Global Commons

The Five Questions Series is a forum for scholars, government officials, civil society leaders, and foreign policy practitioners to provide timely analysis of new developments related to the advancement of women and girls worldwide. This interview is with Sarah Costa, executive director of the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC). Costa reflects on women and girls in the Syrian conflict and European migration crisis, as well as on the outcomes from the two historic summits on refugees and migrants at the United Nations General Assembly last month. The number of people displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution in 2015 was a record high at 63.5 million people—that’s one person in every 113. What are some of the unique challenges faced by displaced women and girls around the world? Women make up approximately half of the people displaced by humanitarian crises worldwide. These crises result in enormous risks to women and girls in the form of rape, assault, intimate partner violence, an increase in early marriage, and all forms of exploitation. With displacement, there’s a breakdown of traditional family and community protection systems, leading to greater violence, and there’s a breakdown in law and order, leading to impunity for perpetrators. Women often travel alone, which makes them particularly vulnerable to trafficking and to exploitation by smugglers. We’ve seen this in the Syrian crisis, as women and girls move through Europe. Among migrants and refugees, the gender inequality that women and girls face in society follows them into displacement and exacerbates these challenges. Factors like age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation can further exacerbate risks for women and girls. For example, adolescent girls are often invisible—isolated in their homes or forced into early marriages. The humanitarian community hasn’t done enough to identify them, and doesn’t understand their specific needs. This is something that the Women’s Refugee Commission cares deeply about and is trying to remedy. The situation for displaced women and girls is compounded by the lack of resources for humanitarian needs, in general, and the significant gaps in addressing the needs of women and girls in emergency responses from the beginning of crises. Focusing on the European migration crisis, how does the current EU-Turkey deal uniquely affect displaced women and girls? How can these risks be better addressed? Many of the refugees who arrived in Greece this year are women and children seeking to reunite with family members in European countries. The EU-Turkey deal has profound and distressing ramifications for these women and children, including prolonged displacement, family separation, and unacceptable hurdles to accessing legal protection. After the EU-Turkey agreement, refugees who had recently arrived in Greece were stuck, living in deplorable circumstances. When we recently traveled to Greece to assess the situation, women and girls reported feeling unsafe and were unable to access basic protection and services. Pregnant women did not have access to medical care, and families did not have diapers or milk for babies. Women were often forced to share spaces with strangers, and reported being raped at night. So many of these women suffered sexual violence and abuse en route; and yet, when they reach what should be a place of relative safety, they’re still threatened. Our primary recommendation is that the EU and Greek government do more to protect refugee women and children stuck in Greece, and provide them with the information they need to access asylum. The Greek government should work closely with humanitarian partners to ensure that refugee women and girls have access to safe gender-segregated spaces and critical reproductive health services, and that they are not detained. We also must pay close attention if women and girls are returned to Turkey to help make sure that they receive adequate protection or asylum there. Shifting attention to the recent events in New York, what do the outcomes from the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants and the U.S.-hosted High-Level Leaders’ Summit on Refugees mean for displaced women and girls around the world? They laid out plans for the adoption of two Global Compacts in 2018—one focused on refugees and one on safe, orderly, and regular migration. How should these compacts address the needs and experiences of displaced women and girls? The summits provided a good opportunity to highlight what’s going on, but we were disappointed that there were not more concrete, tangible commitments made that would make a real difference on the ground for refugees and migrants. The New York Declaration includes good points on gender equality, gender-responsive humanitarian action, gender-based violence, and the full and equal participation of women and girls in creating solutions. Now it’s absolutely critical to ensure that the compacts that are developed over the next few years for refugees and migrants include specific actions regarding the rights, protection, and empowerment of women and girls, to which states will be held accountable. We’re also trying to push for recommendations that would expand access to legal and safe livelihood opportunities that leverage women and older girls’ capacity to sustain and protect themselves and their families. The humanitarian community often views livelihoods as long-term interventions when, in fact, if women and girls do not have access to income, it puts them at great physical risk. Of the large number of women trying to make their way to Europe, how many of them are selling their bodies to pay for a ticket and passage, or selling their bodies to pay for food? We know if basic needs are not met, women are vulnerable. There is an opportunity for the compacts to address this gap in a new and meaningful way. As part of the Grand Bargain at the May 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, aid organizations and donors committed to provide more humanitarian funding to local