Reflection Paper-IS402-G6 §

Class: IS402 Created Time: October 20, 2021 2:16 PM Database: Assignment Database Last Edited Time: December 12, 2021 11:44 AM Provided Materials: G6_Environment_and_Development.pdf, Written_Summary_and_Reflection.pdf, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FpFHoa9U687q-8ucvaLVgD7Dz7B8hUeJ-kUTpgrdv_0/edit Status: Done Type: 📑🎙️

Group 6 §

• Chea Resan
• CHRUN SOKUNTHEA
• SOUN NOBY

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IS402-Assignment-Guidelines

• Submit in google classroom folder
  • Submit on day of covering the chapter on the syllabus
• 1 paper, 1 presentation

Environment and Development:

1. Introduction [272-274]
2. Disaster risk management and development [274-279]
3. Climate Change and Development [279-281]
4. Linking climate change and disaster risk [282-284]
5. International policy processes [284-286]
6. Conclusion [286-287]

I: 1, 5, 6 SOUN NOBY II: 2 CHEA RESAN III: 3, 4 CHRUN SOKUNTHEA

Intro - River At Risk (291-298) Resan

Development for whom - End (298-303) Noby

Assignment Preparation

Topic: Environment and Development §

• Ever since there is reliable disaster assessment
  • 11% of people impacted by droughts, earthquakes, floods, windstorms, lives in low-development countries
  • But account for 53% of deaths from the disasters
• Direct economic, physical, and human disaster losses are focused on in assessments but aren’t the only losses from disasters
  • Indirect Impacts: lost production time, market share,
  • Secondary Losses: (felt by regional or national economy) increased indebtedness, inflation
• International trade inequalities
  • has worsened rural livelihoods in poor countries
  • poor countries has poor labor rights and environmental standards because the capitalistic competition for FDI
• National and local development can further expose people to hazard through privatization, public sector savings that also reduce government’s capacity to provide social safety nets.
  • efforts to reduce the risks also backfire, relocation schemes disrupt livelihoods and social networks that don’t allow society to heal

Disasters and the Millennium Development Goal §

• The United Nations Millennium Development Goal, adopted in 2000: aimed to reduce ‘the number and effects of natural and man-made disasters’
  • Millennium Development Goals: details the plans to make it happen
  • Recommendations of development of early warning systems, vulnerability maps
  • to encourage governments to incorporate disaster risk reduction into their national planning processes
• The MDG aims for 8 different impacts:
  1. Demands eradication of extreme poverty that is undermined by other impacts
  2. Demand universal primary education because disasters makes schooling expensive and require children to work more.
  3. Promote the empowerment of women as disasters can increase sexual violence against women and children and gender inequality.
  4. Seek to reduce child mortality rate as they are vulnerable to the disasters but also post-disaster disease.
  5. Aims to improve maternal health as damaged health infrastructure, stress, and cost impact pregnant women.
  6. Seek to combat chronic diseases like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis that disasters can make more common of.
  7. Aspire to ensure environmental sustainability to ensure disaster management does not neglect aquatic and land-based ecosystems.
  8. Calls for global partnership for development especially for small island developing states who are vulnerable to climate change.

Challenges to integrating disaster risk reduction into development planning §

• What is disaster risk management?
  • risk reduction: prevention, preparedness, mitigation
  • Humanitarian and development actions: emergency response, relief and reconstruction
• Risk reduction is less visible than emergency relief, so unattractive to governments chasing votes and international recognition
  • During state of emergency: funds are easily available
  • Blame set on hazard instead of incomitance in risk reduction
  • Making Samaritan’s Dilemma where states rely on relief supports rather than working on hazard prevention instead
  • Efforts have been made to push risk reduction but only in forms of ‘early warning systems’
• Development specialists have a challenge with focusing on disaster risk reduction, while distracted by more immediate needs
  • They are wary of agendas that emphasize preventive actions
  • However small administrative changes like the introduction of risk assessment as part of a project appraisal methodology will make a big difference
• Misconception that disaster risk reduction is already incorporated into pro-poor development
  • vulnerability and poverty isn’t the same thing
  • and disaster risk reduction try and strengthen livelihoods of the vulnerable
• Misconception that disasters are beyond human control
  • studies have shown disasters aren’t a natural phenomenon
  • when disasters are seen as the accumulation of risk and vulnerability over years leading to a triggered events, then clear actions can be taken

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Case Study: Mekong Dams and the Perils of Peace §

• Cambodians, Laos, and Vietnamese rely on the Mekong for traditional farming, and fishing and there are new threats to the river.

• The problem is who controls the water, how it should be used, and for whose benefits

• China is rising with its economic development and geopolitical objectives and the Indochinese countries have short-sighted policies, sometimes in conjunction with China itself.

• The Mekong river cuts starts from China and cuts through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam

• What is special about the Mekong river is its wet and dry season extreme flows

  • In the wet-season flood build and the river reverse direction filling up the Tonle Sap river in Cambodia, then the lake empties back into the river into the delta with countless species of fish in the period of 3 months. Allowing for fisheries and a third rice harvest in Mekong Delta.

• The Mekong River Commission was signed in a treaty between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in 1995 all agreeing to maintain ‘acceptable natural reverse flow’ into the Tonle Sap.

  • The 8 or more massive hydropower dams in construction in China and 11 further proposed pose doubts about the viability of the use of the buffer

River at risk §

• Large dams hold back soil-renewing silt, destroy fish habitat, wiping away fields and villages

• China’s dams, proposed or under construction, are high capacity impacting the river’s natural hydrology and seasonal inflows

• Along with Cambodia’s proposed dams, it threatens to make sea-level rise in the Mekong Delta happen quicker

• China is where most the benefits of the Mekong comes from

  • China only have one-fourth the length of the Mekong, but account for 90% of the 5,000 meter fall to the ocean.

  • Summer glacier and snow melt on the Tibetan Plateau accounts for as much as 40-70% of the dry-season flow

  • the Upper Mekong also contribute half of the sediment annually replenishes farmers’ fields and rebuild the Mekong Delta during the monsoon floods.

• China’s dams will maintain enough flow downstream to Yunnan and dams planned for Laos and Cambodia to keep them running during the drought seasons and to allow for year round commercial navigation

  • China plans to put 40% more water in the river during the dry season and reduce the monsoon flow by 17%

• Biologist and natural scientists says this unnatural change of the river’s reversing flow will destroy the characteristically productive feature of this river.

  • The delta is the Vietnamese rice bowl, producing 40% of the country’s crops
  • Annual floods replenish the soil naturally without the need for fertilizers, allowing 3 crop yields per year.

• 11 more dams are planned for Lower Mekong by Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia.

  • These dams will pose an absolute barrier to spawning migration of a large variety of fish species that makes up 80% of animal protein of 6 million people.
  • Half of these dams are financed by Chinese banks and official development assistance

• With all these dams, there were no relocation efforts that worked

• Fish ladders projects to allow fish to move through damns were worked on and failed.

• Dams in operation is silting up and blocked far more frequent and early than anticipated.

• The winter snow caps are shrinking from the Tibetan Plateau leading to reduced flow in upper Mekong

• So there are many issues that the construction of dams along the Mekong River has created