Transboundary water: your cut-out-and-keep guide Alex Evans

And so to a veritable treasure chest for scarcity nerds everywhere: the Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements, brought to you by Oregon State University’s Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation.

Here’s what you need to know. First, there are currently 263 rivers that either cross, or demarcate, international boundaries. Europe has most of them (69), followed by Africa (59), Asia (57), North America (40) and South America (38).  Here they are on a handy map (larger version at the link above):

Second, you should know that these international river basins account, according to OSU, for nearly one-half of the earth’s land surface; generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow; and are home to approximately 40% of the world’s population. A taste of the vulnerabilities that come with this:

A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins. 33 nations, including such sizeable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Perhaps even more significant is the number of countries that share certain individual basins … The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than 9 countries while the Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least 5 sovereign nations.

Third, the good news. You might think that the quote above suggests that we’re in for a century of water wars. But it’s worth remembering this: “in the largest quantitative study of water conflict and cooperation, researchers at Oregon State University found that cooperative interactions between riparian states over the past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions by more than two-to-one”.  Shared water has to date much more often been a stimulus for cooperation than for competition – a point our buddy Geoff Dabelko also makes consistently. This isn’t a new story, either: “the history of international water treaties dates as far back as 2500 bc, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River”.

But… ah yes, there’s a but. And it is this:

158 of the world’s 263 international basins lack any type of cooperative management framework. Furthermore, of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral. Moreover, despite the recent progress noted above, treaties with substantive references to water quality management, monitoring and evaluation, conflict resolution, public participation, and flexible allocation methods, remain in the minority. As a result, most existing international water agreements continue to lack the tools necessary to promote long-term, holistic water management

On top of this, there’s the small matter of climate change to consider – and especially, Cleo Paskal’s observation that “water-sharing agreements, especially those based on a set amount of water, rather than percentage of actual flow, will become problematic as water levels alter dramatically” (Cleo has a new book out, btw). So, lots done – but lots to do.

Head of FSA resigns David Steven

Shock news that Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, has resigned. Though, I am sure the two events are not causally related – let me again plug my paper, published last week by the Long Finance Foundation, on risk in the UK mortgage market, which was was highly critical of the FSA’s response to the housing bubble.

The peak oil conspiracy David Steven

It’s tough keeping up sometimes. I thought that the peak oil conspiracy theory ran like this:

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

But that, my friends, is so last week. Apparently, the cool kids now believe that:

Peak oil is a fraud concocted by the oil industries to increase prices amid concerns about future supplies. The oil industry is aware of vast reserves of untapped oil, but does not utilise them in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, they claim.

The safest thing is probably to believe that both conspiracy theories are true.

IPCC – it was the bloggers wot done it Alex Evans

While we’re on the subject of the IPCC, this Spectator piece by Matt Ridley, which flags up the role of bloggers in all this, is worth a look (h/t Clive Crook again):

When Climategate broke, the mainstream media… mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.

For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.

The death of the IPCC? Alex Evans

That’s what Clive Crook thinks we may be looking at, as he explains in a post on FT.com:

A turning point has been reached when in the space of a few days the chief scientist at the UK environment ministry complains about the IPCC’s ever-lengthening list of blunders; the head of Greenpeace UK calls for the IPCC’s head to step down; and, following a series of commendably forthright Guardian pieces on the scandal, The Observer, no less, attacks the Climategate cover-up.

He continues:

…the main damage to the credibility of climate science was done not by the Climategate emails, nor by the principals’ efforts to justify themselves. The main damage was done by the many climate scientists who affected to see nothing troublesome in what was disclosed, and the far larger number who decided it was best to say nothing. That was the really shocking thing. If climate scientists had united in criticising the methods and practices revealed by Climategate, the scandal might very well have fizzled. In saying they saw nothing wrong, they impugned their own work and that of all their colleagues, and brought the whole enterprise under suspicion.

more »

Posted without comment: Mark Weston

This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.

A mobile world Mark Weston

Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).

There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.

As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).

The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts. more »

Why have embassies? Why not just use a PR firm? Alex Evans

I tried asking that to roomful of Foreign Office diplomats yesterday, at a Chatham House seminar (part of the Institute’s program on Redefining the UK’s International Ambitions and Choices ahead of the election - David and I are writing one of two concluding reports, on ‘organising for influence’; the other, by Paul Cornish, will be on UK security and defence policy).

It’s not an altogether flippant question. Various countries (especially from the former Soviet Union) have decided not to bother with embassies in the UK, electing simply to hire Bell Pottinger instead. Other countres go for a both / and approach: China, for instance, has an extensive global network of posts, but also a large account with APCO Worldwide.

