A remarkably underreported story here in the US, and indeed in most advanced economies, is the increasing presence of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies. No, this is not some grand conspiracy to dumb us down or make us passive (please remove the tinfoil helmet’s, y’all) . . . it’s what happens when we overprescribe drugs in dosages larger than can be completely taken up by our bodies. These drugs are expelled in our waste, and enter the surrounding ecosystem. This scares the hell out of me, and is almost enough to make me buy bottled water . . . and then I remember that bottled water is likely coming from a similarly contaminated source and has all sorts of horrific impacts on the environment.
NPR is running another story that references this issue today – a story about shrimp on measurable amounts of Prozac (which they are taking up from their surrounding environments). The story focuses on the impact of the Prozac on the shrimp, which head for light and therefore become more vulnerable to predators. What I find boggling is that the story stops there.
There is a huge implication here – WE EAT THOSE SHRIMP. And chemicals like fluoxetine concentrate as they move up the food chain – which means that when we eat shrimp on miniscule amounts of Prozac, we are dosing ourselves with Prozac. Eat enough shrimp, and you can get a dose that actually affects you. And this is not the only edible animal or plant taking up pharmaceutical chemicals from the environment – lots of them do. Just as mercury becomes a problem as it moves up the food chain, so too these chemicals become a problem – we are approaching a situation where it will be difficult to eat without getting an unprescribed dose of pharmaceutical. This cannot be good for us.
And people wonder why puberty is coming earlier and earlier for girls in our society. There is a reason my daughter drinks organic milk . . .
The point here is that the environment is not a bottomless sink into which we can dump things like chemicals and expect that we will never see them again. Yes, most people know this – yet we, as a society, seem surprised every time a new type of chemical surfaces in our food or water. We spend a lot of time and energy hollering about things like deforestation in the developing world, while we chew up our own environment in much more subtle ways that might be much more difficult to reverse . . . perhaps we need to get our own house in order before commenting on the behavior of others.
Category: sustainable development
Development and Not-Quite-Zero-Sum Growth . . .
It seems to me that one of the more interesting debates to be had around global environmental change and development is that of the nature of growth in the modern world. There are those that argue (or at least implicitly argue) that growth is effectively unlimited by the biophysical world – the real barriers to growth around the world are capacity, governance, etc. Operating from this assumption (or something near to it), the logical decision is to foster growth everywhere in the world, and to assume that the absence of growth is a symptom of problems with human capacity, attitudes and institutions that can and should be rectified. At another pole are those that argue that our growth is fundamentally pinned to the biophysical world – this is the implicit assumption behind ecological footprint calculators, that we draw upon natural resource for growth in a manner that is fixed and measurable -and the measurements suggest, rather strongly, that growth is highly constrained by the biophysical world.
Like most people, I exist somewhere in the middle of this continuum. Ecological footprint calculators, imperfect though they may be (for example, converting our resource use into acres of land is a problematic and weak process/proxy), demonstrate rather clearly that if we are to get everyone in the world up to the average standard of living in the United States, we would need the natural resources from around three Earths. Many of the arguments about future policy built on these footprint calculations end up discussing rather steep resource and wealth redistribution curves if we want to see a more equal world. However, there is a significant flaw in this reasoning – these measures (let’s just assume that they are reasonably accurate for the purposes of this argument) and the resultant policy prescriptions assume the per capita intensity of use to be a constant going forward into the future. This discounts future technological developments that will, no doubt, lower the per capita resource use of those in the advanced economies, such as the US.
On the other hand, the news here isn’t all good – while the intensity of use might decrease over time, such decreases typically translate into the market in the form of reduced prices, which tend to spur increased production. Put another way, 5 years in the future we may only use 75% of the resources we do today to make a shirt, thus lowering the footprint of that shirt and the person who buys that shirt. However, the price of that shirt will likely decrease to remain competitive in the market, encouraging consumers to buy more shirts than they used to. If the price drop of the shirt is such that the consumer who typically buys four shirts a year decides to buy five, we’ve already lost the decreased footprint created by increased efficiency to a larger footprint created by greater consumption. In other words, improved resource efficiency related to growth won’t do us much good if it spurs the growth of consumption such that the per capita resource uptake remains constant or rises.
