America's Defense Monitor Interview with

Allen Hammond, Senior Scientist, World Resources Institute

INTERVIEWER: What the current state of resource use in the world right now?

MR. HAMMOND: Well, unfortunately most of the trends in resource use are up, and the environmental pressures therefore are up, and the degradation therefore is also up. We're losing forests, we're losing coral reefs, we're losing fertile soils, we're losing essentially all the resources people need to support themselves particularly in pre-industrial societies.

INTERVIEWER: Where is the consumption and degradation of resources occurring around the world?

MR. HAMMOND: It varies quite a bit, you and I use an awful lot of stuff, and some of it comes from developing countries, those tropical hardwoods in your den kind of thing and certainly the drain on the world's fisheries is mostly because the rich world like to eat fish. But some of it also comes from poor people in developing countries that don't have any other choices. About a third of the world's population can't go to store, they depend on what they can grow or gather or catch,. And so when those local resources run out they don't have much option and those populations are growing and they don't always have titles to land so they have to move into the forests and cut forests, they don't always have the resources to farm sloping land safely so it erodes, so you find lots of soil erosion particularly in Africa , but pretty broadly spread around central America its bad too. The forests are disappearing nearly everywhere and not literally disappearing so much as being degraded to the point that they're really not forest ecosystems anymore they're just some trees. And in fact other than the Amazon forest most of the others are at very high risk. We are about to publish a report about the coral reefs which are sort of like the tropical forests of the sea. And it shows that something ... a very high proportion of those are also at risk of degradation over fishing, cyanide, dynamite, too many dive boats all the usual suspects.

INTERVIEWER: What are some problems related to resource scarcity that we have today?

MR. HAMMOND: Well unfortunately, most of the renewable resources that we have in the world are finite..right?.. there's only so many trees and it only rains so much and as populations grow and industrial demand increases we are running up against those limits. And in fact increasingly we are starting to degrade the biological basis for those resources. The forests are under threat, fertile soils are being eroded, fisheries and coral reef communities are being badly degraded and increasingly water is tight in some parts of the world. So many of the basic resources that people depend on when they can't buy things from the store are at risk. And about a third of the world's population is in that position, they really depend on what they can grow or gather or pick up.

INTERVIEWER: Is the trend getting better or worse?

MR. HAMMOND: The trends are unfortunately in the wrong direction. As industrial demand increase, well the fisheries are getting over fished. As timber gets scarce in Asia and Africa the logging companies are moving into South America and into the Siberian forests. So basically the picture doesn't look real good and when you look at potential water scarcity out twenty years and thirty years it looks very grim in much of Africa and most of the Middle East.

INTERVIEWER: Do we see competition between countries over renewable resources such as water?

MR. HAMMOND: Water is perhaps the best example. There's an awful lot of rivers that cross international boundaries. Egypt for example, is using nearly all the water in the Nile, but Ethiopia and Sudan, which are upstream are eventually going to want some of that. Turkey is upstream of Iraq and Iran ...er uh..Syria and its starting to build dams which will cut those flows. And in the..South East Asia there are rivers that rise in China and flow all the way through South East Asia and again people are building dams upstream. And again this has huge implications for peaceful coexistence.

INTERVIEWER: What sort of land use or extraction of resource cause tensions between or within countries?

MR. HAMMOND: I think the biggest problem is within countries and it sort of goes like this...if you have people who live on the land and who depend on these renewable resources and you...they begin to get tight, and then there's competition for them and we know who wins the competition between farmers and cities over water, cities win, right? And we can pay much more for tropical hardwoods than the local people who live off those forests and increasing commercial farms move in or people build second homes in the countryside and they can pay a lot more than the farmers, so that leads to a process first of biological impoverishment but also of people impoverishment as those resource spaces either are bought away or are degraded. And that leaves large numbers of people without very many options they can either move to he city or migrate someplace else or go hungry.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think the connection is between consumption and these renewable resources?

MR. HAMMOND: Well it's a complicated one, in many cases the consumption that's most damaging to these renewable resources is in the country where they grow. I mean the biggest use of wood is for firewood, I mean the biggest use for wood is firewood, because people can't afford to buy firewood, but it's not strictly that way. In fact the major pressure on the fisheries is you and I, because we like to eat some fish for dinner in the restaurant and that's devastating the world's fisheries because they are all being over fished. And unfortunately 3/4 of billion people depend on fish as their main source of protein, so when those fisheries collapse, well it will cost us a little bit more for shrimp, but it will cost those people their main food supply?

INTERVIEWER: Have there been any case where countries have come close to getting into a conflict over fishing rights?

MR. HAMMOND: Mostly the industrial countries.. There was a near tiff between Spanish fishermen and Canada just last year and there have been numerous disputes in the North Atlantic between European fisheries of various kinds. They have been concerns about Japanese and Russian fisheries in the Pacific, they haven't come to blows yet, but these pressures are mounting. And its very difficult because you essentially have to.. I mean there's two or three times as many fishing boats as there are fish to catch so you have to tell fishermen that they'll go out of bushiness and governments don't find that very easy.

