Showing posts by Jason Bremner.
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Probing Population Growth Near Protected Areas
›Justin Brashares and George Wittemyer’s recent article in Science, “Accelerated Human Population Growth at Protected Area Edges,” presents data showing that average population growth at the edges of protected areas in Africa and Latin America is nearly double average rural population growth in the same countries. The authors argue that this phenomenon is due to migration, as people from surrounding areas are drawn to the health-care and livelihoods programs made available to people expelled from the parks.
It’s not news that high population growth rates have implications for conservation, both in terms of land-cover change and biodiversity loss. Yet at last month’s World Conservation Congress, I heard scarcely a mention of population growth or other demographic factors. So I appreciate that the authors are urging us to look at this aspect of conservation. In addition, by studying a large number of countries and protected areas, their work helps move our thinking beyond the inherent limitations of case studies focused on a single protected area.
I feel obligated to take issue with a few of the authors’ assumptions, methods, and conclusions, however. For instance, the authors compare growth rates for individual protected areas with national rural rates, and find the former are significantly higher in the vast majority of cases. I wonder why they don’t make the comparisons with the rural population growth rates for the region in which the protected area is located, since that seems as if it would make for an even more compelling argument.
My second issue is a note of caution regarding gridded population data. The creation of a gridded population layer depends both on the size of the population data units and the way in which the population is distributed. Given the inherent inaccuracies in this process at detailed levels of analysis, how can we be sure that the populations for the 10 km “buffer areas” surrounding the protected areas are accurate? Is there any way to validate these data, and how would errors impact the authors’ analysis? This issue is particularly important because rural areas tend to have large administrative units and sparse populations.
My third issue is with the authors’ examination of infant mortality rates as a proxy for poverty. The authors analyzed poverty in an attempt to determine whether poverty-driven population growth was informing their result; they concluded it was not. Measures of infant mortality are notoriously poor at the local level, and the authors need to go further in assessing what portion of growth is due to migration and what portion due to natural increase. While such an analysis would take time, it is necessary, given higher fertility in remote rural areas.
Despite my reservations about how the authors came to their conclusion, I tend to agree that migration is driving higher population growth in areas of high biodiversity and around protected areas. The reasons for migration, however, are diverse, and my fourth issue is that I don’t think the authors provide adequate evidence to demonstrate that conservation investments are driving migration to these areas. My three main reasons for taking issue with this finding:- The number of protected areas in the world has grown rapidly over the last 40 years, and they are generally located in sparsely populated areas. During this same period, the populations of most African and Latin American countries have doubled at least once. Thus, people have migrated to new frontiers—often near protected areas—seeking available agricultural land.
- Extractive industries—including timber, mining, oil and gas, and industrial agriculture—often provide lucrative jobs near protected areas. These jobs offer migrants far greater economic benefits than the meager amounts spent on conservation. Tourism is likely the only industry than can compete with these industries in attracting migrants, and only in areas with high numbers of visitors.
- The correlations the authors found between population growth and Global Environment Facility spending and population growth and protected area staff could, as the authors note, simply mean that conservationists are wisely spending their limited dollars on the protected areas facing the greatest threats.
Jason Bremner is program director of the Population Reference Bureau’s Population, Health, and Environment Program. -
Dispatches From the World Conservation Congress: Jason Bremner on Healthy Environments, Healthy People
›October 8, 2008 // By Jason BremnerI’ve been busy the last several days attending the “Healthy Environments—Healthy People” stream of the World Conservation Congress. While there has been much talk about the connections between environmental services and people’s livelihoods and allusions to how this links with human health, I’ve been surprised by the scarcity of actual documented linkages between conservation strategies and human health.
This conundrum got me thinking about why there aren’t more people trying to actually evaluate impacts on human health. Do environmentalists simply lack the tools and expertise to evaluate human-health impacts? Are human-health benefits too hard to measure? Or does conservation not really have any human-health benefits? No, no, and no again are my answers to these questions.
I think the real problem is that “healthier people” is really just a good selling-point for conservation rather than a true objective of most conservation institutions. In other words, arguing that environmental health promotes human health is a good way for conservation organizations to expand their constituency.
Am I a jaded conference participant who has simply attended one too many sessions? I don’t think so, based on a meeting I attended last week of the EuroNGOs, a network of European organizations advocating for sexual and reproductive health. The topic of this year’s EuroNGOs meeting? The interface between population, environment, and poverty alleviation. Was this really a group of population and health organizations interested in adding an environmental dimension to their work or interested in the environmental benefits of their work? No—the real purpose was to increase funding for sexual and reproductive health by discussing the links and benefits related to environmental conservation and poverty alleviation. So these are different communities coming together for a common goal: to increase the funding for their particular missions.
Does this mean, however, that it is wrong to advocate for conservation interventions based on health benefits or wrong to advocate for health interventions based on environmental benefits? I don’t think so. I just think we need to do a better job of building bridges across communities. It would have been wonderful to have a few environmental organizations at the EuroNGOs meeting and a few more health organizations at the World Conservation Congress. Perhaps then we would do a better job evaluating the cross-sectoral benefits of our health and environment work.
Jason Bremner is program director for population, health, and environment at the Population Reference Bureau.
Photo courtesy of Geoff Dabelko.
I’ve been busy the last several days attending the “Healthy Environments—Healthy People” stream of the 
