Threats Without Threateners: Water, Pandemics and Climate Change as National Security Issues

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The RAND Corporation has just published new research, sponsored by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, looking at pandemics, water and climate change in a national security prism.  Our interest in sponsoring this study was to understand how these three global threats, key components of our work, manifest as security issues, how they are similar and how they differ in that manifestation, and what that might mean for policy.  Here’s how RAND describes the paper:

Three issues with far-reaching causes and consequences, climate change, water scarcity, and pandemics, are examined with attention to their national security implications and impacts on the global commons. The authors aim to trigger new ways of thinking about the complex challenges of these issues. Because their effects are mostly the result of individuals and states acting out of self-interest rather than harmful intent, these three issues are treated as “threats without threateners.”

With sources and solutions that cross national and regional boundaries, multiple parties working together are more effective than unilateral action. In all three areas, risks are hard to assess, in both severity and time frame; therefore, mustering political will and coalitions for action is inherently difficult.

The paper describes four overlapping clusters of policy approaches, international negotiations, coalitions of the willing, transcommunity networking, and anti-fragile approaches, and their relative successes and limitations. Considered one of the policy approaches with the greatest potential for tackling interconnected global challenges, anti-fragile systems do not just cope with change or uncertainty; they benefit from them. They search for alternatives that attract new participants, scale to accommodate those new participants, and create positive feedback loops that enable them not only to perform as well as or better than legacy systems but to continually improve over time.

Using suggestive examples to illustrate each type of approach, the paper builds a case for the evolution of policy away from fixing problems and toward new possibilities and combinations of methods to address threats that are both chronic and acute.

It’s an interesting read, with examples of policy successes and failures in dealing with all three issues, and an innovative look at “anti-fragility” (a concept of Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable).  You can read an executive summary here, or download the full research report here.

Investors and Climate Risk

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Despite continued roadblocks on real progress on climate change at the political level, there are growing signs the private sector understands the risks associated with climate variability.  The recent Investor Summit on Climate Risk and Energy Solutions at the United Nations brought together a wide range of financial players who share a deep concern that climate risks are not being appropriately priced into financial assets.  This 5-minute video provides a good overview of investor concerns, from folks who carry real credibility in the private sector. Worth watching.

Low Probability, High Consequence Events

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Chatham House, a leading global think-tank based in London, has just published new research, sponsored by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, on how well the world is prepared for low probability, high consequence events.  In looking at the global challenges we face, from pandemics to climate change to nuclear proliferation and more, each presents the potential of precipitating sudden events that could cause rapid, unanticipated disruption to the global system.  The report considers recent events like the Eyjafjallajökull volcano ash cloud, the BP oil spill, and the Japanese tsunami, to draw out issues that emerge during these types of crisis event and recommendations for business and policy makers.  Some key conclusions of the report include:

  • The frequency of high-impact, low-probability (HILP) events in the last decade such as Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the nuclear crisis and tsunami in Japan, signals the emergence of a new ‘normal’ – the beginning of a crisis trend.
  • Governments and businesses remain insufficiently prepared to manage HILP crises and shoulder their economic, social and humanitarian consequences.
  • The report sets out the economic costs of HILP events and how the impacts of a shock spread across sectors and countries in today’s globalized world.
  • The report explores two critical dimensions of the decision-making environment during a crisis – omnipresent questions of scientific and technological uncertainty, and the competing economic and political interests of key stakeholders.
  • Effective messaging and communications have never been more important in the management of high-impact events. The report draws on systemic analysis of social media to understand how the public discourse is shaped; highlights the window of opportunity to influence media messaging; and draws lessons for how the media should handle scientific uncertainties.

 

Reuters, the Financial Times and the Guardian all covered the report’s release.  You can also listen to one of the report’s main authors, Bernice Lee, outline its main findings in this audio file.  You can download the full report here, or an executive summary here.

Security and Climate Change

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This short video, produced by the Center for American Progress, provides a nice overview of the security implications of climate change and highlights one of the key challenges of global threats in general: the inability of single countries or governments to tackle them effectively.  Worth watching.

Happy Holidays

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A good way to close out the year…  A video from Emmanuel Jah, an artist from the planet’s newest country, South Sudan, calling for peace, with cameos from a few well known figures.  Jah was recently recognized for his peace work by Search for Common Ground, a recipient of our sister organization’s Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Happy holidays, all.

Jeff Skoll Featured in New York Times Article on Philanthropy

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My colleagues at the Skoll Foundation have a blog post up today on a couple of New York Times pieces over the weekend on philanthropy that include references to the work of our founder, Jeff Skoll.  Read it here.

Visualizing Groundwater Depletion

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Even though about two billion of us use groundwater for drinking and cleaning, industrial processes and irrigating our crops every day, most of us aren’t aware that our groundwater resources are being severely depleted around the world.  Water professionals have struggled to get the message out to the public.

I have been fortunate enough to be part of the judging panel for a design competition to try and change this – to try and make the invisible substance of groundwater more visible. Visualizing.org and HeadsUp teamed up to challenge design professionals to bring more attention to the sad state of our groundwater depletion.

All the judges were impressed with the caliber of entries. The winner, Richard Vijgen, was able to innovatively highlight seasonal trends of groundwater for the past decade AND long-term groundwater depletion trends around the world.

Thomson Reuters/Nasdaq has generously donated the billboard space in New York City’s Time Square to celebrate the next World Water Day on March 22, 2012. The display will run for one month. Be sure to watch for it! You can also watch it from afar via webcam starting on World Water Day.