INTERVIEWER: What is the connection between security and renewable resources?

MR. HAMMOND: There have been studies down in the Chiapas case in Mexico and he shows that about five years before those uprisings broke out that the amount of land per capita began to nose dive, and the poor people were pushed further into the hills and they were clearing forest land and they were basically running out of forest land to be cleared. And when those pressures built up to a point it set the scene, it was necessarily a direct cause, but it certainly set the scene for an eruption.

Another one where its at least an issue, is Rwanda, which happens to be the most densely populated country in Africa. So land is relatively tight, that certainly doesn't help relations between ethnic groups and that set a scene again in which a scene could erupt a very violent catastrophe. Well that's today...and those are contributory factors, but if you push it ahead a couple of decades then you find that these pressures for potential water scarcity, land scarcity, access to forests and firewood, access to fish are going to get much, much worse. And that means they are potentially very destabilizing in many developing countries, both directly where people will fight over these things and indirectly where large numbers of people may have to migrate and move to cities that aren't prepared to receive them.

INTERVIEWER: Where do we see competition for renewable resources such as water?

MR. HAMMOND: Water is one of those resources that crosses international boundaries and that leads to certain kinds of tension for example Egypt uses nearly all the water in the Nile. But upstream from that are Ethiopia and the Sudan and they're eventually going to want some of that water too. Turkey is building dams on the Tigris and Euphrates and which run down through Syria and Iraq and that's going to lower the flow in those countries and they are not happy about that. The Mekong which rises in China and runs all the way through South East Asia and the Chinese are starting to build dams on it as well, so are other people. So with...unless we learn to use these watersheds and manage them as a unit, which requires sharing and international cooperation, it very difficult not to have conflict, and particularly as pressures for water rise. Many people think that in the middle East its water and not oil that will be the source of the next wars.

INTERVIEWER: What can we do to improve upon the situation and reduce the chances of problems in the future?

MR. HAMMOND: There are a number of things that we know how to do and a number of things that we don't know how to do. The thing we don't know how to do is cure poverty. And that's at root one of the problems. There's plenty of food in the world its just not available to those who can't afford to buy it. If we could learn how to manage some of the commons, like the marine fisheries in a way, manage them for perpetuity , rather than destroying them for short term gain, same with some of the forests and that means figuring out ways to have local people have rights, and give them a stake in maintaining that resource. In having some surveillance so that wealthy foreign companies don't bribe officials sand get cutting rights that aren't appropriate and essentially it takes an improved set of surveillance, we don't really have a good data on what's happening to any of these resources in these developing countries, and it requires better governance, both within countries and internationally so we nee d to invent some new mechanisms.

INTERVIEWER: Does the DOD have the right tools to deal with the these environmental problems?

MR. HAMMOND: Well I think its good that our definition of security is expanding to include these threats, I think they are actually much more serious threats than tanks and planes, they are real threat not potential threats...on the other hand satellite photos will only get you so much. And one of the things that we're helping to start is a world wide network of NGO's linked through the Internet that will be monitoring the forests activities on the ground and that gives us a capability that I'm not sure that the intelligence operations for all their resources really have, plus which this is a very public operation, when we see burning its going to be on the Internet along with the name of lease holder. That's sort of a mode of operation that's not usually the mode of how the intelligence community have functioned. So I think in fact its good that there are beginning to be security resources put into looking at these problems, but I think its also important that there be public resources and civil society resources that do the same thing. We've sort of made the mistake in the past sometimes of trusting the intelligence community of doing things that are beyond its capability and we don't want to make that mistake with environmental resources because once they're gone sometimes its very hard to get them back.

Allen Hammond Stand up interview in front of maps....

MR. HAMMOND: This map here shows that the world's forest are under increasing threat in fact very few of the forests outside of the Amazon and the Arctic forests are still intact ecologically and even those portions particularly in Africa and South East Asia are going very rapidly. There's just not much forest left that still functions as a real forest ecosystems and provides all the services that we're expect from forests.

The coastal systems of the world and particularly the coral reefs which are like the tropical forests of the oceans are also under increasing threat. In the Caribbean, nearly all of the reefs are at some risk of degradation from development, from fishing pressures from oil spills and a number of other pressures, and so we're seeing that increasing these resources which are both beautiful to look at and fun to dive and look at but also are primary breeding grounds for most of the fish that people eat are at risk.

Here we can see that these risks up here are particularly at threat up in the Bahamas.

There isn't very much intact forest left in Africa and it's going very rapidly and now the forest companies are starting to move into the Amazon, which is the main other area which has large intact tropical forests, but as pressures continue - ten, twenty

years from now it will be increasing hard to find large chunks of that forest that work as an ecosystem.

Take two:

MR. HAMMOND: The African forests don't have very much in tact and its going very rapidly, now the logging companies are starting to move into the Amazon forests, and if the trend that is now under way continues, large chunks of that are also going to be degraded over the next twenty years or so.