbeing, [water] creates a reservoir of political goodwill that goes across political ideologies, and that’s why we’ve had great success in the U.S. government in creating a groundswell of sustained support for water and sanitation projects.” However, a focus on water is not a silver bullet, especially if that focus is primarily on providing infrastructure, or “taps and toilets,” without supporting the governance mechanisms needed to manage resources sustainably. “What’s been lost in this wider discussion are concerns about water and security and the institutions both at the national and international [level] that can shore up the ability of countries to manage water resources on their own,” says Busby. Donors should support efforts to build the capacity of countries to sustainably manage their water resources, particularly resources that are shared with other countries. As climate change increases both floods and droughts, poorly managed water resources could spur political instability both within and between countries. | |||
| Environmental Peacebuilding: An Oral History | Dr. Dhanasree Jayaram | 21 May 2024 | 00:33:24 | |
In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle speaks with Dr. Dhanasree Jayaram, Program Manager at Climate Diplomacy and Assistant Professor at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India. Dr. Jayaram describes what environmental peacebuilding looks like in the context of South Asia, how climate diplomacy connects to environmental peacebuilding, and how the field has evolved. In looking at the future of environmental peacebuilding, she also raises insights and questions that an environmental peacebuilding lens can help us consider as we push forward on climate action. This episode is hosted in partnership with the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, as part of a special series featuring thought-leaders and frontline Workers in Environmental Peacebuilding. Through interviews with a range of experts, the series explores how the field of Environmental Peacebuilding first emerged and how it’s being shaped by new approaches and new voices. | |||
| Doris Chou on Measuring Maternal Health in the SDG Era | 17 Aug 2017 | 00:22:49 | |
“How do we present things in a responsible way?” asks Dr. Doris Chou of the World Health Organization (WHO) during a Wilson Center panel discussion on “Maternal and Women’s Health, Two Years In: Measuring Progress Towards Meeting the SDGs.” “My job is to make sure things don’t get misinterpreted,” says Chou. WHO’s Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality (EPMM) strategy, which was published in 2015, informed the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) indicator index for maternal health. Chou explains that the EPMM’s themes “speak to empowering women and girls, ensuring country engagement and leadership, and…improving metrics and measurement.” To ensure accuracy, we need to use have clear shared definitions of maternal health terminology. “What do we mean by maternal death?” Chou asks. “There is a definition, but the interpretation of that definition, we found in the MDG monitoring, varied widely.” Miscommunication and misunderstanding between English and Spanish definitions of the term led to “three years of political discussion—on one word,” she explains. Accuracy also requires seeking input from the most important people: the women and adolescents who are at the center of the data. “Can we make sure that everybody who needs to be at the table is at the table to think this through? For instance…when we talk about measuring essential adolescent services, what is essential? ‘Essential’ to you and me might be very different than ‘essential’ to the adolescent that we are trying to reach,” says Chou. “We have to take stock of the old, while we are moving forward and trying to look really far in the future so that we can really always make sure that things are harmonized,” Chou explains, but sometimes it is necessary to stop and understand why we are doing what we are doing. “We are really in a fantastic time that we can really think about this and make a change,” says Chou. “Everyone, everywhere, has something to do.” | |||
| Simon Nicholson on Climate Engineering Technologies | 20 Jul 2017 | 00:09:17 | |
In this podcast postscript, Simon Nicholson goes into detail about the array of climate engineering technologies being researched. | |||
| Backdraft #8: Simon Nicholson on Climate Engineering | 20 Jul 2017 | 00:23:44 | |
When the Paris Agreement set an ambitious goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the negotiators put climate engineering on the table, says Simon Nicholson, professor at American University in this week’s episode of Backdraft. Once the purview of science fiction, a majority of the models run by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) required large-scale use of climate engineering technologies to keep additional warming below 2 degrees. “Nobody who was arguing for that 1.5 degree target at Paris was thinking in their heads we should start shooting sulfate particles into the atmosphere,” says Nicholson. They were looking at the science and recognizing that without aggressive action a lot of people will suffer. But, says Nicholson, it’s not clear that the target is attainable through traditional mitigation alone. “The entire conversation is in some ways an unintended consequence