Showing posts by Carolyn Lamere.
-
PRB’s 2012 World Population Data Sheet
›
“The most rapid population growth in many ways [occurs in] the countries that can least afford it,” said Carl Haub in a webinar on July 19 to launch the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) 50th annual World Population Data Sheet. This year, the report explores aging populations in more developed countries, rapid population growth in less developed countries, and the increased global prevalence of non-communicable diseases in an interactive map, which concisely illustrates global trends. PRB estimates that the world’s population is 7,057,075,000 as of mid-2012; the global population crossed the seven billion threshold in October 2011.
“The most rapid population growth in many ways [occurs in] the countries that can least afford it,” said Carl Haub in a webinar on July 19 to launch the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) 50th annual World Population Data Sheet. This year, the report explores aging populations in more developed countries, rapid population growth in less developed countries, and the increased global prevalence of non-communicable diseases in an interactive map, which concisely illustrates global trends. PRB estimates that the world’s population is 7,057,075,000 as of mid-2012; the global population crossed the seven billion threshold in October 2011.
Aging Europe and East Asia
Haub explained that population growth in Europe has been declining since the 1970s and is more or less a “pre-programmed destiny” for these countries. People of child-bearing ages make up a smaller percent of the population in many more developed countries, so unless there is an “enormous increase” in total fertility rates, these populations will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.
Haub noted that these aging populations are unprecedented. In Germany and Italy, for example, 21 percent are over the age of 65; many other European countries have similar figures, as do other developed countries like Japan and South Korea. PRB expects these percentages to increase throughout the next century and for European countries to struggle to support greater numbers of retirees.
Many such states have already found it difficult to raise the retirement age, even though medical advances allow people to work until later ages. PRB projects that in Japan, 42 percent of their population will be over the age of 60 in 2050; if such a large percentage of the population is no longer in the labor force, it will be difficult for to find the resources to support them.
The report shows that the United States, on the other hand, is still experiencing modest population growth. The higher birthrate is in part due to immigration, as recent immigrants to the United States tend to have more children. Haub noted that European states have been reluctant to accept greater numbers of migrants to try to reverse their declining population.
Youthful Developing Countries
While the demographic destiny of aging countries is somewhat determined, the future for less developed countries is more uncertain. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia have large and growing youth populations, and how many children these “future parents” will have is uncertain. That uncertainty is underscored by the variety of scenarios for future population growth. The UN has four variants – high, medium, low, and constant fertility – which vary considerably in their projections for future populations, and PRB’s global projections for 2050 are some 600 million people more than the commonly-used medium variant UN projection.
Rapid growth in the least developed countries is hardly a new phenomenon, but PRB breaks down the numbers to an impressive degree. The 2012 Data Sheet provides updated net migration rates, projected population as a multiple of today’s, infant mortality rates, rate of natural increase, and other basic statistics. PRB also provides population pyramids from the wealthiest and poorest quintiles of the population of Malawi, as an example of the utility of desegregating data to better allocate resources to the underserved. They found that while birthrates have begun to decline for the wealthiest one-fifth of Malawians, the poorest citizens still have a total fertility rate of over seven children per woman.
Measuring Health Systems
Devastating infectious diseases – malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS – have long been entrenched in some of the least developed and most rapidly growing parts of the world. But this year, PRB began to assess health on a broader level by tracking deaths attributed to non-communicable diseases as well. Diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illness, and cancer are leading causes of death in developed countries, but they have also increased in prevalence in developing countries at an alarming rate.
PRB is not the only organization to take note of the change in disease predominance. The World Health Organization has issued guidelines targeting four factors which increase the risk of these illnesses: tobacco use, alcohol abuse, poor diet/obesity, and physical inactivity. The UN also called a special session last September to discuss non-communicable diseases. President of PRB Wendy Baldwin noted that the last such discussion on a health issue was 10 years ago about HIV/AIDS.
Baldwin also pointed out that non-communicable diseases can increase the burden on the health systems of developing countries even more so than in developed states. She reported that in south Asia, for example, people have heart attacks on average six years earlier than people in developed countries, meaning more families lose their primary breadwinners.