Granted, there are some areas in which it makes sense to keep things in house. Managing bilateral relationships with other government’s isn’t something you can easily outsource. And knowing how to operate in multilateral processes is something you only really learn inside a government – sure, you can hire a lobbyist to help you with (say) WTO negotiations, but chances are that what makes them a good operator in that arena is time spent working for a government.

But campaigning work on global issues – trying to create the conditions internationally for an ambitious climate deal, for instance – mightn’t that be the sort of thing at which a communications consultancy might actually be better than the Foreign Office? more »

AIDS – the wrong answer David Steven

And the big winner of the downturn is… Alex Evans

USA Today this morning:

The recession has battered the U.S. economy, but the lobbying industry is humming along in the nation’s capital, even for companies that have shed thousands of jobs in the past year.The 20 trade associations and companies that spent the most on lobbying increased their spending by more than 20% in 2009 to $507.7 million, up from $418.2 million a year earlier, according to a USA TODAY analysis of reports compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The top 10 spenders: US Chamber of Commerce ($144.5m spend in 2009), ExxonMobil ($27.4m), Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America ($26.4m), General Electric ($25.5m, Pfizer ($24.6m), American Assocition of Retired People ($21.0m), Chevron ($20.8m), Blue Cross / Blue Shield ($20.0m), and the National Association of Realtors ($19.5m). Followed by: Conoco Phillips; Verizon; FedEx; Boeing; American Hospital Association; National Cable and Telecommunications Association; Northrop Grumman; Lockheed Martin; Business Roundtable; Altria Group.

A snapshot of Freetown Mark Weston

Had a surprisingly interesting tour of Freetown’s port yesterday. It’s the world’s third largest natural harbour.

Seventy years ago, the ship carrying my grandfather to the Far East during the war anchored briefly off Freetown. He remembered the oppressive heat and humidity, and the hawkers who rowed out to the ship in dugout canoes to sell their wares to British soldiers (plus ça change). The soldiers would lower buckets down to the canoes and haul up fresh fruit and snacks. For entertainment, some would drop coins into the sea, which intrepid young boys would dive down to retrieve from the seabed.

The port is a pretty modern affair these days. A couple of hours there gives you some insight into the workings of the country. A huge Norwegian vessel was unloading limestone to make cement (the post-war rebuilding of Freetown continues); another ship was being emptied of flour; dockers employed by the day were asleep in the shade of Maersk containers. Rice, bizarrely in such a hot and wet country, is the main import commodity, followed by wheat and iron rods for construction. Iron ore (processed elsewhere – Sierra Leone lacks the industrial capacity to process anything), timber, bauxite and rutile are the main exports (diamonds and gold are exported by other means). The World Food Programme has its own depot there, half-full of sacks of corn and flour.

We were shown round by a security guard, Alex, who has worked at the port for twenty years, including during the war when RUF rebels took it over and looted all the containers. His main duties include checking departing ships for drugs and stowaways. He says about half of the ships bound for Europe contain four or five stowaways. They row in in the dead of night, climb into the rudder hole, and sit tight – for weeks.

Sitting forlornly at the far end of the dock is a medium-sized Chinese fishing vessel. On it are a couple of Chinese men and a Sierra Leonean soldier. The boat was caught and impounded last autumn for fishing in Sierra Leone’s waters without a license (a common problem in West Africa). Seven Chinese fishermen have languished in a Freetown prison ever since – those who remain on board take them food every day but are not allowed to leave the country. To obtain his and the boat’s liberty, each prisoner must pay a $25,000 fine, but the shipping agent has failed to cough up. The vessel, guarded round the clock, is quietly rusting.

The wretched of the earth Mark Weston

I’ve been in Freetown for a couple of weeks now and am starting to get my head around the place. Sierra Leone has only recently climbed off the foot of the UN Human Development Index, but signs of poverty, which people in the West – where its most abject form is mostly confined to society’s margins – can go long periods without glimpsing, are everywhere.

Among the most arresting are the crowds gazing at DVDs playing in shops; the emptiness of markets after festivals; the accused dressing up for court in clean T-shirt and flip flops; young African girls on the beach with old white men; the hordes of disabled people – not just amputees from the war but also victims of polio, leprosy and unhealed fractures; beggars of all ages on every street corner; the ubiquity of slums, which as well as having whole districts to themselves also fill in the gaps in more affluent areas;  billboards telling people to beware of counterfeit medicines; people collecting used plastic water bottles; the popularity of lottery outlets; car engines being switched off going downhill; children outside a bar at night using the electric light from inside to see their homework; stalls selling individual cigarrettes, pills and teabags; incessant and insistent requests for money or help with getting to the UK, even by people who work; the huge number of working children; and, of course, the proliferation of NGOs.

