Since 1994, the ECSP at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC has served as an information clearinghouse on the views, activities and policy initiatives falling under the rubric of "environment, population and security." The ECSP acts as a neutral, non-partisan forum for researchers, practitioners and interested individuals to meet, exchange ideas and concerns, and develop cross-disciplinary dialogue. Through discussion group meetings, publications, and activities of the staff, the ECSP explores a wide range of academic and policy-related topics.
www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp

Facilitator

The EDSP initiative originated from the 2000 annual meeting of the Bellagio Forum for Sustainable Development

Bellagio Forum for Sustainable Development (BFSD)

The Bellagio Forum for Sustainable Development (BFSD) is an international network of grant-providing institutions striving to attain environmental balance, economic stability and social progress throughout the world. The Forum was founded by a group of international donors called together by the Fondazione San Paolo di Torino and the Rockefeller Foundation to a meeting in April 1993 in Bellagio - a small village on the shores of Lake Como, Northern Italy. Since May 1996, the Forum has helped initiate, coordinate or further develop a range of significant programs and projects including the Sustainable Peace Initiative - as a key instrument for building dialogue between North and South.
www.bfsd.org/


Core Group Members

The following section introduces the Core Group Members of the EDSP Initiative:
Alexander Carius
Geoffrey D. Dabelko
Didi Djalal
Pascal O. Girot
Javier Gonzales
Dr. Okechukwu Ibeanu
Alexander López
Michael Ochieng Odhiambo
Dr. Aaron T. Wolf

Alexander Carius is co-founder and managing director of Adelphi Research. As an internationally recognised expert in the areas of environment, development and foreign policy, he is an advisor to numerous national and international institutions. The main fields of his research and consulting include “Sustainable Transport Policy and Mobility,” “Environment, Development and Crisis Prevention,” “Environmental Policy in Central and Eastern Europe” as well as governance and institutions in national and international environment policy. He is currently co-principal investigator on the Environment, Development, and Sustainable Peace Initiative, an international effort to bridge the gap between Northern and Southern perspectives on environment, development, poverty, conflict, and peace. In the past 13 years he has published around 100 articles, research reports and books on environment and development policy.
carius@adelphi-research.de

Geoffrey D. Dabelko is director of the Environmental Change and Security Project, a seven-year old non-partisan policy forum on environment, population and security issues located in Washington, DC at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is currently co-principal investigator on the Environment, Development, and Sustainable Peace Initiative, an international effort to bridge the gap between Northern and Southern perspectives on environment, development, poverty, conflict, and peace. Mr. Dabelko has held prior positions at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Foreign Policy Magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is co-editor with Ken Conca of Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto (2nd Ed. 1998) and the forthcoming Environmental Peacemaking. He is also Editor of the annual Environmental Change and Security Project Report. Mr. Dabelko is ABD in government and politics at the University of Maryland and holds an A.B. in political science from Duke University.
gdabelko@erols.com

Dini Djalal is the Jakarta correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, a HongKong-based regional weekly newsmagazine owned by the Dow Jones. She is also the Jakarta correpondent for CNBC Asia Television, also owned partly by the Dow Jones, as well as a regular contributor to the Bangkok Post and Channel Four News in the UK. Last year, she also wrote the Southeast Asia section of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report. Before she began reporting for international media, for many years Ms. Djalal worked for English-language daily of the Jakarta Post.
Amongst her non-writing activities are involvement in Solidaritas Profesional Untuk Reform, or SPUR, a pro-democracy group for young professionals, and in Susu Anak Bangsa, or SUAB, a charity providing milk to poor families. She has also taught at journalist training workshops in conflict areas such as Aceh in northern Sumatra.
Recently, she launched a local literary and cultural journal called Aksara, aimed at fostering young writers and literary journalism.
djalal@indo.net.id

Pascal O. Girot is currently environmental risk advisor for UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy. A part of the regional resource facility in Panama (SURF), he currently provides upstream policy advice to UNDP country offices in Latin America on issues related to climate change, environmental degradation and disaster risk. As an international consultant, he has worked for many United Nations Agencies such as UNDP, UNEP, FAO, as well as regional instances such as the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA), the World Union for Nature (IUCN), and many other regional and national organisations. As Professor of Geography at the University of Costa Rica since 1987, Pascal Girot has conducted research and teaching on issues related to Political Geography, Urban and Regional Planning and Environmental Problems. In particular, he has published several books and articles on border regions, environmental conflicts, natural resource use and disaster prevention and mitigation in Central America.
pascal.girot@undp.org