There is another bit of bad news here – even if those of us living in the advanced economies decided to freeze our amount of consumption, locking in our current standard of living while allowing increased resource use efficiency to translate into greater availability of goods and services in the Global South, I don’t see a point any time in the near future where these benefits will be of a scope that will allow for a real closing of the gap in the material standard of living between the developing and the developed. We’re looking at differences of orders of magnitude right now, accrued over several centuries of differential political economic activity when the Earth’s population and total resource uptake was much, much smaller. So if we want a truly equal world, those of us in the advanced economies are going to have to give something up.
While I am an indefatigable optimist (hey, I am writing this post but I still work in development), this doesn’t absolve me from a serious consideration of reality – so maybe I am a constrained optimist. The size of the global population today, coupled with our current regimes of resource use, have taken most, if not all of the slack out of the global resource/growth equation. No, we are not yet at a zero-sum world where growth in China means loss somewhere else, like the US – it is still possible to see growth in multiple sites, as technological advances create a bit more space for growth via increased efficiency. But there will come a day where we will cross this curve – where our inability to make things more efficient as quickly as our increased demand on resources rises will finally come to a point where the resources themselves become the restrictor plate on growth – the world will effectively become a zero-sum economy.
In my work on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, I saw trends that make the math above a lot more pressing. The rates of resource degradation around the world are astonishing. Not everything is getting worse, of course – temperate forests, for example, are doing pretty well – but an astonishing percentage of the resources we rely upon for our standard of living are under threat right now, not in some distant future. So our current use of the environment (much of this use in the name of growth, incidentally), with its various impacts, is hastening the day when we cross the curve into a zero-sum economy. Some might argue (or hope?) that we will generate enough wealth and capacity between now and then as to come up with some sort of a solution for this – or to put back the damage that we have done to our environment, thus uncrossing the curve for a while longer. This strikes me as a hell of a gamble*, where the stakes on a bad bet are getting larger and larger. Meanwhile, the nature of this bet has been shifting from betting one’s house on red to betting one’s house on red 16 . . .
No, we are not there yet. But, barring a remarkable revolution in our ability to generate energy and food (I won’t rule these out, but the sort of revolution we need is on the order of fusion, which isn’t all that close right now), zero-sum is coming. But what should we call this not-quite-zero-sum world we are living in? Surely someone has a name for this already . . .
*in the case of extinctions, this is a pointless gamble – there is no putting back extinct, and anything that goes extinct will have effects (some obvious, others difficult to discern) throughout ecosystems . . . and often there will be one or more impact parts of that ecosystem that humans see as useful. or necessary.
The Death of the Energy Bill: Who cares? Basically, everyone.
There is much flutter around Senate Democrats’ recent decision to give up on the Energy Bill that might have brought about a cap-and-trade system here in the US.
From the NYTimes:
Senate Democrats on Tuesday abandoned all hopes of passing even a slimmed-down energy bill before they adjourn for the summer recess, saying that they did not have sufficient votes even for legislation tailored narrowly to respond to the Gulf oil spill.
Although the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, sought to blame Republicans for sinking the energy measure, the reality is that Democrats are also divided over how to proceed on the issue and had long ago given up hope of a comprehensive bill to address climate change.
There will be a lot of analysis of the biophysical impact of our continuing inability to act on the twinned issues of climate change and energy in the coming days, I am sure. But, early in the morning, I want to quickly point out the cascading disaster this will cause in the environment and development policy world. What most people don’t understand about the Copenhagen meetings, which ended in such confusion without a clear agreement, is that most of the key actors decided that it would be best to wait and see what the US managed to pass for its own internal purposes, and then try to work to that to ensure that the US joined the next major global climate agreement (remember, we never did sign Kyoto). Copenhagen wasn’t really a failure the way many people thought – indeed, had they plowed ahead with an agreement in absence of American climate and energy legislation, they would have set the stage for Kyoto II – where the US, once again, refused to sign on to standards that it had not already agreed to.
