Acknowledgments

List of Boxes, Tables, and Figures

Foreword

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Chairman, Green Cross International

Five years ago, all 191 United Nations member states pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability. These critical challenges were reaffirmed by health officials from across the globe in October 2004 at the tenth anniversary of the landmark International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo.

The overarching conclusion from this 2004 meeting was that while considerable, albeit erratic, progress was indeed being made in many areas, any optimism must be tempered with the realization that gains in overall global socioeconomic development, security, and sustainability do not reflect the reality on the ground in many parts of the world. Poverty continues to undermine progress in many areas. Diseases such as HIV/AIDnextricably linked to the ecological and social problems she has devoted her life to addressing. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement to organize poor women to plant millions of trees—the group's goals included replenishing Kenya's dwindling forests, providing desperately needed cooking fuel, and making women active participants in improving their lives and those of their families.

Maathai's success and her subsequent challenge to government conservation policies put her in direct conflict with the country's autocratic president. She and her followers were beaten and jailed—but in the process they spurred thousands of followers to action in Kenya and around the globe. The civil society movement that Wangari Maathai leads helped pave the way for Kenya's peaceful transition from virtual dictatorship to elected government in 2003. Capping the historic transition, she is now a member of the Kenyan parliament and assistant environment minister in the current government.

By coincidence, the Nobel Peace Price was announced just as we were putting the finishing touches on State of the World 2005—the twenty-second edition of our annual book and the first to focus on global security, the topic that has so dominated private and political discourse over the past few years. As longtime admirers of the Green Belt Movement, my colleagues and I were heartened by the news of Wangari Maathai's award, and inspired by the hope that this latest Nobel Prize will help convince millions of people around the world to stop viewing global security as something that can be safeguarded solely through diplomatic skills or military power.

Our focus in the pages that follow is on the deeper roots of insecurity—many of them found in the destabilization of human societies and the natural world that has accompanied the explosive growth in human numbers and resource demands over the past several decades. Drawing on the varied expertise and insights of our own staff, as well as on a record number of collaborators from around the world, we have sought to unravel the often hidden links between such disparate phenomena as falling water tables, the spread of AIDS, transnational crime, environmental refugees, terrorism, and climate change. In doing so, we have found ample reason to fear that the profound insecurity that has gripped the world for the past three years may grow even deeper in the years ahead.

Demographic imbalances are one destabilizing force. As Lisa Mastny and Richard Cincotta describe in the second chapter, in roughly one third of the world's countries—most of them in Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia—a large generation of teenagers is faced with limited economic prospects and often little in the way of education. Most of the world's civil wars, emigration, and terrorism emerge from those countries—exacerbated in many cases by ethnic and religious differences and by the breakdown of the social and ecological systems people depend on.

In many of these same countries, the spread of infectious diseases, particularly AIDS, is also tearing societies apart, killing many of the young people who are best equipped to lead their nations forward economically and politically. Growing human pressures on natural resources—triggering the collapse of fisheries and the drying up of rivers, for example—are further undermining some societies. The latest humanitarian crisis to hit the world's headlines in 2004 was in Darfur in Sudan, where the immediate clashes between Arab nomads and African villagers was preceded by years of desertification that led herders to encroach on farmland to their south, heightening tensions and eventually leading to open conflict, forced eviction of villagers, and genocide.

Access to oil is another cause of instability that has commanded recent attention. The dramatic run-up in prices to over $50 per barrel in the fall of 2004 coincided with growing instability in the Persian Gulf, where the world's richest oil resources are located. The dominance of the oil industry in the Middle East has undermined the economic and political development of the region while flooding it with petrodollars that have increased economic disparities and financed the rise of terrorism. The dependence of the United States and Europe on Middle Eastern oil has led to highly skewed economic flows and heavy military investments that have created deep resentments on both sides. The prospect of world oil production beginning a long decline within the next decade, just when large countries like China and India stake their claims to remaining reserves, would be reason enough for concern even without the crisis caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Together, they have created a global powder keg.

The possibility of disruptive climate change may be an even greater threat to the security of societies. Amid new signs of accelerated global warming—from the rapid melting of Arctic ice to the spread of s and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than by the limits of technology and consumerism. I am delighted that the Worldwatch Institute continues to address these important challenges and goals in its annual State of the World report. I urge all readers to seriously consider their personal commitments to action after finishing this volume. Only with the active and dedicated participation of civil society will we be successful in building a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Preface

Christopher Flavin, President, Worldwatch Institute

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai in October 2004, the Nobel Committee's decision was met with dismay in some circles. To many traditional security specialists, it seemed frivolous at a time of military conflict, civil wars, terrorism, and proliferating nuclear materials to give this most prestigious of international awards to a person known for planting trees rather than signing treaties. Indeed, a leading politician in Norway, which sponsors the prize, commented, "It is odd that the committee has completely overlooked the unrest that the world is living with daily, and given the prize to an environmental activist."

