Showing posts by Carolyn Lamere.
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Population Projections: Breaking Down the Assumptions
›“The seventh billion [person] was added in 12 years, and that could be the story for the eighth billion – and that gets people who think that growth has stopped,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. Haub was joined by Hania Zlotnik, former director of the UN Population Division, and Rachel Nugent of the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health on June 5 to speak about the assumptions behind the UN population projections. While each of the panelists noted the utility of projections, they also cautioned against seeing them as inevitable. [Video Below]
Meeting the Projections
As a former top official in the UN’s Population Division, Zlotnik spoke about how much is riding on the projections. “The experts tell me that to feed nine billion people, living better than the standards of living that we have today, one needs to increase agricultural production or all the production of food by about 70 percent and that is a challenge, but it might be feasible. But if the numbers go higher…I think it’s impossible,” she said.
The medium variant projection by the UN that gets the world to that nine billion figure is not a given – it builds in expected action on and improvement of many demographic indicators. Zlotnik pointed to the global unmet need for family planning, for example, which “is especially high in the high fertility countries,” and suggested that the current rate of increase in contraceptive use is insufficient.
She calculated the number of years it would take many of these countries to meet their unmet need at their current rate of uptake and found “the number of years for a lot of these poorer countries that have high fertility would be very long – 40 years, some of them, 80 years, 100 years – because the increased contraceptive prevalence has been so small.” At that rate, population growth in these countries will far surpass the UN medium variant.
The perception that population growth is no longer an issue contributes to the problem, Zlotnik said. People see that only 18 percent of the world population lives in countries with high population growth and assume “there’s no longer a population problem.” But she emphasized the power of exponential growth, arguing that even a small proportion growing at a rapid rate can have a large impact.
Questioning Assumptions
Haub pointed out several instances where assumptions in the methodology behind the projections create uncertainty.
For example, there is a lack of data in many low-income countries. “A date, let’s say 2000, 2005 – it’s the past, but it may be a projection. It may be based on a census in 1990,” he said. If it’s wrong, that error may not be corrected until another census, but it will still be relied on for country-level projections.
He also noted that certain assumptions about desired family size sometimes do not bear out on the ground. One of the key methods to slowing population growth is to provide women and couples with the means to choose how many children they wish to bear. But in many fast-growing countries, women wish to have large numbers of children. In Niger, for example, women say their ideal family size is over nine children. Such women are less likely to use contraception, no matter how accessible it is, as they value larger families.
“It has been – I guess conventional is a good word – to assume that birth rates are going to come down the way they did in the rich countries,” Haub noted. But there has been a “stall” for many developing countries, which he suggests is caused by fast initial uptake from urban women followed by much slower uptake by rural women. These dynamics, however, are relatively new and therefore are not always well incorporated into current projections.
The Economic Impact of Population Changes
While Haub and Zlotnik looked at the assumptions made before the projections are made and the importance and means to reach these projections, Nugent focused on the economic implications of lower fertility and the demographic transition.
She suggested that increased control over fertility can positively impact a country’s economy. Women are given the opportunity to “invest their time in acquiring skills and investing time in the labor market and that affects their earnings…[and] their ability to control resources and make decisions within the household” as they spend less time caring for children, she said.
The labor market changes as well, as fewer children are born into a given generation. This can reduce “demand on economic resources [and] demand on environmental resources,” and the increased investment in human capital allowed by smaller family sizes can lead to a healthier population.
Nugent concluded by pointing out key areas of intervention most likely to decrease both fertility and mortality and allow countries to reap the positive economic benefits of fertility decline. She suggested a focus on “complementary investments in education and health,” especially with regard to “poor and marginalized populations,” which can in fact impact the country as a whole. Finally, she recommended focusing on proven “evidence-based programs [and] service-delivery programs.”
Educating Policymakers
Each of the panelists cautioned against relying on population projections without taking action to make them come true.
“Maybe the best thing to do if you’re giving a presentation is to show the UN’s constant fertility variant first and scare people half to death and then say, ‘but if 117,000 things go right, [the medium variant projection] is what will happen,” said Haub, addressing the common tendency to view the UN projections as destiny.
Similarly, Nugent warned against viewing the demographic transition as inevitable. “There’s a certain sense…that [the demographic dividend] is kind of an automatic thing that happens, and that really has to be addressed,” she said, adding that “it’d be quite interesting to show some scenarios of what would need to be done…in order to get some benefits from that dividend.” (See also Elizabeth Leahy Madsen’s recent article on achieving the dividend.)