of not doing enough. Very few people want to talk about doing climate engineering. The reason you get a growing number of scientists and policymakers [discussing climate engineering], is because the situation is getting pretty desperate.” There are two types of climate engineering technologies – solar radiation management and carbon dioxide removal. While carbon dioxide removal tends to be slow-acting and expensive, solar radiation management is fast-acting and seemingly cheap. “One thing to really pay attention to is that each of the technologies has its own risk profile,” says Nicholson, the co-founder of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment. “We have to parse them out and discuss them one by one.” Both technologies have significant environmental, political and social, and existential implications. For example, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a carbon dioxide removal technology used in the IPCC modeling, would require an immense industrial infrastructure to capture carbon and move it to storage. There would be massive changes in land use, which could generate political and social conflicts. Determining who gets a voice in the decision-making process will be extremely complicated and could increase the vulnerability of already vulnerable communities, says Nicholson. While faster-acting and less expensive than carbon removal technologies like BECCS, solar radiation management technologies, like stratospheric aerosol injection, could have devastating environmental consequences. “Even if we get it right, there is potential for downsides,” says Nicholson. “The biggest problem is the social and political transformation that’s needed so that long-term human beings and the way that we live are compatible with ecological realities,” says Nicholson. “Solar radiation is not a fix… And yet, one could imagine politicians and other actors try to sell it as a fix.” Currently, there is no formal governance system overseeing climate engineering, and Nicholson suggests that this may be an even bigger hurdle than even the environmental impacts. A successful climate intervention would require at least a couple hundred years to achieve a significant decrease in temperature, and stopping an intervention prematurely could lead to a spike in warming. “How do you build a system of governance that lasts across multiple centuries?” he asks. “It might not be the technological challenges that sink something like stratospheric aerosol injection; it may be that the political conversation is just too tough. We just can’t find a way to put together a governance arrangement that’s robust enough that the world community buys it.” “Although negotiators didn’t intend for this to be the case, now we’re kind of locked into a conversation where climate engineering is on the table,” says Nicholson. “If these [technologies] do start to come onto the table, then they can’t be used as cover for inaction. And that is perhaps the biggest political challenge in this space.” | |||
| Michael Kugelman on Pakistan’s “Nightmare” Water Scenario | 25 May 2017 | 00:13:35 | |
“Water scarcity is a nightmare scenario that is all too real and all but inevitable in Pakistan,” says Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program, in this week’s podcast. Pakistan faces the intersecting challenges of population growth, inefficient infrastructure and policies, deep societal inequality, and climate change, leading to a situation where the country is “voraciously consuming water even as water tables are plummeting precipitously,” says Kugelman. Not only are water problems exacerbating internal tensions, they’re complicating relations with fellow riparian and upstream rival, India. The degree of Pakistan’s dilemma is profound. A 2015 International Monetary Fund report found that Pakistan’s water consumption is the fourth highest in the world and its water intensity rate (the amount of water needed for every unit of GDP) is also among the highest. Groundwater reserves, the “last resort of water security,” says Kugelman, is a “safety net that is fraying.” He cites a NASA study that found the Indus Basin aquifer, shared between India and Pakistan, is the second most overdrawn in the world. High levels of consumption are driven by the “robust demand of a rapidly growing population, which now numbers close to 200 million people,” says Kugelman. The annual growth rate is around 1.8 percent, and is projected to stay above 1 percent until at least 2030. Poor infrastructure and policy also contribute to the dilemma. “Pakistan is unfortunately rather notorious for its leaky, dilapidated pipes, canals, and dams,” says Kugelman, which in turn supply a huge agricultural sector that guzzles water at an enormous rate. The government subsidizes water-intensive crops, like sugar, while encouraging inefficient irrigation methods, like flood irrigation. Overall, agriculture may account for 90 percent of Pakistan’s water usage, says Kugelman. In “feudal-like conditions” of deep inequality, tenants struggle to access water on land controlled by elites, who face little scrutiny in how they use it. “It’s been said that land ownership is as a proxy for water rights,” says Kugelman. “If you don’t own land, your right to water is highly tenuous.” While these factors drive up demand, climate change is imperiling supply. The glaciers of the Western Himalayas, the headwaters