In our view, the award could not have been more fitting. The life history of Wangari Maathai is testimony to the fact that the insecurity the world struggles with today is pacekeeping, and conflict prevention with underlying efforts to meet health and education needs and to restore ecosystems.

It is fitting that the Foreword of State of the World 2005 is by another Nobel Peace Prize winner: former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who is now Chairman of Green Cross International. Gorbachev, who played a starring role in the conclusion of the late twentieth century's biggest security challenge, the cold war, has devoted much of his energy over the last decade to one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century—creating an environmentally sustainable world.

Wangari Maathai and Mikhail Gorbachev represent living bridges between the environment and security. Our futures will be shaped in large measure by how quickly the world follows their lead.

State of the World: A Year in Review

Lori Brown

Chapter 1: Security Redefined

Michael Renner

Security concerns are once more at the top of the world’s agenda, but terrorism is only symptomatic of a far broader set of complex problems that require more than a military response. Acts of terror and the reactions they provoke are often the result of profound socioeconomic, environmental, and political pressures—forces that together create a less stable world. Among them are endemic poverty, convulsive economic transitions that cause growing inequality and high unemployment, the spread of deadly armaments, large-scale population movements, recurring natural disasters, ecosystem breakdown, new and resurgent communicable diseases, and rising competition over land and other natural resources.

Weapons do not necessarily provide security, and real security in a globalizing world cannot be provided on a purely national basis. With world military expenditures rising to close to $1 trillion a year, the war on terror is draining resources that could be used to combat the root causes of insecurity. Furthermore, policies that seek security primarily by military means but fail to address underlying factors of instability will likely trigger a downward spiral of violence and chaos, and quite possibly a collapse of international rules and norms. The need for international cooperation has grown stronger, even as new rifts and divides have opened up.

Solutions to current security concerns lie in policies that strengthen civilian, rather than military, institutions; policies that are preventative in nature, which address the root causes of insecurity; and policies that draw on the strengths and insights of different disciplines, transcending academic and bureaucratic boundaries.

SECURITY LINK: Transnational Crime

Chapter 2: Examining the Connections Between Population and Security

Lisa Mastny and Richard P. Cincotta

Over the past few decades, countries from every major political and religious background and in virtually every world region have experienced momentous change in their numbers and the structure of their populations. Yet the global demographic transition—the transformation of populations from short lives and large families to longer lives and small families—remains woefully incomplete. Roughly one third of all countries, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, are still in the early stages of the transition, with fertility rates above four children per woman.

Studies show that these countries bear the highest risks of becoming embroiled in an armed civil conflict. Most are bogged down by a debilitating demographic situation: they are home to large and growing proportions of young people, many of whom are entering the ranks of the jobless or the underemployed; many are experiencing rapid urban population growth; and many face exceedingly low per-capita availability of cropland or fresh water. Meanwhile, the rising pandemic of HIV/AIDS is striking lethal blows to the basic services and government operations of several countries, mainly in Africa. Alone and in combination, these conditions act as “demographic risk factors” that can contribute greatly to the cycle of recurrent conflict and political deterioration inhibiting economic and social progress in the world’s weakest and most unstable countries.

SECURITY LINK: Environmental Refugees

Chapter 3: Containing Infectious Disease

Dennis Pirages

The biggest threat to human security, when measured by premature deaths and associated physical suffering, is infectious disease. All of the wars of the twentieth century are estimated to have resulted in the deaths of an average of 1.1 million combatants and civilians per year. But at present, communicable diseases are killing fourteen times that number of people annually. Advances in medical research have led health officials to repeatedly claim victory in the campaign against infectious disease; yet over the last three decades, old maladies such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera have spread geographically and more than thirty previously unrecognized diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Hantavirus, and SARS have emerged as new threats to human well-being.

Large-scale disease outbreaks occur when something happens to disturb the evolutionary equilibrium that normally exists between people and pathogens. More than one-quarter of the estimated 57 million deaths worldwide in 2002 were due to communicable disease, with a major impact on life expectancy. The “healthy life expectancy” for newborns in Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland was more than 73 years, while it was less than 34 years in poor and disease ravaged countries such as Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Angola, and Zimbabwe.