Zlotnik reiterated that the UN does not in fact know what the future will bring. “It’s not that we know what the world is going to do, but we hope that [the projections] will get the message out – if this doesn’t happen, you’re in trouble.”
Event ResourcesPhoto Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Gidon Bromberg at TEDx on Peacebuilding Through Water in the Middle East
›“Cooperation over water is not a privilege, it’s a necessity,” said Gidon Bromberg, co-director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, in a TEDx talk at Yale. He sees the shortage of water in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine as an opportunity to bring these contentious communities together – even more so during this period of upheaval in the region.
Water woes have long contributed to regional tensions, said Bromberg. Water rights between Israel and Palestine were supposed to be settled during the Oslo accords in 1993, but negotiations were unsuccessful and water discussions were consequently left unfinished. The lack of formal negotiations caused each side to seize whatever resources they could Although Jordan was not part of the negotiations, it does share water resources with Israel and the West Bank and thus has been impacted by the lack of formal allocation processes. Both Jordan and Israel have diverted flow of the Jordan River into dams and irrigation projects. As a result, the Jordan River has lost 98 percent of its historic flow and the Dead Sea has lost one-third of its surface area.
Today, Israel has restricted Palestinian water use such that Palestinians have access to water only once a week in winter and once every three weeks in the summer, leading them to store water in containers on their roofs, Bromberg said. Though mismanagement is as much to blame as conflict, he notes, Palestinians chafe under the limitations.
Yet Friends of the Earth Middle East has used this difficult situation to educate the public, propose reforms, and build trust between Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli communities. Bromberg highlighted “fear of a small but vocal minority on both sides” as a key factor in preventing dialogue between the communities, but insists that water can bring people together. Neighboring communities have to work together, he said, “not because they’re best friends,” but to improve their own water situations.
Friends of the Earth provides that opportunity with their Good Water Neighbors project and hopes the trust built between communities extends beyond water issues as well. Since communities have strong motives to solve these problems, they work together more effectively than high-level politicians who may not be as apt to collaborate.
A positive update on the state of the Jordan River given in an interview with ECSP in October suggests that Bromberg may be on to something.
Sources: Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth.
Video Credit: TEDx. -
Re-Thinking Price Shocks and Conflict?
›“Conflict, Food Price Shocks, and Food Insecurity: The Experience of Afghan Households,” a paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s annual meeting, examines the relationship between conflict and food prices, using Afghanistan during the 2008 global food crisis as a case study. By examining per capita food intake, numbers of fatalities and injuries, and the number of violent incidents in a given area, authors Anna D’Souza and Dean Jolliffe, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and World Bank, respectively, determine that “at least in the case of Afghanistan, conflict does not seem to be the predominant driver of food insecurity.” Instead, inhabitants of conflict-prone regions, namely southern Afghanistan, consume more food, on the whole, than their northern compatriots. Residents of conflict areas do seem to be more affected by major food price increases, however these are fairly uncommon. D’Souza and Jolliffe speculate that this may be due to “interruptions in market access, inability to trade and barter, and worse food production and distribution systems.” These findings may be somewhat counterintuitive, but are an important resource for those seeking to reduce food insecurity in both conflict-prone and peaceful regions.In a working paper for the Center of Global Development, Samuel Bazzi and Christopher Blattman upend much of the established thinking on the relationship between commodity prices and conflict onset. Past researchers have found that lower prices of agricultural commodities lead to conflict as civilians have less to lose by rebelling against the government, and higher prices of resources like oil and minerals can lead to conflict as rebel groups have greater incentive to seize control. Contrary to these explanations, however, Bazzi and Blattman find “no evidence of a consistent, robust relationship between commodity price shocks and political instability.” Even when examining states with higher risks of conflict, like those which are particularly fragile, ethnically polarized, economically unequal, especially poor, and/or located in sub-Saharan Africa, they find no correlation between price shocks and conflict. The only evidence of a relationship they find is that rising prices lead to rising incomes, which can hasten the end of a conflict, but even this correlation is weak and varies from state to state. Though currently only a working paper, Bazzi and Blattman’s research provides an intriguing counter-narrative: “We argue that errors and publication bias have likely distorted the theoretical and empirical literature on political instability,” they write.