of the Indus River and its tributaries, have been melting rapidly. “The government in Pakistan has claimed that glacial melt on Pakistan’s mountains has increased by nearly 25 percent in recent years,” says Kugelman. “The once mighty Indus River has slowed to essentially a trickle in parts of the southern province of Sindh.” Many in Pakistan, including anti-India terror groups, see these problems and accuse India of hoarding water and depleting rivers that flow across the border. Some believe the only solution is to “liberate” the disputed border areas of Jammu and Kashmir. But Kugelman says there is no evidence to support this accusation and that India is “more of a convenient scapegoat than a genuine explanation.” India has mostly built “run of the river” dams that do not store appreciable amounts of water and thus do not keep water from flowing across the border, he says. The Indus Waters Treaty also gives Pakistan the rights to the three largest rivers of the basin, amounting to 80 percent of flows, says Kugelman. “The broader reality is that there has actually been a fair level of cooperation between these two enemies in managing transboundary water resources in the Indus Basin.” Climate change and rapid population growth are changing conditions significantly and there have been calls on both sides for the treaty to be renegotiated, but Kugelman believes there is not enough trust between the two for a renegotiation to be productive at the moment. “It is 100 percent wrong to claim that water is a soft issue, that the two sides can use water as a confidence building measure,” he asserts. Resolution of Pakistan’s water problems will require mainly domestic changes, but in the public eye are more connected with cross-border, nationalist contentions, a dynamic that only entrenches problems. “You cannot separate transboundary water management from the ugly, complex, political disputes in India-Pakistan relations,” he says. “There is really nothing apolitical about transboundary water management on the Indian Subcontinent.” Michael Kugelman spoke at the Wilson Center on May 9, 2017. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play. | |||
| Christophe Angely on Overcoming Pessimism for the Sahel | 18 May 2017 | 00:14:05 | |
The Sahel region of Africa is a wide band that marks the transition from the Sahara Desert in the north to the wetter, sub-tropical regions in the south. The Sahelian countries have some of the most rapidly growing populations in the world and have faced significant environmental change over the past century. In recent years, insurgencies have surged in several countries, new terrorist groups have become active, there have been several droughts, and migration has increased. “We firmly believe that without development, the security situation in the Sahel will worsen, generating enormous human and financial costs for countries in and around the region as well as in Europe,” says Christophe Angely of the France-based Foundation for International Development Study and Research (FERDI) in this week’s podcast. FERDI recently completed a two-year transdisciplinary research project of the region, pulling information from researchers on the ground and from France’s military intervention in Mali. “We got a very alarming message about what was happening,” Angely says – and about people’s outlook. There are major demographic, economic, social, environmental, and institutional challenges, but they are not insurmountable, he says. “Our plea seeks to overcome the prevailing pessimism about the Sahel’s economic potential, which leads some to believe…that the only solution for people is to migrate outside the Sahel zone.” Angely’s first proposal? Reinvest in education. The international community has dramatically reduced aid for education in the Sahel since 2009, says Angely. In 2014, France allocated just 13 percent of its programmable aid to the education sector, and the United States and other multilateral donors allocated only 2 percent. Combined with rapid growth in school enrollment, thanks to youthful and growing populations, this has left Sahelian states unable to fund education alone. Sustainable Development Goal 4, to ensure inclusive, equitable, and quality education for all, “demands…a rethink of the funding strategies of education, given that national government, private funders, and international donors are increasingly difficult to coordinate,” Angely explains. He calls for not only more schools, but better training for teachers and supervision that can protect girls from the kind of violence that has played out in northern Nigeria and discourages many from attending. FERDI also recommends a new approach to agriculture. Instead of sticking with historic patterns of expanding surface area to increase production, Angely argues that policymakers should encourage farmers to improve yields on existing plots. He also calls for selecting more diverse crops, encouraging young people to get involved in the industry, smoothing price variability for exporters, and promoting better coordination in the sector generally. These solutions not only promote food security, they provide benefits to local economies. “Small-scale processing food or agriculture is probably where you get the most reserve of jobs,” Angely says. Angely’s final recommendation is to strengthen national administration capacities. The Sahel countries