I have found exactly one piece of good coverage of this issue, via Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire: “Overseas Frustration Grows Over U.S. Domestic Impasse on Climate Policy”. The article nicely captures what is truly at stake here:
“Why is it that for the last 20 years the United States is unable to have a bill on climate change? What’s happening? What’s going on? It’s very complicated to understand,” said Brice Lalonde, France’s top negotiator.
“For a lot of us, we cannot wait for the United States. We have to go on. It’s like Kyoto,; we just go on” Lalonde said, referring to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol treaty that the U.S. joined but never ratified, leaving European countries to largely carry the weight of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Added Pa Ousman Jarju, lead negotiator for the small West African nation of Gambia, “We cannot rely on the U.S., because everything the U.S. is supposed to do depends on domestic policy. So we’re not going to get anything from the U.S. in terms of tangible commitment.”
He charged that the international community is “no longer hopeful” that America, the world’s biggest historic emitter of global warming pollution, will ever pass a bill to cut emissions. That, he said, leaves the global community with two options: “Either the rest of the world continues to do what they were doing before, or the whole multilateral system will collapse.”
What we were doing before was not good enough. I am not all that sure that the net outcome of business as usual is all that different from a complete collapse of the environmental component of the multilateral system as we understand it. The US simply has to be on board, or this is all for naught. UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres put it this way:
“Whether the United States meets the pledge that it put on the Copenhagen Accord via legislation or whether it meets it via regulation is an internal domestic affair of the United States and one that they need to solve,” she said. “What is clear is that at an international level the United States needs to participate in a a meaningful way, and in a way that is commensurate with its responsibility.”
Credit to her for saying this clearly, and for suggesting that content (getting some sort of formal controls on emissions in place, whether through regulation or legislation) is a lot more important than form (insisting that everyone pass legislation to somehow bolster the legitimacy of these efforts). Now, let’s see if the Obama Administration is willing to really use the newly-empowered EPA as a blunt object in the fight to control greenhouse gas emissions – at this point, I see no other way forward for the US. Which means no other meaningful way forward for the rest of the world.
The soft bigotry of low expectations, development-style
PRI’s The World ran a story today about the boom in renewable energy in the developing world. The story itself is fine – but I’m tired of reading stories that hang their angle on how amazing/interesting it is that the global poor can be so innovative, and so capable to taking up new technologies – this angle is misguided and condescending, and does a lot to keep us trapped in the development echo chamber that tells us how the global poor would be lost without our help.
The World, like all media, has to draw the reader/listener in with unusual and topical stories. But this story is not all that unusual – it runs parallel to the explosive growth of mobile phones in the developing world. When I first started working in Ghana, back in 1997, barely anyone had cell phones. Landlines were also rare, and nearly impossible to get because the switchboards in places like Cape Coast were maxed out – basically, you had to wait for someone to move or die, which would free up a land line. The waits for land lines ranged into years. I could make outbound calls from the Ghana Telecom building in Cape Coast, but I had no means of receiving phone calls. When I went out to a village to do fieldwork, I effectively disappeared – there was no means of reaching me except word-of-mouth messages passed by people going to and from the village on various errands (though that method was surprisingly effective – I could get a message in well under a day in that manner).
Fast forward to 2004 -when I arrived in Ghana, I borrowed a cell phone from a colleague of mine at the University of Ghana, went out and bought a SIM and some minutes for around $15, and had a phone number within a few hours of touching down in the country. People could call me, and I could call out, nearly all the time. Coverage did not extend into the villages in which I was working, but if I climbed a very tall hill behind my house, I could get a wobbly signal. In 2005, the signal was much stronger. Since 2006, it has been possible to make and receive calls from the village itself, without having to climb the hill. And people have adopted the phone as these advances have taken place, to the extent that while these villages do not have electrical service, I have heard a farmer take a call on a mobile phone in his field (the phones are charged on car batteries).