The risk factors for these non-communicable diseases are difficult to target, especially with increasing urbanization in developing countries. But in a video accompanying the report, Baldwin mentioned that raising the price of cigarettes is an effective way to reduce tobacco consumption, especially for youth. Some countries have also made progress in increasing physical activity through sports programs and making urban areas safer for pedestrians. “The low and middle income countries have a real opportunity to take really positive steps to confront that rise in non-communicable diseases and to address the risk factors that drive them,” she said.
The Data Sheet Over Time
The World Population Data Sheet has long been a vital resource for those in the population, health, and environment fields and has grown to include far more data than its first iteration in 1962. At first, the sheet had only four indicators: a population estimate for the year, annual rate of increase, crude birth rate, and crude death rate. Over time, PRB began measuring a greater number of key figures like infant mortality and life expectancy at birth. Population projections, a staple of the current version, were not added until 1978, perhaps in response to the inception of the United Nations World Population Projections in 1974.
Over the past five decades, the data sheet has been witness to some major shifts in global population trends. While PRB discourages researchers from comparing past data to current figures because the measures and methods of gathering information have likely changed over time, it is still possible to see the rise of importance in several trends based on the indicators PRB chose to focus on each year. For example, extremely young populations have been found to have profound effects on a country’s stability and prosperity, as have aging populations. The 1966 data sheet was the first to measure the percentage of the population under the age of 15, and it didn’t become a consistent data point until 1977.
The number of people living in cities in the developing world surpassed those in the developed in 1970, according to the UN, and in 1972, PRB began tracking the percentage of populations living in urban areas. HIV/AIDS indicators were added in 2000, as global awareness and a commitment to fighting the disease was rising.
PRB’s demonstrated commitment to continually adding more data and refining existing projections makes the data sheet is a valuable resource to those studying the problems of today and the future. Fifty years on, the amount of information collected is staggering. The data sheet provides a glimpse at not just how many people there are in the world, but also where and how they live.
For more information, take a look at the full data sheet!
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UN Population Division.
Image Credit: PRB; Video: Noncommunicable Diseases and Youth in Developing Countries. -
Chaotic Climate Change and Adaptation in Fragile States
›In “Chaotic Climate Change and Security,” published in the June issue of International Political Sociology, Maximilian Mayer traces the transformation of climate change from a long-term problem to something that has taken on a new urgency in recent years. Understanding the non-linear nature of climate change – the “abrupt changes” that can come as environmental thresholds are crossed – has led to the securitization of the environment, writes Mayer. Unfortunately, the “doomsday rhetoric of scientists and campaigners about ‘tipping points’ has apparently failed to spur governments toward negotiating a meaningful agreement.” Climate change skepticism still exists, he points out, and even those who are convinced of the potential negative impacts of environmental change on state security have failed to reverse detrimental actions, choosing instead to focus on ameliorating the effects of change on their individual states. As a replacement for these failed frameworks, Mayer suggests that actor-network theory should be used as it better accounts for the interconnected nature of climate change.Katherine Houghton discusses the relationship between climate change and resilience in her article “Climate Change in Fragile States: Adaptation as Reinforcement of the Fabric of the State,” published in a collection of articles written by members of the United Nations University Summer Academy. Houghton writes that in fragile states, environmental issues can be “compounded by armed conflict and institutional failure,” which further destabilizes the country. She mentions cases in which the state lacks the authority to properly assist its citizens following natural disasters, like the flooding of the Indus Valley in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In these cases, failure of the government to meet citizens’ needs “fuels instability and fragility rather than fosters resilience.” Any action to reduce the effects of climate change on residents of vulnerable areas must thus begin with the state, she writes. “Without effective action to strengthen the state and thereby enable adaptation, climate-induced adverse effects and extreme events may lead to the further destabilization of already fragile states.” -
Gates Foundation Spearheads London Summit on Family Planning
›July 12, 2012 // By Carolyn Lamere“Given the option, [women in developing countries] will have fewer children,” said Melinda Gates in a TEDxChange talk in April. “The question is: are we going to commit to helping them get what they want now? Or are we going to condemn them to some century-long struggle, as if this were still revolutionary France and the best method was still coitus interruptus?”