need better democratic models, he says; in many, democracies are “more formal than real.” Elected officials tend to focus on reelection and capitalizing on differences between groups instead of responding to the needs of all citizens. Donors should work to create long-term programs that not only support key ministries such as education, but are also able to manage pressures such as food insecurity without creating conflict or triggering violence, he says. “People need to rediscover their face in progress and feel more confident about the rule of their states. This is why it must be the objectives of all actions in the region to favor a balance between quick impact activities and actions that are effective over the long term.” Christophe Angely spoke at the Wilson Center on April 25. Download his slides to follow along. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes. | |||
| A Little Respect: Saraswathi Vedam on Reducing Over-Intervention in Maternal Care Through More Autonomy | 11 May 2017 | 00:19:37 | |
Governments and health organizations have made remarkable gains in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity rates around the world. Much of those gains have been driven by increasing capacity, directing more women to hospitals and clinics to ensure they get modern medical care. Increasingly, however, experts are realizing that this push has brought challenges of its own. “We have these huge numbers of women going into hospitals with three to a bed and overcrowded hospitals and terrible conditions, and we have not improved the outcomes,” says Saraswathi Vedam, an associate professor and lead investigator at the University of British Columbia’s Birth Place Lab, in this week’s podcast. “Institutional birth has not been shown to be the answer,” she says. Instead, “it’s about skilled attendants and respectful care.” Under crowded and hectic conditions, many women feel pressure to undergo unnecessary obstetric interventions that are both expensive and dangerous, including Caesarean sections (C-sections) and episiotomies, a phenomenon The Lancet refers to as “too much, too soon.” “When we talk about interventions and too much too soon,” Vedam says, “we need to understand who’s making the decisions, what’s driving the decisions.” The Birth Place Lab created the Mother’s Autonomy in Decision Making (MADM) scale and the Mothers on Respect (MOR) index to help quantify the experiences of expecting women and families and record their perceptions of respect and agency throughout the process. Among the nearly 3,400 women from various backgrounds who took part in the Changing Childbirth in British Columbia study, for example, 95 percent said it was “very important” or “important” that they lead the decisions about their own pregnancy, birth, and baby care. Yet, the bulk of the decisions are being driven by providers. Among respondents in three recent maternal care studies, “two in five women felt pressured to have a C-section,” Vedam says. “It wasn’t whether they had the intervention [that affected their perception of care], it was whether or not they felt involved in decision-making.” Women consistently responded to more personalized and higher quality care. Midwifery clients reported more respectful treatment wherever they delivered, Vedam says, as well as higher autonomy scores. “We think that it has something to do with time,” she says. When women have enough time to consider their options and make more informed choices, maternal care is more collaborative, and costly and risky over-interventions are avoided. Saraswathi Vedam spoke at the Wilson Center on April 24, 2017. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play. | |||
| Backdraft #7: Janani Vivekananda on What Renewable Energy Projects Can Learn From Oil and Future-Proofing Humanitarian Responses | 13 Apr 2017 | 00:16:12 | |
As more and more development and humanitarian programs contend with climate-related problems, there are important lessons learned from past experience that should not be forgotten, says Janani Vivekananda, formerly of International Alert and now with adelphi, in this week’s episode of “Backdraft.” In her work with International Alert, Vivekananda found there was often a misconception that all renewable energy projects are an “unalloyed good.” But renewable energy efforts still require access to resources, like land and water, which can be highly contested (listen to Stacy VanDeveer in Backdraft #2 for more on this). Traditional extractive industries like oil and gas have grappled with conflict risks in the communities they work for decades, to greater and lesser degrees of success, but little of that experience has transferred over to the renewable sector, she says. Vivekananda says that development actors looking to encourage renewable energy projects should strive to understand local power dynamics as much as possible – who controls assets, and is it through formal or informal agreements, treaties, etc. “Then understand how your intervention is going to affect and change this and who the winners and losers are going to be.” There can be significant financial and social costs when conflict-sensitivity is not built into program design. Vivekananda gives the example of a wind farm in northwest Kenya proposed by a large international bank. The consultation process focused on elites at the district level, but did not include local non-elites