Why the rapid advances in mobile phone technology? People wanted the service (badly), but the dominant technology of the late 1990s (land lines) was too expensive to extend to everyone who wanted it. Mobile phones filled the gap . . . and now we see all kinds of innovation in mobile technology starting to emerge from Africa – such as the unique talent pool of low-bandwidth phone app programmers in Kenya.
Given all of this, I am forced to ask why anyone would find the adoption of alternative energy sources by those living in the developing world surprising. People want and need power, but the infrastructure to bring it to them is very expensive. Dominase and Ponkrum, the two villages in which I have focused much of my research in Ghana, are less than five kilometers from huge high tension lines carrying electricity from the Akosombo Dam to coastal cities like Takoradi to the West. Yet they have no electricity themselves, and little hope of seeing the grid extended to them any time soon. As the story notes:
“One reason why renewable energy is expanding is because of the inadequacy of the power supply in much of the world. Conventional power grids simply don’t reach many people. And when the price of oil goes up, people who use diesel generators start searching for other ways to get power.”
I agree that situations like this one drive innovation (the villagers can run almost anything off of a car battery), but the emergence of alternative energy as one set of innovations is therefore completely unsurprising.
The real story here, as I see it, is the rate of change. What we are seeing is a remarkable rate of innovation in the developing world around emerging technologies. Further, this is not all the result of development projects, education, or other capacity-building efforts supplied by advanced economies. Instead, such as in the case of the Kenyan programmers, these innovations are local phenomenon that illustrate just how capable the people living in the Global South really are.
Perhaps we need to stop writing stories that express surprise and interest in the emergence of new technologies among the global poor, and refocus to carefully explore why some technologies emerge and others do not. Any time we see a useful, innovative technology hit the Global South without making a major impact, or without people picking it up, we need to explore what is preventing this sort of innovation and impact. The only reason we don’t, I fear, is because we assume that the global poor are generally incapable of such innovation without outside help. This is a bad assumption that empowers development projects that are probably not needed or misguided – efforts that could be better spent identifying and removing the barriers to adoption so that these local innovations can flourish.
So I guess it's for real now:
What does it say that it took the appearance of my forthcoming book on Amazon’s website to make the whole thing seem real?
Dead Zones and Development
Mickey Glantz has a new post on the Fragileecologies Blog comparing our societal response to the gulf oil spill and the near total lack of response to a much more serious, long-term threat to the gulf, the ever-growing “dead zone” that spills out from the mouth of the Mississippi. This despite the fact the dead zone has been a known issue for some time:
“Back in 1974, Dr. R. Eugene Turner, Director of Coastal Ecology Institute at Louisiana State University, discovered a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone is the result of runoff from cities, farmlands, feedlots and factories into the mighty Mississippi River. This River basin drains about 40% of the continental United States. Herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers among other chemicals are released on a routine basis throughout the basin. In the springtime they accumulate of the Gulf Coast forming an 8000+ square mile region, which adversely affects all living marine resources.”
Mickey has an interesting comparison chart for the two problems that begins to point toward why we responded so quickly to an oil spill, while largely ignoring a much larger ecological disaster that compromises the Gulf economy and the health of the population that lives along the lower reaches of the Mississippi and along the Gulf coast.
What do you think of Mickey’s list? Is there anything he’s missed?
Environmental Migration and the Immigration Debate
UPDATED 7-28
Scientific American has posted a news and commentary piece on a study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that links climate change to increased migration from Mexco to the US. The author, David Biello, sent me an embargoed copy of the study a few days ago and asked for my comments – which he was kind enough to draw from at length in his article.
