Showing posts from category On the Beat.
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National Geographic’s Population Seven Billion
›The short feature above and accompanying cover article in the January 2011 issue launch National Geographic’s seven-part year-long series examining global population. The world is set to hit seven billion this year, according to current UN projections, and may reach nine billion by 2045.
The authors point out that today, 13 percent of people don’t have access to clean water globally and 38 percent lack adequate sanitation. Nearly one billion people have inadequate nutrition. Natural resources are strained. Is reducing population growth the key to addressing these problems?
Not according to Robert Kuznig, author of National Geographic’s lead article, who writes that “fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future…the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation.”
“The most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea-level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems,” writes Kuznig. Speaking on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, he reiterated this message, saying global problems “have to be tackled whether we’re eight billion people on Earth, or seven, or nine, and the scale for them is large in any case.”
Instead, the challenge is simultaneously addressing poverty, health, and education while reducing our environmental impact, says Kuznig.
“You don’t have to impose prescriptive policies for population growth, but basically if you can help people develop a nice, comfortable lifestyle and give them the access to medical care and so on, they can do it themselves,” said Richard Harris, a science correspondent for NPR, speaking with Kuznig on Talk of the Nation.
Kuznig’s article highlights the Indian state of Kerala, where thanks to state investments in health and education, 90 percent of women in the state can read (the highest rate in India) and the fertility rate has dropped to 1.7 births per woman. One reason for this is that educated girls have children later and are more open to and aware of contraceptive options.
Whither Family Planning?
In a post on Kuznig’s piece, Andrew Revkin, of The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, points to The New Security Beat’s recent interview with Joel E. Cohen about the crucial role of education in reducing the impact of population growth. Cohen asks: “Is it too many people or is it too few people? The truth is, both are real problems, and the fortunate thing is that we have enough information to do much better in addressing both of those problems than we are doing – we may not have silver bullets, but we’re not using the knowledge we have.”
Although the National Geographic article and video emphasize the connections between poverty reduction, health, education, and population growth, both give short shrift to family planning. It’s true that fertility is shrinking in many places, and global average fertility will likely reach replacement levels by 2030, but parts of the world – like essentially all of sub-Saharan Africa for example – still have very high rates of fertility (over five) and a high unmet demand for family planning. Globally, it is estimated that 215 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy but are not using effective contraception.
Development should help reduce these levels in time, but without continued funding for reproductive health services and family planning supplies, the declining trends that Kurznig cites, which are based on some potentially problematic assumptions, are unlikely to continue.
As Kuznig told NPR, “you need birth-control methods to be available, and you need the people to have the mindset that allows them to want to use them.”
At ECSP’s “Dialogue on Managing the Planet” session yesterday at the Wilson Center, National Geographic Executive Editor Dennis Dimick urged the audience to “stay tuned – you can’t comprehensively address an issue as global and as huge as this in one article, and within this series later in the year we will talk about [family planning] very specifically.” Needless to say, I look forward to seeing it, as addressing the unmet need for family planning is a crucial part of any comprehensive effort to reduce population growth and improve environmental, social, and health outcomes.
Sources: Center for Global Development, Dot Earth, NPR, Population Reference Bureau, World Bank.
Video Credit: “7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine,” courtesy of National Geographic. -
Where Have All the Malthusians Gone?
›Forget youth bulges and population bombs; lately, the population story has been all about the baby bust. The cover of this month’s Foreign Policy features “Old World: The graying of the planet – and how it will change everything,” by Phillip Longman, and author Ted Fishman recently appeared in The New York Times and on NPR to talk about his book, Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival and Nation Against Nation. Nicholas Eberstadt covered similar issues in Foreign Affairs with his article, “The Demographic Future: What Population Growth – and Decline – Means for the Global Economy.”
To the extent that policymakers take away a sense of urgency to reform retirement institutions and potentially reevaluate military strategy, the recent spate of publications about aging is useful. But policymakers should not be misled into thinking that the population tide has turned and resources for education, development, and family planning are no longer necessary. While global population growth is slowing, it has not stopped, and the political and economic consequences of continued growth and youthful age structures across most of the Global South will be dire.
A Population Bomb…of Old People
Eberstadt, Fishman, and Longman argue for the need to prepare for a future where there are large proportions of elderly dependents and relatively few workers to support them, and they chronicle the many challenges that may result, including political resistance. The October protests in France against raising the pensionable age from 60 to 62 — which, despite the hullabaloo, fall far short of the levels needed to improve France’s long-term economic position — are but one example of the reform resistance they warn about.