who would be directly affected by the project. Consequently, the project broke down as the project organizers realized too late that the land required was already highly contested. “These local contextual conflict dynamics were not fed into program design,” says Vivekananda, “and it was a very expensive way to learn about the need to ensure that an intervention was conflict-sensitive.” Humanitarian interventions are another response that by their very nature – immediate, short-term, and urgent – often do not plan for longer-term impacts. As groups rush to fill the burgeoning global need, “we’re seeing then that humanitarian interventions are climate blind and conflict blind,” says Vivekananda. Refugee camps, like Zaatari in Jordan which houses nearly 80,000 refugees, are often built without sustainable water or energy use plans. Groundwater extraction in Zaatari has inflated the local water market making it difficult for surrounding communities to afford water, thereby increasing tensions, says Vivekananda. To address gaps in planning, Vivekananda says a shift in mindset is needed not only at the practitioner level, but at the political level. By incorporating a sustainable development and conflict-sensitive lens at the outset, interventions can not only help avoid conflict but actively increase cohesion and trust. In Kibera, a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Vivekananda and her colleagues saw firsthand the peace dividends that can come from a forward-looking, participatory planning approach. They found that the projects most likely to increase community resilience – to both conflict and climate risks like flooding – were the ones that “through their process involve people in decisions and planning and are participatory by nature and therefore build trust between the communities affected and the government.” Interventions with a single sector approach – e.g., moving people from informal shacks to more sturdy structures – sometimes inadvertently undermined social networks and ultimately had a negative impact on community resilience. “That social cohesion is critical and if you’re intervening in a way that dislocates that, undermines that, it’s unlikely to take hold,” says Vivekananda. The “Backdraft” podcast series is hosted and co-produced by Lauren Herzer Risi and Sean Peoples, a freelance multimedia producer based in Washington, DC. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play. | |||
| Backdraft #6: Jesse Ribot on Why It’s So Important for Climate Interventions to Work Through Local Democracy | 06 Apr 2017 | 00:20:36 | |
In a research project spanning more than two dozen case studies on environmental governance in 13 sub-Saharan African countries, Jesse Ribot, professor at the University of Illinois, and colleagues found that while many forest management projects claimed to be working with communities, they were in fact undermining local democracy in various ways. For example, Ribot says in this week’s episode of “Backdraft” that REDD, REDD-readiness, and other forest governance projects often circumvented locally elected officials for the sake of convenience and in response to pressure for quantifiable results. The workarounds were done “almost systematically, and not in ways that were subtle.” Why does this matter? Local democratic processes are “the nursery of democracy,” says Ribot. “People learn democratic process in local democracy and they go other places within their country and up the hierarchy.” When you have a system of decision-making that is accountable to the people, you have greater equity and stronger outcomes for the population. “Legitimacy follows power,” says Ribot, “and if you’re a project and you recognize a local actor as your interlocutor, your local representative, you’re empowering them, and that legitimates them.” Similarly, when development interventions ignore locally elected leaders, they delegitimize them. Where communities had more than one authority with overlapping responsibilities – e.g., elected local government, customary chiefs, and administrators from central government – development practitioners often chose to work with one of the traditional or centralized authorities over the democratically elected local government. One reason for this was that practitioners operated on the assumption that the customary chief spoke for the people. Digging deeper, Ribot and his colleagues found that while the customary chief often did speak for the people, their opinions were rarely accurately represented. The democratically elected local government was able to more effectively reflect the interests of the people. Ultimately, regardless of the pressure to produce results that may follow climate mitigation and adaptation programs, Ribot says the process matters. Rather than the climate event itself, it’s the vulnerability of a community that causes a catastrophe, says Ribot. Often people are not vulnerable to climate events because they lack adaptive capacity, but because of overwhelmed, poor, or exploitive governance. Undermining what democratic governance there is, therefore, is unlikely to produce positive results. The “Backdraft” podcast series is hosted and co-produced by Lauren Herzer Risi and Sean Peoples, a freelance multimedia producer based in Washington, DC. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play. | |||