In a general way, I am very supportive of work that examines the connection between climate change/environmental change and migration – mostly because so little work has been done on the topic, and the assumptions about the connections between migration and environment that drive policy are so often wildly incorrect. However, I am a bit leery of this study, as I feel like it is making a classic mistake in environment-migration studies: it is trying to identify the portion of the migration decision that is about environmental change. As I have argued elsewhere, there is little point in trying to isolate environmental factors from all of the factors that contribute to migration. Biello quoted me quite accurately:
“Migration decisions, like all livelihood decisions, are about much more than material quality of life,” argues geographer Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina, who studies human migration in countries such as Ghana and was not involved in the Mexico emigration research. “What I am seeing in sub-Saharan Africa are very complex patterns in which environmental change is but one of several causal factors.”
What I am worried about here is a sort of intellectual ambulance-chasing, where the research is driven by a sexy topic (the intersection of climate change and Latino migration, which is sure to bring out the crazies on all sides) regardless of whether or not the fundamental research question is all that sound. The fact that several researchers quoted in the piece (myself included) were able to quickly poke significant holes in the study suggests that this publication falls into this problematic category. First, the migration pattern examined and emphasized in this project is likely to be very, very small relative to other kinds of movement.
“Most often international migration is not an option and rural residents migrate to urban areas, contributing to urbanization and urban poverty in developing countries,” says sociologist Elizabeth Fussell of Washington State University.
That is certainly the case in Mexico, according to population and migration researcher Haydea Izazola of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, also not part of Oppenheimer’s team for the new study. “The great majority of the rural population who grow maize—rain-fed agriculture—for their own consumption are the poorest of the poor and lack the means to invest in the very expensive and risky migration venture.”
Further, the very models that predicted the impact of climate change on Mexican agriculture were not applied to the economy of the US, where the migrants are supposed to be headed.
Crop yields in the U.S. will likely suffer as well. “People do not move blindly; they move to greater opportunity,” Carr notes. “So we should probably be using [these economic and climate] models to examine the impact of future climate change on various migrant-employing sectors of the southwestern U.S. economy.”
While the research team that published this study intends to examine this issue, it calls into question even this preliminary study. I’m honestly surprised this got through peer review . . . except, perhaps that it was too sexy to pass up.
UPDATE: I wrote this late last night, and so was a bit spacey – as a friend of mine reminded me, there is another huge problem with the study – a lot of the “Mexican” migration that people are talking about in the popular media, and indeed in this study, is in fact Latino migration from Central America more broadly. As these areas were not modeled in this study, we have yet another gaping hole to address. I repeat: how did this get though peer review?
UPDATE: Well, people are jumping all over this article. Pielke’s site has a review with a similar take to my own . . .
The difference between debt forgiveness and bailouts – no moral hazard here
In the news, recently, was the IMF’s decision to forgive its portion of Haiti’s debt – a substantial $268 million (BBC, CNN) However, it should be noted that this is hardly complete debt relief. According to the World Bank, Haiti owed $1,935,265,000 in 2008. So this relief really just lowers the debt from $1.9 billion to $1.67 billion – not a particularly huge thing, in the grand scheme of things. This outstanding chart from the World Bank shows who holds Haiti’s debt, and makes clear what a tiny sliver the IMF held (see the bottom of page 2). Certainly, the IMF was right to do this – but it won’t matter all that much to Haiti.
There are some who would argue that debt relief raises the specter of “moral hazard”, that much-discussed issue in the wake of the financial bailout in late 2008. However, applying this argument to debt relief in general is a terrible mistake resting on a faulty understanding of the sources of debt. On Wall Street, the bailout raised the issue of moral hazard because the money went to the very people who made the bad investments and created the problematic investment vehicles – in short, encouraging these people to take risks in the future, knowing that if they failed again the government would step in, rather than letting the economy tank completely (For an outstanding take on this, see Simon Johnston and James Kwak’s 13 Bankers – link below). This, I think, does raise a significant issue about who has to absorb risk when people take big chances with their (and other people’s) money – the bailouts we have seen, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, risk has been outsourced to taxpayers, many of whom did not benefit from (hell, they suffered greatly from) the very investments that they are now being asked to bail out.