Wednesday, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation followed through on Gates’ pledge, helping to raise more than $2.6 billion at the London Summit on Family Planning as part of an ambitious goal of helping 120 million additional women in developing countries gain access to contraception by 2020. The summit was co-hosted by the UK Department for International Development and garnered support from other foundations and governments, including the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Australia.
To quote the Population Institute’s Robert Walker on Dot Earth, this is a big deal:Many of the challenges that we face (hunger, severe poverty, energy, food, carbon emissions) are seemingly intractable. Population growth, which is a challenge multiplier, is not intractable. Far from it. There are proven highly cost-effective means of lowering fertility rates: providing access to contraceptives, keeping girls in school, ending child marriage practices, and changing social norms (including attitudes toward women and desired family size) through entertainment media.
The focus on family planning for the Gates Foundation – one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world – is relatively new (though their commitment to global health and development is not). Melinda Gates announced a commitment to maternal health in 2010, and the foundation first issued a family planning strategy in April of this year.
The move has been unwelcome by some, particularly some Catholic institutions who object to family planning. But Gates has been adamant that contraceptives “should be a completely non-controversial topic.” She argues that 90 percent of Americans find contraceptives “morally acceptable,” including herself and many other Catholics, so there is no reason for the taboo around international aid for family planning to continue.
“We’re not going to agree about everything, but that’s OK,” said Gates in a recent interview with CNN.
In the TEDxChange talk, which helped launch this year’s push, she credits her upbringing for instilling a strong sense of social justice. During her travels with the Gates Foundation, one woman from a slum in Nairobi told her, “I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another.” That statement resonated with Gates: “We all want to bring every good thing to our children,” she said. “But what’s not universal is our ability to provide every good thing for our children.” Gates pointed to contraception as a way for families to plan for their future and manage their resources. She recognized the controversial history of family planning as population control, but argued that this new initiative is about providing choices to individuals, not imposing values.
Gates remains confident that as long as the foundation makes its mission clear, people will rally behind the cause.
“We’re not talking about abortion. We’re not talking about population control. What I’m talking about is giving women the power to save their own lives, to save their children’s lives, and to give their families the best possible future.”
Sources: BBC, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CNN, Catholic Family and Humans Rights Institute, Catholics For Choice, Dot Earth.
Video Credit: TEDxChange. -
Guttmacher Updates Unmet Need Estimates, and West Africa’s Demographic Dividend Examined
›The Guttmacher Institute has updated their estimates for global contraceptive services, putting the number of women around the world who have an unmet need for modern family planning at 222 million (up from 215 million). Authors Susheela Singh and Jacqueline E. Darroch, in Adding It Up: Costs and Benefits of Contraceptive Services Estimates for 2012, also examine the estimated current costs of contraception, cost of meeting the current unmet need, and the money saved from having fewer unintended pregnancies. An estimated four billion dollars is currently spent on contraception in the developing world, and “the total cost of fully meeting the contraceptive needs of all women in the developing world with appropriate services would…be $8.1 billion per year.” Singh and Darroch note that there are substantial benefits to increasing access to contraception, including reduced infant and maternal mortality and lower education and health costs as smaller populations put less strain on existing systems. They conclude that “the gains that derive from meeting the contraceptive needs of all women in the developing world more than outweigh the financial costs.”How Can We Capitalize on the Demographic Dividend?, by Jean-Pierre Guengant of the Institute of Development Research, explores the connection between population age structure and economic growth in 12 West African countries (the West African Economic and Monetary Union plus Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, and Nigeria). While much of Africa has recently experienced economic growth between four and six percent, Guengant notes it has been “too low to allow for any substantial increase in per capita income levels” due to continued population growth. And he suggests that projections of declining fertility in much of Africa are overly optimistic. “Contrary to popular belief,” he writes, “the demographic future of sub-Saharan Africa has not been written.” Guengant extrapolates his own fertility projection using data beginning in 1960. If fertility declines rapidly, he writes, the larger proportion of people in the labor force could increase the GDP per capita and drive up the standard of living. -
What Are the Most Important Factors in the Failed States Index?
›Last week, the Fund for Peace issued its eighth annual Failed States Index (FSI). The index gives 177 countries a score between 1.0 and 10.0 for 12 indicators, ranging from the legitimacy of the state and the security apparatus to demographic pressure and uneven development (high being bad, low being good – see full descriptions of the indicators here). But which of these indicators has the biggest impact? We did a quick analysis of the Failed States Indexes published from 2006 to 2012 to show which of the indicators correlate most with a high score. (We skipped 2005 since the roster of analyzed countries was significantly smaller.)