The concern is that while the Global North – Europe and Japan in particular – scramble to meet the needs of their older citizens and preserve the health of their economies, their powerful positions in the international system are at risk. As Fishman states, “It now looks as if global power rests on how willing a country is to neglect its older citizens.” China, a country on the cusp of aging, has thus far chosen neglect over meaningful investment, stoking more fear that the Global North may fall behind.
Though a focus on economic health is useful, other aspects of their arguments do a disservice, particularly those that start from the premise that the days of Malthusian angst over the planet’s ability to support a rapidly growing population are long gone.
Echoing Fred Pearce in his The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, Longman argues without reservation that dangerous population growth is a thing of the past, and instead, the world faces a “population bomb…of old people.” He even goes so far as to claim that “having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.”
I have to ask: what demographers did he talk to? Articles published over the last year in the field’s top journals — Demography, Population and Development Review, and Population Studies — certainly explore low fertility, but they also cover a range of youth- and growth-related issues and topics such as mortality, teen parenthood, and immigration. And within the field of political demography in particular there is still quite a lot of attention being paid to the implications of population growth and youth bulges on civil conflict and human security. Even Foreign Policy, in which Longman’s article appears, publishes an annual Failed States Index that argues there is an important relationship between demographic pressure and state collapse.
As studies like the Failed States Index and the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends project show, contrary to Pearce et al., carrying capacity arguments are not completely outmoded. Regardless of how extreme the impact of an aging population will be on developed nations in the near future (although the United States will almost certainly be less affected than others), in many parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, population growth is straining local water and land resources and creating instability — issues that will likely be exacerbated by climate change.
Geographic Bias
If there really is more attention being paid among demographers to low fertility it may well be due to institutional and geographic bias. After all, most of the funding for demography comes from Western nations concerned with their own decline. Likewise, all the top journals are American or European.
Though it is correct that most advanced industrial states are aging because of low fertility, for a large part of the world, population growth is still the number one issue. Declining fertility in most countries of the world means that populations are getting older, but this is not the same as saying they have a problem with aging. Between 1980 and 2010, the median age of the less developed countries, excluding China, rose from 19 to almost 25 and the world’s least developed countries saw a rise from 17 to 20 years. Median age in more developed countries, however, went from 32 to 40 — a level twice that of the least developed countries.
Many of the low-fertility countries Longman cites — Iran and Cuba, in particular — are exceptions among developing countries, rather than the rule. The UN Population Division estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will gain 966 million people by 2050 – more than the current population of all of Europe – and, as Richard Cincotta and I have both argued on this blog previously, the total fertility rate (TFR) projections used in those estimations are likely low. Rapid population growth in sub-Saharan Africa has already exacerbated many countries’ abilities to meet the growing needs of their populations, causing civil conflict and instability, and will continue to do so in the future.
Why is it Important to Get it Right?
Alarmism is useful when it grabs the attention of policymakers and a public that is overloaded with information, but it is also risky. Both Pearce and Longman take jabs at Paul Ehrlich because his “population bomb” never exploded. What they fail to note is that Ehrlich’s predictions could have proven right, except that he was successful at scaring a generation of policymakers into action. Funding towards population programs increased greatly in the wake of such research. If those of us who write about the dangers of aging are successful, perhaps we will be so lucky to look as foolish as Ehrlich one day.
If these warnings fall on deaf ears and policymakers do not act to reduce the burden of entitlements, certainly budgets will be strained beyond capacity and the dire future predicted by Fishman, Pearce, and Longman may well become a reality. On the other hand, if policymakers similarly disregard carrying capacity issues in the developing world, conflict and misery are sure to continue in these places and may well worsen.
Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba is the Mellon Environmental Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. She is also the author of a forthcoming book, The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security. Follow her on Twitter at @profsciubba for more on population-related issues.
Sources: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, NPR, National Intelligence Council, The New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, UN.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “Protest/Manifestation,” courtesy of flickr user lilicomanche. -
New Study Finds Lower Population Growth Could Cut Carbon Emissions
›A new study, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” finds that slowing population growth by 2050 would meet 16-29 percent of the reductions in carbon emissions necessary to avoid dangerous climate change — roughly equivalent to 1-1.5 “stabilization wedges.” Published in PNAS this week, the article reports the results of a comprehensive assessment, led by Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), of the impact of demographic changes, including urbanization and aging, on global carbon emissions.
