security

Today, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) inaugurates 2011 as the International Year of the Forests.  In our rapidly urbanizing world where many people live detached from forests, wetlands, and other “wild” spaces, it is easy to forget their impact upon our daily lives and upon the essential resources and services we take for granted.   However, in reality these wild places provide numerous essential ecosystem services—especially those related to water security—including storage, filtration, increased precipitation, and localized climate cooling.

Considering that 80% of the world’s population lives in areas where water resources are considered to be insecure and more than 75% of the world’s freshwater supplies come from forested (or partially forested) watersheds, forests and wetlands play a critical and valuable role in helping to secure water supplies.  In the face of increasing stresses from population growth, land degradation, deforestation, and climate change, the services of these ecosystems are likely to become even more valuable over the coming decades.

So forests and wetlands are important not only for their own sake, but for the valuable role they play in providing cities, agricultural areas, and human populations worldwide with stable, clean water supplies.  But how valuable?  One study on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) estimates that the water-related services of tropic forests account for up to 45% of their total value (USD 7,000/hectacre annually).  More than the value of timber, tourism, and carbon storage combined.

Water security can only be achieved by addressing a multitude of economic, social, and environmental factors and by analyzing how these factors interplay and interact to create a supply, delivery, disposal, and regeneration system.  Forests are an excellent place to start water security analysis and interventions.

Read more about the role of forests and wetlands in water security and the provision of key human resource and infrastructure services from the CBD here.

• US aid for Yemen goes predominantly to military and hard security projects.
• To confront the key sources of instability the U.S. must look beyond military assistance.
• Tier two engagement will be a critical component of this strategy, especially in looking at challenges to natural resource and human security.

government protesters in Sana'a, 2009

As Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen makes headlines yet again for attempted terrorist activities against the United States, the US government is preparing a $150 million package aimed at training and aiding Yemeni security and military forces.  This unsurprising move represents business as usual for US-Yemeni relations; a continuation of security and terrorism-centric dialogue, policy, and funding that pervades all levels of the two countries’ engagement.    In fact, of the $63 million in aid money to Yemen in FY10, well over half goes toward military and security assistance.

In his October 29th speech on the attempted cargo plane bombings, President Obama announced that the US government intends to “strengthen a more stable, secure and prosperous Yemen so that terrorist groups to not have the time and space they need to plan attacks from within its borders.”   This statement is coupled with an announcement to increase the military aid to Yemen to $150 million.  Considering that the President’s FY11 budget called for just over $100 million in total aid for Yemen, 48% of which was for military and security assistance, this new announcement triples military aid and makes it approximately 75% of Yemen’s aid money.

While security is the primary focus of the FY 11 budget, under its new Yemen strategy USAID is also working to address some of the soft security issues that fuel instability.  Included in this FY11 budget are projects on:

• Military and security assistance;
• Responsive governance, a multi-sector project expected to be funded at $43 million for 5 years and aimed to strengthen public policies and institutions;
• The Community Livelihoods Project, a multi-sector program expected to be funded at $125 million for 5 years with the goal of economic stabilization through government services, job creation, civic participation, and responsive local governance.
• Urban refugee aid for those living in Sana’a;
• Public health; and
• Supporting an independent media.

AQAP, 2009, courtesy of The Long War Journal

This $200 million in aid compares to packages of over $1.5 billion for Egypt, $730 million for Iraq, $680 million for Jordan, $550 million for the West Bank and Gaza, and $250 million for Lebanon.

A recent article by Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out that Yemen suffers from more than just the hard security challenges associated with AQAP, the Houthi Rebellion in Sa’da, and the Southern Mobility separatist movement in the South and in Hadramawt[1]. Boucek notes that, “Beyond its security concerns, Yemen is on the brink of economic disaster, suffering from poor governance and quickly dwindling water supplies.”

The article rightly calls for the U.S. government to expand its aid focus to help Yemen: improve its legal system and laws, fight corruption, increase policing capacity, improve the economy, alter the land distribution and ownership system, and enhance the education system. These policy prescriptions are standard practice in the Middle East—multilateral aid packages with the goals of addressing economic instability, furthering governance and rule of law, promoting civil society, and improving education and with debatable effectiveness. Boucek further calls on the U.S. government to partner with Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s largest donor nation at $2 billion a year.

While these prescriptions will be important components in a comprehensive Yemen strategy, they fall short of addressing Yemen’s immediate and long term stability challenges, especially those

related to:  natural resources, population growth, and human health and capacity.

Robust track one and track two Yemeni-U.S. engagement will be necessary over the coming years.  Track two approaches will be especially important for addressing these core resource, population, and human challenges as their solutions are highly technical in nature, the target populations often live in areas with limited central government involvement or legitimacy, and effective solutions will require individual buy-in and stakeholder engagement from diverse actors.

Note that an effective strategy must include cooperation and engagement with the tribal and religious networks and stakeholders that are central components of Yemen’s social structure and civil society.  Tribes especially will be important partners in Yemen’s ongoing stability.  As an example of this, the leader of Yemen’s largest Bakil tribe, Sheikh Naji Abdul Aziz Al-Shayef, recently called for the creation of a coalition aligned with the government against Al Qaeda.