Javier Gonzales, Food technologist and nutritionist, has been working since 1991 with food security issues, peri-urban agriculture, food anthropology and food system economics as researcher, lecturer and consultant. Currently lecturer of the development sciences module and senior researcher of the Human Studies Unity (Food security, extreme events and climate change adaptation), Nur University Bolivia (www.nur.edu). Since 1996, he has been working on global change issues, in particular land use and climate change in relation to food systems and agriculture, was a member of the Global Change research committee, and coordinator of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Changes Research Committee in Bolivia. Since 1998, he has been working for the National Climate Change Program (government of Bolivia) as policy advisor and consultant; was senior consultant of the National Climate Change Strategy implementation (1998-2002) in cooperation with different civil society networks and municipalities; has contributed to the institutional design and strategic planning of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Bolivia (World Bank 2000), and to the vulnerability and adaptation chapter of the first national communication of Bolivia for the UNFCCC (1999). In several times he has participated in UNFCCC and IPCC official meetings as government delegate.
jgonzales@mdsp.gov.bo

Dr. Okechukwu Ibeanu is Program Officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, he was a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Nigeria. He was a Research Fellow at the Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, a Fellow of the United Nations University and a Guest Lecturer at the Environment Change and Security Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington DC. Dr. Ibeanu serves on the Scientific Committees and Councils of many organisations including the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project and the Center for Democracy and Development, London. He has published extensively on issues of environmental security including Oil, Conflict and Security in Rural Nigeria.
macarthur.nigeria@skannet.com

Alexander López with a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo is currently associate professor at the School for International Affairs, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. He also is the project coordinator of “conflict, cooperation and environment: Redefining sovereignty in Central American International river basins”, a research project supported by the MacArhur foundation under the program “Global Security and Sustainability.” He has also been attached as researcher to the Center for Environment and Development in Oslo, Norway and as a Lecturer to the Central American Institute for Public Administration in San José, Costa Rica. He has published several articles on environmental conflicts and environment in security focusing on the Amazon region and Central America.
alope@una.ac.cr

Michael Ochieng Odhiambo is the Executive Director of the Resource Conflict Institute (RECONCILE) a regional environmental and natural resources law and policy research NGO based in Nakuru, Kenya. He is also the Coordinator of LandNet East Africa, a network which brings together land and natural resource policy practioners from government and civil society from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. He has consulted for Oxfam and FAO on policy and law for the management of natural resource conflicts in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
A law graduate from the University of Nairobi, he has practised and taught law in Kenya and is associated with efforts to develop public interest in environmental and natural resources litigation in the East African sub-region.
reconcile@net2000ke.com or ekmoo@africaonline.co.ke

Dr. Aaron T. Wolf is an associate professor of geography in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. His research focus is on the interaction between water science and water policy, particularly as related to conflict prevention and resolution. He has acted as consultant to the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, and the World Bank on various aspects of transboundary water resources and dispute resolution. He is author of Hydropolitics Along the Jordan River: The Impact of Scarce Water Resources on the Arab-Israeli Conflict (United Nations University Press, 1995), and a co-author of Core and Periphery: A Comprehensive Approach to Middle Eastern Water (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Resolution (United Nations University Press, 2000). Wolf coordinates the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, an electronic compendium of case studies of water conflicts and conflict resolution, international treaties, national compacts, and indigenous methods of water dispute resolution (www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu).
wolfa@geo.orst.edu

Sponsors

Financial support for the EDSP initiative is provided by the following sponsors:

German Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development (BMZ)

German Development Co-operation, provided through the Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development (BMZ) has three priority areas for funding: poverty alleviation, environmental and resource protection, and education and training. BMZ is committed to sustainable development in which economic, social and ecological development are viewed as an indivisible unit. BMZ's focal areas are: poverty alleviation; environmental and resource protection; and equal opportunities for women and men; all are considered significant multi-sectoral tasks. In all German development co-operation, the impact of initiatives on poverty, the environment and women in the country in question are evaluated.
www.bmz.de/en

German Agency for Technical Co-operation (GTZ)

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ - German Agency for Technical Co-operation), from Eschborn, near Frankfurt in Germany, is an organisation which acts on behalf of the German Federal Government. Its work covers a wide range of economic and technical co-operation tasks as well as humanitarian and emergency interventions. The governing body is the BMZ- Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development, which is the central planning and funding institution. The GTZ was founded in 1975 and is one of the world's largest service enterprises in the field of development co-operation.
www.gtz.de/english/index.asp

Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation (SDC)

The Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation (SDC) is part of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The SDC is organised and funded by the Swiss government and operates by financing programs both directly and in partnership with other agencies to countries around the world. The primary philosophy of SDC is to fight poverty through participatory programs, creating sustainable improvements in peoples' lives by involving them in the process. Its main intentions are to improve access to education and basic health care, to promote environmental health, to encourage economic and governmental autonomy, and to improve equity in labor.
www.sdc-gov.ch