The authors conclude that policies designed to meet the substantial unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services, particularly in the United States and developing countries, would lead to emission reductions that amount to about one-half of a wedge. These results suggest that “family planning policies would have a substantial environmental cobenefit,” they write.
O’Neill will discuss the study’s results and recommendations on Friday morning at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference in Missoula, MT. The panel, “Population, Climate, and Consumption,” which I helped organize, will be moderated by Ken Weiss of the Los Angeles Times. Weiss wrote on the Times’ Greenspace blog that “the study offers a novel way to quantify how changes in human population influence the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
To tease out the complex connections between climate, population, and consumption, O’Neill and his coauthors looked beyond population size to delve into household location and composition. They found that urbanization and aging trends will have differential–and potentially offsetting–impacts on carbon emissions.
Aging, particularly in industrialized countries, will reduce carbon emissions by up to 20 percent in the long term. On the other hand, urbanization, particularly in developing countries could increase emissions by 25 percent.
The Taboo Against Mixing Condoms and Climate
Most coverage to date, including the widely distributed press release from the National Science Foundation, overlooked the study’s recommendations to increase access to family planning and meet unmet need for contraception as a climate mitigation strategy.
Unfortunately, that’s the case in many venues: “You don’t see policymakers talking about in the climate negotiations,” climate scientist Richard Somerville told Weiss. Family planning has long been off the table–Mother Jones recently called it “The Last Taboo” – especially at the big climate conferences. At Copenhagen, it was only discussed at side events; NYT’s Andrew Revkin called it the “missing ‘P’ word.“
One of this year’s panelists, Laurie Mazur, who last year published, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge, will likely explore the environmental cobenefits of improving women’s reproductive health. In addition to mitigation, some developing countries have identified family planning as a strategy in their national climate adaptation plans.
Growth Story: Population at SEJ
Friday’s panel is the only one to consider population’s role in environmental issues at this year’s SEJ conference, the premier event for U.S. environmental journalists. Given the issue’s historic marginalization within environmental community, that’s not necessarily surprising.
But there appears to be a growing interest among reporters: last year’s SEJ panel on population moderated by Tim Wheeler of The Baltimore Sun drew a standing-room-only crowd, following a popular 2008 SEJ panel on the topic moderated by Steve Curwood of Living on Earth.
More surprisingly, Friday’s panel is one of less than a handful at this year’s conference to address international environmental issues. I hope next year’s conference in Miami will draw on that city’s vibrant immigrant community and short flights to Latin America and the Caribbean to bring in more international flavor.
Sources: DotEarth, Greenspace, National Science Foundation, Population Action International, UNFPA. -
Climate-Security Linkages Lost in Translation
›A recent news story summarizing some interesting research by Halvard Buhaug carried the headline “Civil war in Africa has no link to climate change.” This is unfortunate because there’s nothing in Buhaug’s results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, to support that conclusion.
In fact, the possibility that climate change might trigger conflict remains very real. Understanding why the headline writers got it wrong will help us better meet the growing demand for usable information about climate-conflict linkages.
First, the headline writer made a simple mistake by translating Buhaug’s modest model results — that under certain specifications climate variables were not statistically significant — into a much stronger causal conclusion: that climate is unrelated to conflict. A more responsible summary is that the historical relationship between climate and conflict depends on how the model is specified. But this is harder to squeeze into a headline — and much less likely to lure distracted online readers.
Buhaug tests 11 different models, but none of the 11 corresponds to what I would consider the emerging view on how climate shapes conflict. Using Miguel et al. (2004) as a reasonable representation of this view, and supported by other studies, there seems to be a strong likelihood that climatic shocks — due to their negative impacts on livelihoods — increase the likelihood that high-intensity civil wars will break out. None of Buhaug’s 11 models tested that view precisely.
If we are going to make progress as a community, we need to be specific about theoretically informed causal mechanisms. Our case studies and statistical tests should promote comparable results, around a discrete number of relevant mechanisms.
Second, a more profound confusion reflected in the headline concerns the term “climate change.” Buhaug’s research did not look at climate change at all, but rather historical climate variability. Variability of past climate is surely relevant to understanding the possible impacts of climate change, but there’s no way that, by itself, it can answer the question headline writers and policymakers want answered: Will climate change spark more conflict? For that we need to engage in a much richer combination of scenario analysis and model testing than we have done so far.