and national responders to improve outcomes for affected people and reduce transactional costs. An additional commitment was made to provide better funding and training for local women around the world. Why is this a priority and how can the global community make it happen? The Grand Bargain is spot on. In order for the outcomes from last month’s summits to be effective, it’s critical to make funding work for women and girls. We need humanitarian programs that address the specific needs of women and girls, and we need funding to go as directly as possible to civil society organizations. There’s something like 4,000 civil society organizations responding to crises, but they receive a tiny fraction of humanitarian funding. Civil society groups can help monitor what’s going on in country, and help hold governments accountable for all the commitments that have been made. But they need financial support to do that. When there’s violence or crises, very often it’s women’s rights groups that are the first responders to issues affecting women and girls. But time and time over they do it without any funding at all. They’re playing a critical role, but the humanitarian community doesn’t acknowledge it. The Women’s Refugee Commission will monitor the overall amount of humanitarian funding that goes to civil society groups and track whether women’s rights groups receive an equitable share. This is critical for the protection of women and girls. There is a parallel effort underway—the Call to Action on Protecting Girls and Women in Emergencies—through which humanitarian actors have committed that every humanitarian response mitigate the risk of gender-based violence and provide safe and comprehensive services for those affected by it. What’s next on this front? Our challenge now is in implementation. We know a lot about preventing gender-based violence, and some of it starts with simple steps—like locks and separate latrines for women and men. Yet, across the humanitarian community, there is a continued failure to implement this basic guidance. We need to call the humanitarian providers out on that. When they set up camps, they need to put these basic procedures in place from the beginning. It’s much harder to correct them if they’re not there, and women and girls suffer in the meantime. The international community has made strong commitments to protect women and girls in emergencies, but now we have to make sure that these pledges are really carried out.

This week the Chinese and Russian navies launched eight days of war games in the South China Sea. For Beijing, it’s a chance to brush off the July ruling by an international tribunal dismissing the merit of its claim to jurisdiction over those waters. For Moscow, it’s an opportunity to flex Russia’s global muscles and tweak U.S. pretensions to be the arbiter of Asia-Pacific security. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is hosting a very different ocean reunion in Washington. On September 15-16, Secretary of State John Kerry will welcome representatives from some sixty countries, as well as hundreds more from business, science, and civil society to the third Our Ocean conference. According to the agenda, the conferees will focus on how to: protect oceans from global warming, expand marine protected areas, support sustainable fisheries, and stem oceanic pollution. Just what are we to make of this odd juxtaposition? Realists might well conclude that the Obama administration had lost its mind, by allowing its chief diplomat to focus on a boutique environmental issue. Such an “old school” assessment is misguided, because defending U.S. national security is about much more than geopolitics. Yes, the risks of great power war, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism will remain with us for decades. But Americans also confront new perils, including “threats without a threatener” like climate change and pandemic disease. The dramatic deterioration of the world’s oceans—a catastrophe exacerbated by global warming—falls squarely into this basket. And it is no distant threat, but a clear and present danger. John Kerry thus deserves praise for elevating its prominence in U.S. foreign policy. The oceans, which cover 71 percent of our planet, are not just a nice place to windsurf. They help regulate the Earth’s climate, feed humanity, and sustain economic growth. Unfortunately, they are in deep crisis, thanks to global warming, unsustainable exploitation, and rampant pollution. Without a dramatic course correction, we stand to lose not only resources of immense value but also our main source of breathable air. This week’s conference seeks to turn the tide by adopting innovative, collaborative approaches to rescuing the marine environment. Four priorities stand out: Prevent climate change from killing the oceans: Humanity is just waking up to the sea’s indispensable role in buffering the planet from climate change. The oceans are an enormous carbon sink, absorbing a quarter of the world’s CO2 They also function as the planet’s lungs, producing half of all atmospheric oxygen—more than all rain forests combined. And they are a powerful heat sink, absorbing a thousand times more heat than the atmosphere. Unfortunately, providing these “ecosystem services” has come at a catastrophic cost. Rising carbon loads make seawater more acidic, threatening zooplankton and other microorganisms and undermining the marine food chain upon which a billion people depend for their primary source of protein. Warmer oceans, meanwhile, are killing off phytoplankton, bleaching coral reefs, and melting icecaps. Sea levels are rising faster than predicted, promising to inundate U.S. coastal communities. Many cities will need to be abandoned, among them Norfolk, VA, home to the world’s largest naval base. Finally, warmer waters are producing hurricanes and storms of unprecedented violence, posing greater threats not only to coastal residents but commercial shipping upon which 90 percent of global trade relies. Despite their acute vulnerability to global warming—and their historic role in mitigating