Scientists, physicians, and health officials are faced with evolving challenges from the microbial world caused by the accelerating pace of globalization. At present, a slow-moving HIV/AIDS virus has killed more than 20 million people, and it is infecting an additional five million people per year. Additionally, there is deep concern among health officials that an influenza virus, perhaps a communicable and lethal variant of the avian flu that has swept through Europe and Asia, could spread rapidly around the world leading to millions of human casualties before an effective vaccine could be developed.

Foreword

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Chairman, Green Cross International

Five years ago, all 191 United Nations member states pledged to meet eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability. These critical challenges were reaffirmed by health officials from across the globe in October 2004 at the tenth anniversary of the landmark International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo.

The overarching conclusion from this 2004 meeting was that while considerable, albeit erratic, progress was indeed being made in many areas, any optimism must be tempered with the realization that gains in overall global socioeconomic development, security, and sustainability do not reflect the reality on the ground in many parts of the world. Poverty continues to undermine progress in many areas. Diseases such as HIV/AIDS are on the rise, creating public health time bombs in numerous countries. In the last five years, some 20 million children have died of preventable waterborne diseases, and hundreds of millions of people continue to live with the daily misery and squalor associated with the lack of clean drinking water and adequate sanitation.

We must recognize these shameful global disparities and begin to address them seriously. I am delighted that the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai, a woman whose personal efforts, leadership, and practical community work in Kenya and Africa inspire us all by demonstrating the real progress that can be made in addressing environmental security and sustainable development challenges where people have the courage to make a difference.

Humankind has a unique opportunity to make the twenty-first century one of peace and security. Yet the many possibilities opened up to us by the end of the cold war appear to have been partially squandered already. Where has the "peace dividend" gone that we worked so hard for? Why have regional conflict and terrorism become so dominant in today's world? And why have we not made more progress on the Millennium Development Goals?

The terrible tragedies of September 11, 2001, the 2004 terrorist attacks in Beslan in Russia, and the many other terrorist incidents over the past decade in Japan, Indonesia, the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere have all driven home the fact that we are not adequately prepared to deal with new threats. But better preparation means thinking more holistically, not just in traditional cold war terms.

I believe that today the world faces three interrelated challenges: the challenge of security, including the risks associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorism; the challenge of poverty and underdevelopment; and the challenge of environmental sustainability.

The challenge of security must be addressed by first securing and destroying the world's arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. Both Russia and the United States have taken numerous positive steps in this direction. But we must accelerate these nonproliferation and demilitarization efforts and establish threat-reduction programs around the world if we are to be truly successful.

The world's industrial nations must also commit greater resources to the poorest countries and regions of the globe. Official development assistance from the top industrial countries still represents but a tiny percentage of their gross national products and does not come close to the pledges made over a decade ago at the Rio Earth Summit. The growing disparity between the rich and the poor on our planet and the gross misallocation of limited resources to consumerism and war cannot be allowed to continue. If they do, we can expect even greater challenges and threats ahead.

Regarding the environment, we need to recognize that Earth's resources are finite. To waste our limited resources is to lose them in the foreseeable future, with potentially dire consequences for all regions and the world. Forests, for example, are increasingly being destroyed in the poorest countries. Even in Kenya, where Wangari Maathai has helped plant over 30 million trees, forested acreage has decreased. The global water crisis is also one of the single biggest threats facing humankind. Four out of 10 people in the world live in river basins shared by two or more countries, and the lack of cooperation between those sharing these precious water resources is reducing living standards, causing devastating environmental problems, and even contributing to violent conflict. Most important of all, we must wake up to the dangers of climate change and devote more resources to the crucial search for energy alternatives.

It is for reasons such as these that I founded Green Cross International 12 years ago and continue to advocate for a global value shift on how we handle Earth, a new sense of global interdependence, and a shared responsibility in humanity's relationship with nature. It is also for these reasons that I helped draft the Earth Charter, a code of ethical principles now endorsed by over 8,000 organizations representing more than 100 million people around the world. And it is for these reasons that Maurice Strong, Chair of the Earth Council, and I have initiated the Earth Dialogues, a series of public forums on ethics and sustainable development.

We need a Global Glasnost—openness, transparency, and public dialogue—on the part of nations, governments, and citizens today to build consensus around these challenges. And we need a policy of "preventive engagement": international and individual solidarity and action to meet the challenges of poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and conflict in a sustainable and nonviolent way.