Debt relief, by and large, is something entirely different – there are a lot of reasons why we should drop the debts of countries in the developing world, not least of which being that these debts are anchors that will never allow these economies to rise on the global economic tide. For example, in the late 1990s, Ghana was sending roughly half of its annual revenues overseas to service its totally unsustainable debt. In simple terms, this meant that every year, $500 million worth of schools, hospitals, roads and electrical grid could not be constructed because that money was being hovered out of the country to pay for a debt incurred before much of the population had ever been born.
This, to me, is why we need to drop many countries’ debts – including that of Haiti. These debts were not accrued in the name of the people of these countries, but in the name of particular leaders who often misused the funds. If you need an example, Google Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) – the United States (and the international community, at the behest of the US) dumped money into Mobutu’s hands in the form of development loans, knowing he was both stealing this money and killing a tremendous proportion of his own population, because we did not want him turning to the Soviets. So it takes a lot of gall to demand that the current population of the DRC pay back the debts incurred by Mobutu (who managed to die of cancer in 1997 before he could answer for any of this). There is no moral hazard in offering debt relief here – the current population of the DRC had little or nothing to do with accruing this debt, and the lenders always knew the loans were really bribes. Haiti is really not all that different from the DRC – Haiti too has a history of problematic leaders propped up by “loans” from the developed world. However, here there is a wider guilt, as a good portion of why the country is so poor is because the US has forced its economy to open to global markets where small Haitian farmers cannot compete with the economies of scale of large, multinational agribusinesses.
It shouldn’t have taken an earthquake to put debt relief on the table for Haiti. There are many other countries, equally deserving of relief, who wait. It shouldn’t take an equivalent disaster for them to make it happen.
This, as my father would have said, is "piss poor"
The WWF reports that the upcoming meeting of the REDD+ Partnership issued invitations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) only a week before the meeting. The WWF’s Paul Chatterton argues:
“By waiting until the last minute to invite civil society participants to this meeting, the organizers have virtually guaranteed that these invitees will not be able to participate.”
I agree completely – most NGOs operate with very small budgets, and the soaring cost of last-minute international plane tickets will price many NGOs out of the meetings entirely, and greatly curtail the size of the teams other NGOs might otherwise send. Further, this is not accidental – these meetings are well-orchestrated events, and while it is possible that a single organization, or even a handful, might be accidentally omitted, there is simply no way that the program organizers “forgot” the entire NGO community. Clearly, someone is trying to minimize the involvement of NGOs, who are the principal voice for the communities who live in and around many of the forest resources likely to be covered under REDD+.
Aside from the underhanded nature of this move, why does this matter? As I argue in my upcoming book, we are lumbering (no pun intended) slowly toward a global agreement on how to use the protection of threatened forest resources and the reforestation of degraded forest areas as means of offsetting carbon emissions as part of a much larger global carbon market. This is not a problem, in and of itself. Cap and trade is not inherently flawed – but its success is completely contingent on its implementation. And what I am seeing from the private markets (via informal proposals that get passed my way) is a lot of project planning that completely ignores local communities.
Now, think what you will about the rights of communities to the natural resources in and around them – I know that some argue that these rights have to be curtailed for the greater good of humanity. I happen to disagree, as I feel that this stance makes a small group of people who play little role in the global climate issues that REDD+ is trying to address responsible for bearing the negative impacts of our efforts to deal with these problems – in short, we are outsourcing the pain of mitigation to these communities. However, whatever your stance might be on this, there is no refuting the fact that people, when forced off of a resource they once could use, have a very high incentive to monkey wrench these projects in an effort to regain access to the resource (there is a large literature on this with regard to how people displaced by protected areas like game reserves respond). Thus, these proposals, and this odd effort on the part of the REDD+ Partnership, are more or less guaranteeing a high rate of project failure until someone figures out that they will have to take the needs of these local populations quite seriously.
Development is not the same thing as adaptation
One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development. Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value. However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming. It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals. In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other. Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now. A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster. In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought. Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice? For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation? It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations. If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable. To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this? I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level. How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.