it—the oceans remain a fringe issue in global climate discussions. (Indeed, the oceans got barely a mention in the historic Paris Agreement). Expect the conferees in Washington to sound the tocsin about our dying oceans—and the need to restore their health to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals endorsed at last year’s UN General Assembly. Expand marine protected areas: Kerry’s second priority is to persuade other countries to establish and extend marine protected areas (MPAs), or managed zones designed to protect marine ecosystems and maintain biodiversity by regulating fishing and other forms of exploitation. In 2010, parties to the Biodiversity Convention endorsed conserving 10 percent of their exclusive economic zones as MPAs. The United States has more than risen to this challenge, having preserved more than 30 percent of U.S. waters. Just last week, President Obama quadrupled the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, established by George W. Bush, creating the world’s largest MPA, at more than two times the size of Texas. The good news is that protection works—and can even reverse past damage caused by humans. The bad news is that globally, only 3-4 percent of world’s oceans currently fall within MPAs. Enforcement is also a challenge: Too many small or poor countries lack the capacity, and sometimes the will, to ensure that citizens and foreign fishing fleets respect their regulations. This week’s Our Ocean conference should focus on how to improve maritime domain awareness among small island nations like Palau, which have declared massive MPAs. To complement these sovereign MPAs, the United States must keep pushing for prompt completion of a UN high seas biodiversity agreement. Despite initial reservations that such talks could go off track, the White House ultimately chose to engage other countries rather than marginalize itself. Negotiations began promisingly in March, and the second round concluded last week. The final two negotiating sessions will occur in 2017, whereupon a draft treaty will be presented to UN member states. End illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Globally, some 60 percent of global fish stocks are depleted or over-exploited, thanks to unsustainable practices. One of the biggest culprits is illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. As the name implies, this encompasses three separate offenses: (a) harvesting fish within another nation’s fishery (or one controlled by a regional fisheries management organization); (b) failing to report the catch to the relevant fisheries authority, or (c) fishing by improperly authorized vessels, often operating under “flags of non-compliance.” Beyond its ecological and economic costs, IUU fishing exacerbates maritime insecurity, since it is frequently linked to transnational organized crime. Fortunately, both international law and high technology provide tools to combat this scourge. A recent legal breakthrough was the entry into force in June 2016 of the Port State Measures Agreement, a treaty that prohibits illegal fish hauls from being unloaded in the ports of participating states. This week Secretary Kerry will press additional countries to ratify the convention. Building on the “Sea Scout” initiative Kerry unveiled at last year’s conference, which aims to identify IUU “hot spots,” the State Department has also invited technology firms to Washington to showcase new approaches to monitoring and combating illegal fishing worldwide. (A potential model for such efforts is Secure Our Oceans, a joint project by the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Pristine Seas program of the National Geographic Society). Stop rampant marine pollution. The scale at which humans are despoiling the oceans is mind-boggling. Each year, we dump more than eight million tons of plastic into the sea. Much of this flotsam is ground down into fine particles that find their way into the diets and flesh of living organisms. A huge percentage of this waste originates in emerging and developing countries, particularly in littoral Asia, that lack adequate systems for waste management in coastal zones, particularly at the municipal level. And then there is the effluent of the affluent. Thanks to lax regulations, too many rivers in the United States and other advanced market nations deliver a massive runoff of fertilizers and chemicals into the sea. Nutrient pollution from the Mississippi river, for example, has elevated nitrogen and phosphorous levels into the Gulf of Mexico, creating enormous dead zones. In 2015, the Group of Seven (G7) adopted an action plan committing its members to combat both land- and water-based sources of marine pollution. The Our Ocean summit offers an opportunity to expand this effort to big emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. As always, the proof of good intentions will be in the implementation. Wisely, the State Department has included multiple participants from the private sector—including the fishing industry, plastics manufacturers, and retail companies—as well as scientists and nongovernmental advocacy groups. Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. presidents have created national monuments late in their terms to burnish their legacies. Barack Obama—like George W. Bush before him—has taken this conservation commitment beyond the water’s edge. At this week’s Our Ocean conference, the United States can take things even further, by safeguarding high seas biodiversity and helping other nations become responsible stewards of their marine environment. The European Union has promised to host the next Our Ocean conference in 2017, with Indonesia on tap for 2018. But sustaining momentum on ocean issues will require firm leadership from the next U.S. president, who should know the stakes involved. Hillary Clinton, in response to a request from ocean advocates, recently released a letter outlining her ocean priorities, pledging to boost the “blue economy” while protecting the health of the marine environment. Donald Trump has yet to do the same.