We are the guests, not the masters, of nature and must develop a new paradigm for development and conflict resolution, based on the costs and benefits to all peoples and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than by the limits of technology and consumerism. I am delighted that the Worldwatch Institute continues to address these important challenges and goals in its annual State of the World report. I urge all readers to seriously consider their personal commitments to action after finishing this volume. Only with the active and dedicated participation of civil society will we be successful in building a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for the twenty-first century and beyond.

SECURITY LINK: Bioinvasions

Chapter 4: Cultivating Food Security

Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil

For many people around the world, poverty, soil degradation, population growth, and water shortages continue to be the main causes of hunger. But the biggest threats to global food security in coming decades will likely be quite different; on top of these traditional concerns are a range of new and unprecedented threats that will challenge food production at both the local and national levels, including the loss of crop and livestock diversity, the emergence of new agricultural diseases, and the interplay between agriculture and climate change.

The disturbing pictures of Asian farmers recently forced to incinerate millions of chickens because of avian flu foreshadow the variety of new farm diseases—like Nipah virus and mad cow disease—that have emerged in recent years, and that threaten both the food chain and human health. At the same time, uniformity in our crop fields and livestock herds not only invites new diseases, but also leaves our farms wide open and vulnerable to the spread of food-borne pathogens and malicious bio-warfare attacks. Perhaps the most important new threat, however, will arise from the interplay between agriculture and climate change. Plant scientists from Asia have found that rising temperatures may reduce grain yields in the tropics by as much as 30 percent over the next 50 years.

Yet just as the current and evolving threats to food security are numerous, so are the solutions. Our most important tool is not new chemicals or fertilizers or genetically engineered seeds, but a new approach to farming that depends on the knowledge of farmers and the sophisticated use of the environment around them.

SECURITY LINK:Toxic Chemicals

Chapter 5: Managing Water Conflict and Cooperation

Aaron T. Wolf, Annika Kramer, Alexander Carius, and Geoffrey D. Dabelko

Farmers, hydropower generators, recreational users, and ecosystems often compete for finite water supplies, both within and between nations. Despite this fact, water is rarely the single—and hardly ever the major—cause of violent conflict. But it can exacerbate existing tensions and therefore must be considered within the larger context of conflict and peace.

From the Middle East to New Mexico, the problems remain the same. So however, do many of the solutions. Human ingenuity has developed ways to address water shortages and cooperate in managing water resources. In fact, on the international level, cooperative events between riparian states outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one between 1945 and 1999. Institutional capacity—the ability of international institutions to successfully manage cross-boundary water resources—is a key factor in preventing conflicts and finding cooperative solutions.

Water has also been a productive pathway for building confidence and, arguably, preventing conflict, even in particularly contentious basins. In some cases, such as in the Middle East, water provides one of the few paths for dialogue in otherwise heated bilateral conflicts. In politically unsettled regions, water is an essential part of regional development negotiations, which serve as de facto conflict-prevention strategies.

SECURITY LINKS: Resource Wealth and Conflict,The Private Sector

Chapter 6: Changing the Oil Economy

Tom Prugh, Christopher Flavin, and Janet L. Sawin

Industrial civilization is defined by the staggering abundance of energy it utilizes. To date, most of that energy has come from fossil fuels, of which oil is the most highly prized. But oil has become a liability that threatens global security in three broad ways.

First, oil threatens global economic security because it is a finite resource with no clear successor and the gap between supply and demand is growing. Oil (most of it imported) accounts for a large share of energy budgets in most industrial countries: 36 percent in France, 39 percent in the United States, and 49 percent in Japan, for instance. (Developing countries are even more vulnerable because their imports are larger in relation to GDP.) Growing evidence suggests that rising demand, especially from nations such as China and India, will soon permanently outpace supply, leading to a long-term rise in prices.

Second, oil threatens security by undermining peace, democracy, and human rights in many regions. Great powers (including the United States) have long wielded their military and economic strength to secure access to oil supplies, interfering in the affairs of other countries and supporting repressive regimes when useful. Many nations with oil resources have also found themselves afflicted with the “natural resource curse”—the tendency of mineral wealth to support corruption and conflict rather than growth and development. Oil has recently been linked to terrorism, most obviously in the Wahhabist schools, funded by Saudi oil revenues, which helped train the Islamic radicals of al Qaeda.

Finally, oil undermines climate stability because its use as the world’s dominant transportation fuel produces over two-fifths of total emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief human-caused greenhouse gas. Although the huge global reserves of coal remain a larger threat to climate stability, ending oil use is imperative if greenhouse warming is to be controlled.