| Samara Ferrara on How Midwifery Can Reduce Unnecessary Surgeries and Save Lives in Mexico | 30 Mar 2017 | 00:09:19 | |
“Midwives have the knowledge, midwives have the skills, and have the heart and compassion to serve mothers and babies in the most perfect way,” explains Samara Ferrara in this week’s podcast. But they often face demoralizing conditions, poor pay, and in some cases disdain from doctors. A new survey, Midwives' Voices, Midwives Realities, reports that “nearly 300,000 women and 2.7 million newborns die during the first 28 days of life, many from preventable causes.” Led by the World Health Organization, International Confederation of Midwives, and White Ribbon Alliance, this first-of-its kind survey highlights how midwives can buttress efforts to reduce maternal and newborn fatalities but also explores the everyday challenges they encounter around the world. As a young midwifery leader and board member of Mexico’s Midwife Association, Ferrara advocates for a greater role for her colleagues in Mexico’s efforts to make childbirth safer. “Twenty years ago, almost half the births were attended by midwives,” she says of Mexico. Now it is only two percent. “Ninety-five percent of births are attended by physicians, so births are over-medicalized,” she says. Mexico has among the highest rate of cesarean sections in the world. More midwives could help reduce unnecessary surgeries and the complications that come with them. But there are few opportunities for growth and recognition within the broader health system, Ferrara says, which discourages new midwives and professional advancement. As well, “the hospitals don’t accept home births easily,” making it difficult to register newborns and obtain a birth certificate for practicing midwives and their patients. “In total we only have 100 midwives in the whole country,” Ferrara says. In fact, there are only five midwifery schools Mexico’s 31 states. Of the recommendations in the report, Ferrara cited greater educational opportunities as a big first step to bridging the gap between private-practice midwives and the country’s health system. “We need to start by education in every level,” she says, in order “to have more professional ways to advance.” Additionally, Ferrara points out a public perception gap since “people don’t know what midwifery is about.” In order to raise awareness, she reiterates the important role midwives play in providing quality, safe childrearing expertise. “We know what women need,” says Ferrara, “we know what babies need, and we need to be there providing the highest standard of care.” Samara Ferrara spoke at the Wilson Center on February 27, 2017. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes and Google Play. | |||
| The Arc | Dr. Mizan Khan on Loss and Damage and Bangladesh’s Role as a Climate Adaptation Leader | 21 May 2024 | 00:32:39 | |
n today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Claire Doyle and Angus Soderberg speak with Dr. Mizan Khan, Deputy Director at the International Center for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), a research institute based in Bangladesh. Dr. Khan describes Bangladesh’s vulnerability to climate change and its unique role as an adaptation leader. He also discusses what he believes the core principles of the Loss and Damage Fund should be, and the legacy of the late Dr. Saleemul Huq. | |||
| The Arc | Dr. Renata Giannini on Women Environmental Defenders in the Amazon and Climate Mitigation | 26 Apr 2024 | 00:33:21 | |
In today’s episode of “The Arc,” ECSP’s Angus Soderberg and Claire Doyle interview Wilson Center Fellow, Dr. Renata Giannini. She shares stories and solutions from her work with women environmental defenders in the Amazon and she looks ahead at COP30 in Brazil. We also hear from Dr. Giannini about her work as a program manager and senior researcher at the Igarape Institute, where she coordinated a project on the challenges faced by women environmental defenders in the Amazon, and her work at the Wilson Center on the role of these defenders in mitigating climate change. | |||
| Environmental Peacebuilding: An Oral History | Dr. Erika Weinthal | 18 Apr 2024 | 00:34:18 | |
Today’s episode of New Security Broadcast is hosted by ECSP in collaboration with the Environmental Peacebuilding Association as part of a special series, "Thought-leaders and Frontline Workers in Environmental Peacebuilding: An Oral History." The series features interviews with academics, practitioners, and frontline workers to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the history and evolution the environmental peacebuilding field. In this episode, ECSP's Claire Doyle speaks with Dr. Erika Weinthal, Lee Hill Snowdon Professor of Environmental Policy at Duke University and member of the United Nations Environment Programme's Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. Dr. Weinthal shares how academics, practitioners, and policymakers collaborated to shape and bring momentum to the environmental peacebuilding field, why water was a central focus early on, where she thinks environmental peacebuilding is headed, and more. | |||
| Environmental Peacebuilding: An Oral History | Dr. Ken Conca and Dr. Geoff Dabelko | 21 Mar 2024 | 00:48:24 | |