A key challenge we had at the beginning of the contest was locating the right set of data to run the competition. Luckily, Leonard F. Konikow from the U.S. Geological Survey and Jay Famiglietti from the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, using NASA’s GRACE satellite, had just the right set of information. It has been a very interesting process to connect world-renowned scientists in the water field with design/advertising professionals to get an easier-to-digest groundwater message out to the general public.

So, is any one up for the challenge to bring similar competitions to other major cities in the US and around the world? Or have even better ideas of how to get the message across? Peggy Weil was a one-person tour de force in making this competition happen.  We hope there are others like Peggy who are interested in bringing this to Amman, Beijing, Delhi, Dubai, Mexico City, Sydney, or other places where the groundwater depletion story needs to be told.

Hackergate Redux

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A slew of articles hit today reporting on the release of another batch of emails from climate scientists stolen from the University of East Anglia in the U.K. (See stories from the BBC, New York Times, and TIME Magazine).  Most reports suggest they are from the same period as the last bunch that surfaced in late 2009 and led to a manufactured scandal quickly dubbed “Climategate” by climate skeptics. A series of investigations since that time have all exonerated the scientists of any wrongdoing (beyond some pettiness in their discourse). Meanwhile, the real-world data continues to paint an increasingly dire picture on emissions.

What’s interesting this time around is that the framing of the issue in the media is very different. In fact, it reflects the frame that should have applied the first time around, but didn’t. Articles today focus on the fact that whoever stole the emails committed a criminal act, that they remain at large, and that the investigation into the hack has been cursory, at best.  Articles today also question the timing of this new release of emails, occurring, as in 2009, in the weeks leading up to an important international climate meeting in Durban, South Africa.  Whoever is behind the hacks clearly seeks to disrupt and distract from the work that’ll take place in Durban and hijack the discourse, which is what happened to some degree at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009.

It’s too bad today’s framing didn’t prevail in 2009.  Instead of “Climategate,” we should have had “Hackergate,” with the focus not on the normal exchange of emails among climate scientists, but on the who and why behind an illegal, sophisticated and extensive hacking attack. Makes you wonder where the dysfunctional national political dialogue on climate might be today if that had been the case.

Water…Too much…Too little

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I was struck yesterday with three stories I read on severe water stress in three different regions. The current Economist magazine runs a piece on dams and proposed dams on the Mekong river, highlighting how the riparian countries seem largely blind to the risks of damming a river for which climate change is likely to significantly reduce the flow. Meanwhile, here in California, the Los Angeles Times published a story on the high economic and energy costs of getting water to Southern California, much of which is carried from quite distant sources.  Climate change is making its impact felt there, too. Finally, the Houston Chronicle had a detailed look at Texas’ water future, finding no obvious future supply to meet anticipated demand, even with huge investments in hard infrastructure like new dams, wells, and the like.

On the flip side, I saw a short piece in the Bangkok Post today on a group of parliamentarians in Thailand putting forward a proposal to move the capital away from Bangkok because of the high flood risks there.

Too little water, too much water.  Consistent with climate change models.

Flu Near You – DIY Surveillance

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In addition to supporting the good work of others, we also aspire to identify areas where gaps exist in solutions to the threats we work on and create projects ourselves. Such is the case with Flu Near You. Developed in partnership with HealthMap and the American Public Health Association, Flu Near You is an effort to track the spread of flu on a national level, potentially unlocking hidden secrets about this viral mystery.

As a medical epidemiologist at Google.org, I had the pleasure of working with a team of Google engineers to answer a very specific question: “Can we find flu faster?” With Google Flu Trends, the engineers built a tool that finds flu up to two weeks earlier than the traditional sentinel laboratory-based system used in public health today. Researchers have demonstrated similar success looking at Yahoo search terms related to flu. While this two weeks advanced warning surprised some, we suspected that people would search the Internet for information about their symptoms before visiting a health care provider. This seems to be the case.

Many in public health are trying to explore the use of social networks – what you write on your “wall”, what you SMS each day – anything that might provide valuable information for even earlier warning of flu. Seems to me we may have been too timid to try what really matters:  simply asking people. Theoretically, the earliest sign of spread in a community could come from tracking the flu via self-reporting of symptoms.

Evidence suggests self-reported flu surveillance indeed works. Craig Dalton and colleagues, for example, successfully implemented FluTracking in 2004 with partners in Australia. Now tracking 10,000 people online every week, they have demonstrated vaccine efficacy and are providing guidance on addressing pockets of need in communities with high rates of self-reported illness. More importantly, they have retained – indeed, even grown – participation in the program through the simplicity of the system. Ten countries in Europe currently collaborate on Influenzanet, with thousands of online volunteers responding to a similar weekly survey via email.

Inspired by these early pioneers, we have engaged the APHA as the leading public health organization in the U.S. to build a pool of voluntary ‘sentinels’ of flu in the United States. We are asking volunteers to complete a short survey that takes 5-10 seconds once a week. Your shared data is anonymous and contributes to the Flu Near You platform, built by HealthMap.

The openly available data set can help everyone better understand flu, including policy makers, healthcare providers, researchers, educators and the public.  Reporting no symptoms of flu may prove as useful as reporting symptoms—hence the weekly survey.

With APHA’s help, we are putting the public into pubic health surveillance in a direct, active way.  We have asked APHA members to reach out through their social networks, engage with community partners, schools and workplaces, and share among their family and friends. We hope everyone will explore Flu Near You.