And finally an audible indicator of poverty, in the shape of a complaint made to me last weekend by an old man in a slum: “We should be shitting four or five times a week,” he said, “but people here only shit twice a week.”

Recession hits the world’s poorest Mark Weston

Of course, traditional banks like Ecobank look down on microfinance as a small-fry, over-risky industry. In Freetown I met SB, who heads a not-for-profit microfinance institution (MFI).

Set up in 2002 by a large American NGO but now self-sustaining, it has 20,000 members in four Sierra Leonean cities. It lends sums of between $120 and $2000 – in a country where most people live on a dollar a day, this means the loans are too large for the poorest people to access (SB says small loans are too costly to administrate).

Loans are for “income-generating activities” only. That is, not for weddings, funerals, medical bills or luxuries, for example, although SB is receptive to my argument that the first three of these can indirectly lead to improved income-generating capacity by relieving stress and strenghtening health (he also admits that some loans probably end up being spent on consumption rather than investment).

Most of the loans are repaid over 6-10 months, with repayments made weekly. They do not come cheap. The monthly interest rate is 3% – with inflation at around 11% this works out at an annual rate of 25%. And to this must be added the cost of travelling to the MFI’s office to make repayments (my medicine seller friend Musa said he gave up his membership because having to pay every week was too tough – his business is collapsing, and he asked me to fund him last week instead). Clients put up with these rates because they are poor, and cannot access cheaper loans because they lack collateral and credit ratings – SB’s MFI relies on word of mouth references, visits to inspect businesses, and guarantors.

Eighty per cent of clients are self-employed businesspeople, who borrow to buy palm oil for cooking businesses, refrigerators for storage, baskets and trays for hawking, and stock. The other twenty per cent are salaried but moonlighting. Eighty per cent of clients are women because, as SB says, men want to shoot for the big pot so they look down on small loans. Women are also much better payers.

The recession has hit the MFI’s clients hard. Remittances and investment from abroad have slumped, and the increased costs of food and fuel have hit customers. Many small enterprises, says SB, have gone to the wall. The normal default rate on loans is 3-4%, but in 2009 11% of money loaned was not repaid. As SB put it, “You might want to pay back a loan but if you have the choice of maintaining your credit rating or feeding your family, you don’t worry about not being able to borrow again in the future.”

If clients do default, the MFIs have limited options for chasing their losses. SB threatens to take bad debtors to the police but never carries it through because he knows it won’t help him recover the money. He worries that “clients talk to each other,” and come to see not-for-profit MFIs as a soft touch. Readers of Hernando de Soto will not be surprised to hear, moreover, that in many cases SB can’t even find his errant clients – some don’t have identity cards, and changes of address are frequent and go undetected by officialdom.

SB’s profits (which are all reinvested) have halved in the past year. Other MFIs have seen similar or worse slumps – in Morocco, once the poster child of African microfinance, the government has had to step in to help as several MFIs went bankrupt after defaults soared to 30%.

Because of the recession, many MFI clients have resorted to “multiple borrowing.” They join several institutions at once, borrow money from all of them, and often fail to repay. The problem is so serious that SB’s MFI has stopped taking new members until it figures out a way to stop the multiple borrowers. Such is people’s desperation, he says, that “if we opened up our membership now, we’d have 200 applicants queuing outside our office every day.”

Ecobank: An African Success Story Mark Weston

Last week I met someone high up in the Sierra Leone branch of Ecobank. He proudly told me the history of his bank.

In the 1980s, because of widespread instability and the collapse of most African economies, Western banks like Barclays and Citibank pulled out of the continent. West Africa was left bankless.

Seeing this, West Africa’s chambers of commerce got together and decided that instead of allowing the Westerners’ withdrawal to cause further damage to African businesses, they would set up a bank of their own. The chambers of commerce didn’t have any money, however, so ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) stumped up the initial capital. The chambers of commerce didn’t have banking skills either, so they talked to Citibank in New York and drew up a contract whereby Citi would set up the new bank, run it for its first four years, and train Africans to take it over after they left.

Lome, the capital of Togo, was chosen as Ecobank’s headquarters, as Togo was the only stable West African state at the time (it was ruled by a dictator). After four years, and having made good money out of the deal, Citibank handed the new entity over to Africans. Ecobank now has branches in thirty African countries, Paris and Dubai, and is planning to open up in London and New York. And it’s still run entirely by Africans.

‘Only a tiny handful of writers even noticed the collapse of Rome’ Alex Evans

John Michael Greer has just posted the latest instalment in a series of essays on collapsonomics over at the Archdruid Report – here’s a sample. I don’t agree with everything he’s been arguing in his series – but it’s thought-provoking stuff and definitely worth a read.

I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people’s hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.