On today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program and the Environmental Peacebuilding Association launch a series of oral history interviews with experts to trace the history of the field of environmental peacebuilding. From the people who helped shape the field to those who are bringing new approaches and perspectives today, our guests give us a behind-the-scenes look at how the field of environmental peacebuilding first emerged and how it has evolved. In this first episode, ECSP’s Claire Doyle speaks with two of the field's early thought leaders, Dr. Ken Conca and Dr. Geoff Dabelko, who unpack what motivated them to publish their 2002 book “Environmental Peacemaking” and share how they’ve seen the field change, as well as their hopes for the future of environmental peacebuilding. | |||
| The Arc | Climate, Conflict, and Women’s Resilience: A Recent Women for Women International Report | 08 Mar 2024 | 00:33:18 | |
In today’s episode of “The Arc,” ECSP’s Angus Soderberg and Claire Doyle interview Nisha Singh and Kavin Mirteekhan from Women for Women International. We dive into the organization’s report, Cultivating a more enabling environment: Strengthening women’s resilience in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected communities, hearing from them on the need for a report at this intersection, their key findings, and the report’s recommendations. Kavin, Women for Women’s Country Director in Iraq, also shares the experiences of women in climate-vulnerable and conflict affected communities there.” | |||
| Sarah Ladislaw on US Climate Security and “Mutually Assured Resilience” | 07 Mar 2024 | 00:22:46 | |
In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP Program Director Lauren Risi speaks with Sarah Ladislaw, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Climate and Energy at the National Security Council (NSC). In the conversation, Special Assistant Ladislaw describes the most pressing climate security challenges facing the US, her recent address at the Munich Security Conference, and her vision for achieving “mutually assured resilience.” | |||
| The Arc | Dr. Yvonne Su on Climate Migration, Equity, and Policy | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:22:59 | |
In today’s episode of “The Arc,” ECSP’s Claire Doyle and Angus Soderberg interview Dr. Yvonne Su, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Equity Studies at York University in Toronto. Dr. Su challenges oversimplified portrayals of displacement by drawing out how socioeconomic status, identity, and timeframes shape experiences of migration. She also stresses the importance of involving marginalized communities in policy consultations and draws attention to local grassroots organizations as pivotal players in addressing the challenges of climate migration. | |||
| The Arc | Financing Inclusive Climate Action: Investing in and Empowering Local Communities | 13 Dec 2024 | 01:06:50 | |
In today’s episode of The Arc, we’re sharing a panel discussion from the Forum on Advancing Inclusive Climate Action in Foreign Policy and Development, an event hosted by the Wilson Center in collaboration with the White House and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and with support from the USAID Climate Adaptation Support Activity. The panel you’ll hear today was the final panel of the Forum, focusing on how to accelerate climate finance while ensuring equitable access to resources. The panel was moderated by Jake Levine, the Senior Director for Climate and Energy at the National Security Council. The experts on the panel include Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, the Inaugural Executive Director of the Home Planet Fund; Jacqueline Musiitwa, the Deputy Assistant to the Administrator for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at USAID; Bella Tonkonogy, Senior Advisor at the Department of Treasury’s Climate Hub; and Laura García, the President and CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund. | |||
| Unpacking the Impact of the Fifth National Climate Assessment | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:28:27 | |
In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Lauren Risi hosts three contributing authors of the international chapter of the recently released fifth National Climate Assessment. Dr. Roger Pulwarty is a Senior Scientist with the Physical Sciences Laboratory at NOAA; Dr. Andrea Cameron is a permanent military professor teaching policy analysis at the US Naval War College; and Dr. Geoff Dabelko is a Professor and Associate Dean with the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs at Ohio University and a senior advisor to ECSP. In the conversation, the authors discuss the implications of climate change for national and international security, and they delve into the international chapter and its significance for policymakers in the US and abroad. | |||
| Green Corruption: Dissecting a Recent Wilson Center Event | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:20:07 | |
In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Angus Soderberg breaks down a recent Wilson Center event against the backdrop of the 10th annual Conference of State Parties (COSP) to the UN Convention on Corruption, which is under way in Atlanta this week. On September 19, ECSP, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, the Embassy of the Principality of Liechtenstein, and the Basel Institute on Governance, hosted Combating Green Corruption: Fighting Financial Crime as a Driver of Environmental Degradation. The speakers discuss how corruption fuels wildlife trafficking and other environmental crimes, which finance illicit activities, hamper development, and erode efforts to combat biodiversity loss and climate change across the globe. | |||