-
IPPF and Partners Connect Reproductive Rights With the Environment and Development
›A new framework for sexual and reproductive health is needed, argued panelists in a recent event at the Wilson Center, and the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development would have been the place to start. An international consensus around women’s human rights was developed at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, but Carmen Barroso, director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Western Hemisphere Region, said there has been slow implementation, little funding, and furthermore the world has changed significantly since then.
Barroso was joined by Latanya Mapp Frett, vice president of Planned Parenthood Global, as well as two representatives of Planned Parenthood partner organizations, Marco Cerezo of FUNDAECO and Ben Haggai of Carolina for Kibera.
New challenges to the reproduce rights landscape include the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS and decreased funding for international programs. But new opportunities include rapid dissemination provided by the internet and globalization and a subsequent mobilization of youth. “Young people are the largest cohort in history,” Barroso said in an interview with ECSP, both in absolute numbers and in percent of the population. “We have a historical opportunity [to incorporate] them in these decision-making processes.” Additionally, gender and health issues are incresaingly seen by many as linked with the environment and development.
Intersection of Health and the Environment
Marco Cerezo’s FUNDAECO (Foundation for Ecodevelopment and Conservation) is an example of Planned Parenthood’s partnership with other organizations. Based, in rural Guatemala, they shifted from primarily focusing on conservation and sustainable development to incorporating women’s health after finding a vicious cycle of poverty, high fertility, and environmental degradation in the places they worked.
Women’s health was so dire it was holding development back, Cerezo said. “Sustainable community development will not be possible without the education, empowerment, and support to rural women,” they write in their mission statement.
FUNDAECO now acts as a model for the intersection between reproductive health and the environment. Cerezo reported that once women are healthy and empowered through clinics established by FUNDAECO, they become more active in all aspects of the community, including ecological preservation.
Building Healthy Communities
Ben Haggai, who works in Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, further reiterated the need for integrated programs. Carolina for Kibera has a number of programs to improve the quality of life for residents, he said, and has a particular focus on youth with sports associations and education programs.
Youth are the best reproductive health educators, Haggai said, as they are able to talk frankly with their peers. The NGO trains peer youth educators to reach out to community members about reproductive health and other issues like substance abuse. Since the young people work as volunteers, Haggai said, they are motivated only by a desire to improve their communities.
A Natural Intersection
Latanya Mapp Frett agreed that sexual and reproductive health aligns quite naturally with issues of sustainability. “We try to work in the countries overseas in Latin America and Africa where we focus particularly on non-traditional health sectors,” she said in an interview with ECSP following the panel. “One of those sectors is the environment.”
While emphasizing that contraceptive use is a cost-effective way to ensure sustainable development, Mapp Frett cautioned against framing sexual and reproductive health only in the context of reducing fertility. While this may have been common in the past, she noted, it’s important to ensure that women have the right to make childbearing choices for themselves.
Mapp Frett also urged policymakers in the United States to look to developing countries for intersections between development, the environment, and reproductive health. She said that Planned Parenthood’s partner organizations, including FUNDAECO and Carolina for Kibera, have found these connections and successfully partnered with already existing networks like churches to more effectively reach the community.
Translating Into Effective Action
Each member of the panel spoke about the challenge of articulating the need for sexual and reproductive health programs to people outside the field. Barroso mentioned research conducted by Brian O’Neill which found that meeting the current unmet need for contraception would slow population growth enough to reduce emissions by 17 percent.
Cerezo emphasized the importance of consensus among the staff of a given organization, saying it is difficult to make a case to agronomists and farmers if a culture clash exists within the institution. Haggai agreed, adding that focusing on reproductive issues is an important measure of prevention which helps protect both the environment and the health of women in a community.
For Mapp Frett, women’s reproductive and sexual health is indivisible from other aspects of development. “As you talk about sustainable development, you talk about ensuring that women are empowered to make sure that our earth is sustainable,” she said.