We are in a period in which climate change assessments have become highly politicized and climate politics are enormously contentious. The post-Copenhagen agenda for coming to grips with mitigation and adaptation remains primitive and unclear. Under these circumstances, we need to work extra hard to make sure that our research adds clarity and does not fan the flames of confusion. Buhaug’s paper is a good model in this regard, but the media coverage does not reflect its complexity. (Editor’s note: A few outlets – Nature, and TIME’s Ecocentric blog – did compare the clashing conclusions of Buhaug’s work and an earlier PNAS paper by Marshall Burke.)
The stakes are high. This isn’t a “normal” case of having trouble translating nuanced science into accessible news coverage. There is a gigantic disinformation machine with a well-funded cadre of “confusionistas” actively distorting and misrepresenting climate science. Scientists need to make it harder for them to succeed, not easier.
Here’s how I would characterize what we know and we are trying to learn:1) Economic deprivation almost certainly heightens the risk of internal war.
To understand how climate change might affect future conflict, we need to know much more. We need to understand how changing climate patterns interact with year-to-year variability to affect deprivation and shocks. We need to construct plausible socioeconomic scenarios of change to enable us to explore how the dynamics of climate, economics, demography, and politics will interact and unfold to shape conflict risk.
2) Economic shocks, as a form of deprivation, almost certainly heighten the risk of internal war.
3) Sharp declines in rainfall, compared to average, almost certainly generate economic shocks and deprivation.
4) Therefore, we are almost certain that sharp declines in rainfall raise the risk of internal war.
The same scenarios that generate future climate change also typically assume high levels of economic growth in Africa and other developing regions. If development is consistent with these projections, the risk of conflict will lessen over time as economies develop and democratic institutions spread.
To say something credible about climate change and conflict, we need to be able to articulate future pathways of economics and politics, because we know these will have a major impact on conflict in addition to climate change. Since we currently lack this ability, we must build it.Marc Levy is deputy director of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a research and data center of the Earth Institute of Columbia University.
Photo Credit: “KE139S11 World Bank” courtesy of flickr user World Bank Photo Collection.
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Talk Versus Action
‘Dialogue Television’ on Rebuilding Haiti
›Watch below or on MHz Worldview
In the aftermath of Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake, the world turned its attention to the impoverished and devastated island nation (including the New Security Beat, which covered some its demographic problems). Reporters, relief workers, and volunteers from around the globe rushed to provide coverage and aide. Western leaders announced bold blueprints for building a “new Haiti.” Six months later, only a tiny portion of pledged funds have been delivered, over one million Haitians remain homeless, and much of the country’s infrastructure remains in ruins. This week on dialogue, host John Milewski speaks with Donna Leinwand of USA Today and Sheri Fink, Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center, on their experiences working and reporting in Haiti after the devastation. Scheduled for broadcast starting July 21st, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.
Donna Leinwand is a reporter for the nation’s top-selling newspaper, USA Today. She’s been with the paper since 2000, covering legal issues, major crimes, the Justice Department, terrorism, and natural disasters. She is also a past president of the National Press Club. Sheri Fink is a senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a staff reporter for Pro Publica, and is a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. She was awarded a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her investigative piece on doctors at a hospital cut off by Hurricane Katrina flood waters.
Note: A QuickTime plug-in may be required to launch the video. -
‘Dialogue Television’ Interviews Paul Collier
›Watch below or on MHz Worldview
According to last week’s guest on Dialogue, restoring environmental order and eradicating global poverty have become the two defining challenges of our era. The environmental horror unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates just how difficult it is to balance economic progress and protection of the planet. It provides an alarming example of how the search for resources and profit can lead to the plunder of nature. Host John Milewski speaks with Oxford University economist Paul Collier on his latest book, The Plundered Planet: Why We Must and How We Can Manage Nature for Global Prosperity. Scheduled for broadcast starting June 30th, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.
Paul Collier is professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Formerly, he served as director of development research at the World Bank. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Bottom Billion.
Note: A QuickTime plug-in may be required to launch the video. -
‘Dialogue Television’ Explores Pakistan’s Population Challenge
›It’s difficult to imagine a scenario for a stable and peaceful world that doesn’t involve a stable and peaceful Pakistan. The country is among the world’s most populous and is also home to the world’s second largest Muslim population, making it the only Muslim majority nuclear state. Its history has been characterized by periods of military rule, political instability, and regional conflicts. This week on dialogue host John Milewski explores the nation’s changing demographics and what they may tell us about near and long term prospects for this vital U.S. ally with guests Michael Kugelman, Zeba Sathar, and Mehtab Karim.
Watch above or on MHz Worldview.
Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. Much of his recent research and programming focus has involved demographics in Pakistan. He is a regular contributor to Dawn, one of Pakistan’s major English language newspapers.