| Relief, Recovery, and Peace: Iris Ferguson on COP28’s New Theme | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:19:33 | |
In a new mini-series previewing the upcoming UN Climate Summit (COP28)’s new focus on relief, recovery, & peace, ECSP Program Director Lauren Risi spoke with Iris Ferguson, the US Department of Defense’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience. Deputy Assistant Secretary Ferguson spoke about why climate security has become a crucial element in DOD planning, as well as why the department will have a highly visible presence at COP28. She also shared the story of her own path to leadership at the Pentagon – as well as why her position includes both global resilience and the Arctic. | |||
| The Arc | Gender, Agriculture, and Climate Change with Dr. Maureen Miruka | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:29:08 | |
In the first episode of “The Arc,” ECSP’s Claire Doyle and Angus Soderberg speak with Dr. Maureen Miruka about the complex relationship between gender, climate, and agriculture. Miruka, who is Director of Strategic Partnerships and Research at CARE USA., emphasizes the disproportionate impact of climate stressors on women and vulnerable populations through the lens of food systems. She also underscores the pivotal role women play as change agents in global climate mitigation and adaptation and makes a call to broaden the scope of research in this space to include other gender minorities. | |||
| The Arc | Dr. Robert McLeman on Climate Migration, Equity, and Policy | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:28:01 | |
In today’s episode of “The Arc,” ECSP Director Lauren Risi interviews Dr. Robert McLeman, a professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Toronto. Dr. McLeman unpacks how climate change interacts with social, economic, and political conditions in ways that render some communities to be more vulnerable to climate-related displacement than others. He also shares insights into how we can promote safe, dignified, and just migration in the context of climate change and how justice and equity considerations are being incorporated into climate migration policy. This episode is part one of two focusing on the intersection between climate migration, equity, and policy. | |||
| Relief, Recovery, and Peace: Peter Schwartzstein on COP28’s New Theme | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:15:50 | |
In a new mini-series previewing the upcoming UN Climate Summit (COP28)’s new focus on relief, recovery, & peace, the Director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, Merissa Khurma, spoke with Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and Wilson Center Global Fellow. Schwartzstein discusses the impact of the war in Gaza on COP28 and environmental peacebuilding efforts more broadly in the region. He also talks about how we can advance the new theme of peace in COP discussions and what his hopes are for a best-case scenario coming out of the upcoming summit. | |||
| Relief, Recovery, and Peace: David Nicholson on COP28's New Theme | 13 Feb 2024 | 00:21:31 | |
In a new mini-series previewing the upcoming UN Climate Summit (COP28)’s new focus on relief, recovery, & peace, ECSP Program Director Lauren Risi spoke with David Nicholson, Director of the Environment, Energy and Climate Change Technical Support Unit at Mercy Corps. Nicholson described his role in ensuring that climate change is at the center of Mercy Corps’ wide-ranging and successful global humanitarian aid programs in 42 countries—and the importance of having local staff to make interventions a true partnership. He also talks about climate finance, and his hopes that COP28’s theme of “relief, recovery and peace” will advance the view that peacemaking is essential to adaptation efforts. | |||
| Introducing "The Arc" | 06 Nov 2023 | 00:02:28 | |
On today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP is launching a new series called The Arc, focused on the connections between climate change, equity, justice, and identity. We will cover a wide range of topics – from food and water systems to the energy transition, migration, and climate finance – and talk with practitioners, advocates, professors, and community leaders to discover where these topics intersect with issues related to climate impacts and justice. We will also examine how responses to climate change intersect with justice and equity. From adaptation to mitigation, it is essential to explore how our collective response to climate change—including the financing mechanisms that propel these efforts—provide an opportunity to create more just, sustainable, and vibrant communities. Broad economic and social transitions are underway as we take action on climate change. Against that backdrop, The Arc will also foreground how our responses must prioritize the needs of historically underrepresented communities—and embed their knowledge into any solutions. Tune into The Arc to hear stories about the diverse dimensions of climate change, its connections with inequality, and meet those working in this space to make an impact. | |||
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