CIA analysts studied data on major floods due to rainfall in North Korea since 1996 in order to devise a framework for evaluating the significance of such floods and their likely consequences for North Korean agriculture.
The analysts identified four principal variables: the intensity of the rainfall, the location of the rainfall, the time of year, and damage to non-agricultural infrastructure.
“Rainfall intensity and geography of flooding appear to be key variables with the most impact,” their report (pdf) said. “Critical periods in the agricultural growth cycle — for sowing, growing, and harvesting — and the scope and severity of infrastructure damage are compounding variables that can magnify the impact of major floods in key food producing areas.”
All four elements were present in 1996 and 2007, when flooding produced the most severe agricultural impact. But using the methodology described, analysts judge that the cumulative impact of two instances of heavy rain in 2010 “has been relatively low.”
A copy of the CIA report was obtained by Secrecy News. See “North Korea: Assessing the Impact of Flooding on Agricultural Output,” CIA Open Source Works, December 15, 2010.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.