In the immediate future, the U.S. must support both track one and especially track two engagement in:

• Resource ownership. An immediate problem, Yemen’s oil and natural gas are running out and its water is running out even faster.  The U.S. must support scientists, technologists, and other experts in working with Yemeni government officials, scientists, and stakeholders to determine resource distribution, replenishment rate, and must begin dialogues with stakeholders on how resources are distributed, allocated, and managed.
• Land ownership. Before radically overhauling the land ownership system, the U.S. must work with the Yemeni government to institute legal safeguards that ensure that traditional land tenure systems are recognized. Current land reform efforts seek to secure land titling through registration and ownership legislation.  However, much land is owned at the tribal level, is communally owned, or is owned by the local mosque for the benefit of the mosque and the area’s poor (generally as a result of land donated through zakat or alms) and land reformation has the potential to further increase poverty as those without registration are displaced.
• Science and technology (S&T) cooperation. The U.S. government should take advantage of the Arab world’s favorable opinion of U.S. S&T to develop exchange programs and build internal Yemeni S&T capacity, focusing on issues such as water, energy, and biosecurity, which are of mutual need and interest.
• Refugees. Located not just below Saudi Arabia, but just across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden from Africa, Yemen is a country of 23 million people, with almost 200,000 refugees.  The majority of these refugees are from Somalia, with small groups from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Iraq.  The U.S. must work with civil society in the U.S., Yemen, and internationally, as well as with the UNHRC, to develop a strategy for permanent resettlement and to aid refugees as well as the populations in the South of Yemen where the refugee camps are located.
• Internally displaced persons. Yemen has an estimated 150,000-250,000 internally displaced persons, mostly in Sa’da and the North.  The U.S. must work with local tribes, international human rights and refugee organizations, and the government of Yemen and to develop a strategy for infrastructure and housing development, for public health initiatives, and for economic development.

Long term formal and informal engagement on the following issues is critical:

• Resource management. With dwindling resources, especially of water and fossil fuels, management is an increasingly critical challenge.  Sustainable resource use and allocation mechanisms are critical.   Their development can be best facilitated by the U.S. supporting tier two collaborations between experts, resource managers, and stakeholders, backed by tier one cooperation with politicians to develop supportive legislation, markets, and profit sharing mechanisms.
• Infrastructure development.
• Public health. Foci of these efforts should be infectious diseases, material and reproductive health, access to basic medical services, and population control issues.

No one policy or engagement strategy will be a panacea for Yemen’s root destabilizing factors.  Instead, the U.S. and other donor nations must focus on a variety of strategies at multiple levels of engagement that enhance human capacity and education, stabilize resource use and availability, improve governance, engage Yemen in the global S&T community, and approach Yemen as both a unique state and as a critical actor in a volatile region.

• Yemen faces severe water shortages within the next decade
• access to water resources is already a critical security matter in Yemen
• to prevent large-scale resource conflict innovative water provision and management solutions are necessary

Last week in Sana’a a British diplomatic convoy was attacked by Al Qaeda militants armed with an RPG. Incidents such as these are putting Yemen in the headlines with stories proclaiming the threat of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) growing presence, U.S. drones striking remote villages, attacks on western embassies and diplomats, and kidnappings.

But in this volatile region security is more than an Al Qaeda presence, more than a tribal rebellion, more than the realist notions of security based on military strength, coercive power, or advanced weaponry.

Security in Yemen is increasingly a matter of resource access and availability. And while scarcity and unequal distribution will not be the sole cause of conflict in the coming years and may not lead to the large-scale resource wars predicted by many international relations scholars,* both will undoubtedly be important exacerbating factors.

Models predict that the capital city of Sana’a will empty its water reservoir in as little as a decade, more than 40% of the population lives on less than USD2 per day, one in three Yemenis suffers from malnourishment, and the country’s population will double in just over twenty years.
Add to this social context the evidence that the fossil reservoirs in Sana’a are depleting at a rate of more than 5 meters per year as agriculturalists sink deeper and deeper wells, the nation’s production of the narcotic qat crop continues to expand, and a poor resource management system inhibits effective government action to control water use and quality. While a tribal management system was long effective in regulating water use, it largely disappeared with the creation of the Republic of Yemen and the deployment of diesel well pumps; what remains is an unregulated and unsustainable use pattern across the country—a race to use more water, faster, before it disappears.

Water shortage has already produced casualties in 1999, 2006, and 2009 and is cited as a factor in dozens of tribal conflicts and disagreements. And as seen in FAS’ interviews and conversations with government officials, tribal agriculturalists, Sanaani, and academics while in Yemen, the people of Yemen are themselves very concerned about future water availability and consider a likely cause of large-scale conflict in Yemen in the near future.

Meanwhile, security analysts consider the southern secessionist movement to be the single-greatest threat to the state’s stability and longevity. Chief amongst their claims against the central government in Sana’a is the government’s failure to provide access to essential resources, especially a stable water and energy supply. And in the wake of the military campaign against the Houthis in Sa’ada, more than 200,000 internal refugees were created and the region suffered extensive infrastructure loss and damage, exacerbating existing resource shortages and inequalities. (The extent of the damage is still largely unknown due to the government’s tight control over travel in and the rural nature of the Sa’ada region.)

Any security strategy toward Yemen must involve a comprehensive plan to improve access to and the availability of water resources. Without addressing this and other critical resource needs, without addressing the broken distribution mechanisms, without addressing a very real future of extreme water scarcity, all the armaments and military interventions and anti-terrorism trainings will be wasted. Western security policies toward Yemen must pull back from a narrow focus on countering terrorism and address these underlying structural problems.

Science diplomacy that focuses on critical environmental issues can be a key security policy tool to mitigate environmental threats, address structural inequities and challenges, and to improve science and global engagement in Yemen. (For more on the potential for science diplomacy see FAS President Charles Ferguson’s piece The Ecology of International Security.)

Felix Arabia, Happy Arabia to the Romans, the one-time breadbasket of Arabia, is on a path to run out of water completely by mid-century. And with no water there can be no stability and security.