Assessing Rio+20
The panel took place before the UN Conference on Sustainable Development got underway in Rio. Participants had high hopes for a renewed focus on gender and reproductive rights at the conference. Unfortunately, language on reproductive rights was first weakened and then omitted entirely from the final outcome document (see the account written by ECSP’s Sandeep Bathala at Rio for more on the conference).
While pressure from the Vatican and the G-77 kept reproductive health out of the outcome document, it was not entirely forgotten at the conference. A number of side events highlighted the importance of reproductive rights, especially in the context of the environment and development.
Hillary Clinton also re-affirmed U.S. commitment to access to contraception and reproductive health care. “Women must be empowered to make decisions about whether and when to have children,” she said at the conference on Friday. “And the United States will continue to work to ensure that those rights are respected in international agreements.”
Clinton shared the urgency expressed by the panelists at the Wilson Center. “There is just too much at stake, too much still to be done,” she said. “We simply cannot afford to fail.”
Event Resources:Sources: FUNDAECO, UN Conference on Sustainable Development, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
IFPRI Launches First ‘Global Food Policy Report’
›June 27, 2012 // By Carolyn Lamere“The Global Food Policy Report is the first publication that represents the major, major food policy developments in the past year and the outlook for 2012,” said Director of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Shenggen Fan in a video to promote the launch of the institute’s most comprehensive policy publication yet. The report is focused on regional developments, new research, debates, and legislation regarding food security both within individual states and at the international level.
A Guidebook for Policy
The 2008 global food crisis launched food security back onto the global agenda. A rapid rise in food prices contributed to instability around the world, and policymakers began to realize that access to food is an important security issue (high food prices have been linked to riots, for example).
“For 2012, food prices will remain very high and volatile, and some of the long-term trends like climate change, population growth, and demographic shifts towards more urbanized and higher income [populations] will continue to put pressure on global food security,” predicted Fan.
But the report notes that much of the fluctuation in global food prices is due to a lack of knowledge, not necessarily scarcity. The authors point to issues of preparedness and regulation as exacerbating factors and suggest that more detailed information, like that provided in the report, can help provide better solutions to policymakers.
Fan said that, by design, the report is “nontechnical, so the nontechnical person such as politicians, policymakers, practitioners, or anybody else who is interested in food security can use it as a comprehensive handbook.”
Making Connections Between Disciplines
The report draws on the expertise of dozens of authors who discuss topics ranging from biofuels to climate change. Rajul Pandya-Lorch, head of IFPRI’s 2020 Vision Initiative, spoke about the utility of collaboration among different disciplines in an interview with IFPRI: “I think for me 2011 was the time when we began to realize that we cannot think of agriculture simply for agriculture; we need to think of agriculture as a way in which we can impact on other development outcomes, especially nutrition and health,” she said.
Kathy Spahn, president and CEO of Helen Keller International, a speaker at the launch event, agreed. “The development community is beginning to realize that achieving food security is about more than just growing more food. It is also about growing more nutritious foods and making sure these foods are available and accessible to the families in need,” she wrote for Helen Keller International.
Fan emphasized that although agriculture has become more prominently featured in discussions of development, it is important to continue to link it to other outcomes. “We must find new ways to exploit the links between agriculture and other sectors, including health, nutrition, water, and energy,” he wrote in the overview of the report.
Past Developments and Future Outlook
Several key developments are highlighted that shaped food security in 2011. Food prices were particularly volatile – rising for the first half of the year then dropping – which caused a renewed global emphasis on food from policymakers.
New players ranging from emerging economies to the private sector “are increasingly reshaping the structure and nature of the global food landscape,” write the authors. The G-20 is “claiming a growing role” to help manage economic issues, and states like China, Brazil, and India are becoming more vocal regarding global food policy. Partnerships between governments and private companies have also become more common.
These and other developments described in the report will have an impact into 2012 and beyond. The report points out that “food emergencies” caused by natural disasters like the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa will likely occur in 2012 as well, but also emphasizes that these cannot overshadow more long-term drivers of food insecurity, like land degradation.