SECURITY LINK: Nuclear Energy

Chapter 7: Disarming Postwar Societies

Michael Renner

About 300,000 people are killed by small arms (handguns, hunting rifles, machine guns, etc.) each year in armed conflicts; another 200,000 people are killed annually in non-war gun violence, and 1.5 million are wounded. The dispersal of guns to private armies and militias, insurgent groups, criminal organizations, and private citizens feeds a cycle of violence. No one knows how many of these weapons exist; estimates run to 639 million, of which military-style weapons are believed to number 240 million. Global production is estimated at 7.5–8 million units per year. Weapons flow through government and commercial channels, but illicit flows include the capture of arms by insurgent forces, the looting of military and police depots, and transfers from one hotspot of the world to another.

An array of regional agreements addressing arms manufacturing, transfers, and stockpile management are now in place, though most are not legally binding. Tackling the small arms scourge requires not only tighter export controls, codes of conduct and embargoes, but also a reduction in the number of weapons in circulation through gun buyback programs and other collection methods. More than eight million surplus arms from government stocks have been destroyed since 1990.

In countries recovering from armed conflict, demobilizing ex-combatants is essential. Reintegrating them into civilian life is difficult where warfare has destroyed a large portion of public infrastructure, economic activity remains handicapped, and national treasuries are depleted. Many former combatants have limited or inappropriate skills and the world’s 500,000 child soldiers require special support.

It has proved easier to secure funding for disarmament than demobilization. The reintegration component, which tends to have less visibility and requires longer-term commitments on the part of donors, has been particularly shortchanged. In the interest of human development, disarmament needs to proceed; in the interest of disarmament and security, sustainable development is indispensable.

SECURITY LINKS: Nuclear Proliferation, Chemical Weapons

Chapter 8: Building Peace Through Environmental Cooperation

Ken Conca, Alexander Carius, and Geoffrey D. Dabelko

A growing array of initiatives—including peace parks, shared river basin management plans, regional seas agreements, and joint environmental monitoring programs—blend ecology and politics in the service of peace. Environmental peacemaking uses cooperative efforts to manage environmental resources as a way to transform insecurities and create more peaceful relations between parties in dispute. As such initiatives become more frequent and gain momentum, they may transform both how people approach conflict and how people view the environment.

As a peacemaking tool, the environment offers some useful—perhaps even unique—qualities that lend themselves to building peace and transforming conflict: environmental challenges ignore political boundaries, require a long-term perspective, encourage local and nongovernmental participation, and extend community building beyond polarizing economic linkages. Where cooperation does take root, it may help to enhance trust, establish cooperative habits, create shared regional identities around shared resources, and establish mutually recognized rights and expectations.

Recognizing the potentially critical linkages between the environment and insecurity, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for integrating environmental contributions to conflict and instability into the U.N.’s conflict prevention strategy and the deliberations of his High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Surprisingly, however, relatively little is known about the best design for environmental peacemaking initiatives or the conditions under which they are most likely to succeed. Without better knowledge and a stronger commitment to study current efforts, the international community may be missing powerful peacemaking opportunities in the environmental domain.

SECURITY LINK: Environmental Impacts of War

Chapter 9: Laying the Foundations for Peace

Hilary French, Gary Gardner, and Erik Assadourian

Laying the foundations for lasting peace will require international cooperation on a broad range of fronts—from resisting aggression to combating terrorism, mediating peace settlements, and addressing underlying causes of conflict and instability such as poverty, overpopulation, disease, and environmental degradation. At the same time, the experience of recent decades has made it clear that building a secure world will require extensive interactions among a broad range of actors, including visionary and committed national and local politicians and government officials as well as engaged, globally-minded citizens.

In September 2000, the members of the United Nations agreed to reduce global poverty, disease, and societal inequities significantly by achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. The targets adopted two years later at the World Summit on Sustainable Development rounded out the picture by addressing how countries can further improve social conditions by protecting critical natural systems. These goals were primarily adopted in order to address growing global inequities in a sustainable manner. In the post–9/11 world, however, where security threats have become the dominant concern, the MDGs can equally be seen as a means to increase national and global security.

Success in creating a more peaceful and secure world is far more likely if the civil sector is involved in the effort. Fortunately, the record of the past 15 years suggests that actors from civil society have emerged as skilled players in global politics and even as leaders on the broad range of issues relevant to global security.

Notes

Index