Zeba Sathar is Pakistan country director at the Population Council in Islamabad. Prior to joining the council, she was chief of research in demography at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and a consultant with the World Bank.
Mehtab Karim is a distinguished senior fellow and affiliated professor with the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Additionally, he is a senior research fellow at the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, specializing in global Muslim demographics. Previously, he was a professor of demography at Aga Khan University in Karachi.
Note: A QuickTime plug-in may be required to launch the video. -
The Food Security Debate: From Malthus to Seinfeld
›Charles Kenny’s latest article, “Bomb Scare: The World Has a Lot of Problems; an Exploding Population Isn’t One of Them” reminds me of a late-night episode of Seinfeld: a re-run played for those who missed the original broadcast. Kenny does a nice job of filling Julian Simon’s shoes. What’s next? Will Jeffrey Sachs do a Paul Ehrlich impersonation? Oh, Lord, help me; I hope not.
I’ve already seen the finale. Not the one where Jerry, George, and Kramer go to jail — the denouement of the original “Simon and Ehrlich” show. After the public figured out that each successive argument (they never met to debate) over Malthus’s worldview was simply a rehash of the first — a statement of ideology, rather than policy — they flipped the channel.
Foreign Policy could avoid recycling this weary and irrelevant 200-year-old debate by instead exploring food security from the state-centric perspective with which policymakers are accustomed. While economists might hope for a seamless global grain production and food distribution system, it exists only on their graphs.
Cropland, water, farms, and markets are still part and parcel of the political economy of the nations in which they reside. Therefore they are subject to each state’s strategic interests, political considerations, local and regional economic forces, and historical and institutional inefficiencies.
From this realistic perspective, it is much less important that world population will soon surpass 7 billion people, and more relevant that nearly two dozen countries have dropped below established benchmarks of agricultural resource scarcity (less than 0.07 hectares of cropland per person, and/or less than 1000 cubic meters of renewable fresh water per person).
Today, 21 countries—with some 600 million people—have lost, for the foreseeable future (and perhaps forever), the potential to sustainably nourish most of their citizens using their own agricultural resources and reasonably affordable technological and energy inputs. Instead, these states must rely on trade with–and food aid from–a dwindling handful of surplus grain producers.
By 2025, another 15 countries will have joined their ranks as a result of population growth alone (according to the UN medium variant projection). By then, about 1.4 billion people will live in those 36 states—with or without climate change.
For the foreseeable future, poor countries will be dependent on an international grain market that has recently experienced unprecedented swings in volume and speculation-driven price volatility; or the incentive-numbing effects of food aid. As demand rises, the poorest states spend down foreign currency reserves to import staples, instead of using it to import technology and expertise to support their own economic development.
Meanwhile, wealthier countries finding themselves short of water and land either heavily subsidize local agriculture (e.g., Japan, Israel, and much of Europe) or invest in cropland elsewhere (e.g., China, India, and Saudi Arabia). And some grain exporters—like Thailand—decided it might be safer to hold onto some of their own grain to shield themselves from a future downturn in their own harvest. All of this is quite a bit more complex than either Malthus could have imagined or Kenny cares to relate.
It hardly matters why food prices spiked and remained relatively high—whether it is failed harvests, growing demand for grain-fed meat, biofuels, profit-taking by speculators, or climate change. Like it or not, each has become an input into those wiggly lines called grain price trends, and neither individual states nor the international system appears able or willing to do much about any of them.
From the state-centric perspective, hunger is sustained by:1. The state’s inability or lack of desire to maintain a secure environment for production and commerce within its borders;
In some countries, aspects of population age structure or population density could possibly affect all three. In others, population may have little effect at all.
2. Its incapacity to provide an economic and trade policy environment that keeps farming profitable, food markets adequately stocked and prices reasonably affordable (whether produce comes from domestic or foreign sources); and
3. Its unwillingness or inability to supplement the diets of its poor.
What bugs me most about Kenny’s re-run is its disconnect with current state-centric food policy concerns, research, and debates (even as the U.S. administration and Congress are focusing on food security, with a specific emphasis on improving the lives of women.—Ed.).
Another critique of Malthus’s 200-year-old thesis hardly informs serious policy discussions. Isn’t Foreign Policy supposed to be about today’s foreign policy?
Richard Cincotta is a consultant with the Environmental Change and Security Program and the demographer-in-residence at the H.L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC.
Photo Credit “The Bombay Armada” courtesy of Flickr user lecercle.