The report describes four “high-priority areas of action” for this year. First, the G-20 should try to reduce price volatility (although some have argued volatility is less a problem than consistently high prices). Second, policymakers should work to improve agricultural production specifically through strategies like soil nutrient management which provide high yields but are more sustainable than high use of fertilizers. States should also ensure that the infrastructure necessary to make these strategies successful is in place. The next target is based on the Rio+20 conference, namely that participants should “integrate economic, social, and environmental sustainability efforts” to improve outcomes like nutrition and health. There were in fact several seminars on cross-discipline partnerships at the conference, and the importance of integration was mentioned in the outcome text that emerged.
Finally, the report calls for further collaboration across disciplines, in emulation of the internal IFPRI effort for the report which included a wide variety of expertise. The authors emphasized that though progress has been made, the challenge of achieving global food security will remain a concern for the near future, and cooperation across communities will be critical.
“The idea and the impact of the report is to make people aware of the problems that we are facing and the concerns…clearly the problem is not resolved and it’s something that we need to take very seriously,” said contributor Maximo Torero in an interview with IFPRI. “There’s a lot of work to be done to try to do this.”
Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CNN, Hellen Keller International, International Food Policy Research Institute, UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
Video Credit: IFPRI. -
Alexandra Cousteau on the Global Water Crisis and Choosing Between the Environment and the Economy
›Above is a short discussion filmed after a full dialogue TV episode last week; for the full interview, please visit the Wilson Center.
“We have serious issues that we need to address, yet we’re largely unaware of them because water seems so abundant,” said Alexandra Cousteau in an interview at the Wilson Center. “That myth of abundance is finally reaching an age of limits.”
Cousteau spoke with John Milewski of the Wilson Center’s dialogue TV program, after an event on the recent global water security assessment by the U.S. intelligence community. She discussed the work of her organization, Blue Legacy, which seeks to raise awareness of the ‘global water crisis’ – from degrading quality to growing scarcity and the proliferation of water refugees.
Global Water Crisis
“Traditionally our understanding of the global water crisis has been very narrow,” said Cousteau. “We have talked about it mostly in terms of the very real water and sanitation crisis that is happening in the developing world.” Without minimizing the severity of the situation in developing countries or oversimplifying the tangled nature of their problems, she characterized these water and sanitation struggles as fundamentally “solvable.”
Cousteau argued that there are also substantial water problems in the United States. Pollution due to runoff and over-utilization of major riverways are threats that are much different from those in the past.
“In Nixon’s time, when he signed the Clean Water Act, it was because rivers like the Potomac were in such bad shape, and they could see it from their office windows,” she said. “But the threats to our water are different today…before, it was industrial effluent, and what we were putting in the water that we could see. The Hudson River would change color daily based on the paper mills and what color paper they were printing that day.”
Today, chemicals may impact water quality without changing the appearance of water: “You don’t see it, the water can be perfectly transparent.”
Blue Legacy Expeditions
Cousteau has taken two expeditions with Blue Legacy to highlight water issues around the world. The first in 2009 was global; Cousteau and her team traveled from India to Botswana and beyond. Throughout the voyage, she worked to make her travels accessible to the general public and was surprised at her success.
“It was an experiment, but it worked. And when we came back to the United States, we got a lot of feedback, and one of the things people said was, ‘Gosh, that was an incredible adventure, thanks for taking us along for the ride! Clearly, there is a global water crisis, now I understand that. I’m just so relieved it’s not happening in America.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my Lord, I guess we have an expedition to do in America!’”
Her 2010 North America expedition focused on issues ranging from the over-exploited Colorado River to the polluted Mississippi, and sought to make water problems personal “at a time when our demand on water is at a tipping point.”
The Environment and the Economy
Cousteau’s interview was particularly timely in light of global economic troubles which have led some to say the environment should take a backseat. Cousteau said this doesn’t have to be the case. She emphasized the interconnected nature of the environment and the economy, saying that policymakers don’t have to choose to focus on one or the other.
“We feel like we have to make a choice between the economy and the environment, and that’s a false dilemma. A healthier environment is a more prosperous economy. And when we fail to realize that we don’t have to sacrifice one to have the other, then I think we wind up sacrificing a lot of the quality of life and the opportunity that we take for granted.”
Video Credit: Dialogue/Wilson Center and Alexandra Cousteau.
“The most rapid population growth in many ways [occurs in] the countries that can least afford it,” said Carl Haub in a webinar on July 19 to launch the Population Reference Bureau’s (PRB) 50th annual 
