Showing posts from category consumption.
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Reaching Out to Environmentalists About Population Growth and Family Planning
›“Promoting women’s empowerment is an effective strategy for looking at climate and the environment but also is important in its own right,” said the Sierra Club’s Kim Lovell at the Wilson Center on February 22. “Increasing access to family planning for women around the world is a climate adaptation and climate mitigation solution.” [Video Below]
Drawing on research by Brian O’Neill (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and others Lovell explained that meeting the unmet need for family planning around the world could provide up to 16 to 29 percent of the emissions reductions required by 2050 in order to avoid more than two degrees of warming (the target set by nations to prevent the most damaging effects of climate change).
For environmentalists and those concerned with climate change, “sometimes the idea has been that population is toxic, that we can’t talk about population growth,” said Nancy Belden of Belden Russonello and Stewart Consulting, but the results of a recent survey and several focus groups conducted in association with Americans for UNFPA demonstrate that there is great potential for engaging the environmental community in such a discussion.
Belden and Lovell were joined by Kate Sheppard from Mother Jones to discuss how the population and environment communities can come together in the lead-up to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference.
Besides providing a basic health commodity, empowering women through access to family planning also improves adaptation outcomes, said Lovell. “Climate change is already happening and women and families around the world are suffering from the effects of water scarcity [and] of erratic weather patterns,” she said. But “when women have the ability to plan their family size and have more choices about their families and about their reproductive health and rights, that makes it easier to adapt to those climate change effects that are already taking place.”
Resonating With Environmental Priorities
“The people who really care about the environment are generally the same people who care about access to contraception and birth control and family planning…they’re a ready audience to hear about these connections and they’re a ready audience to take action about them,” said Kate Sheppard. Reproductive rights issues are something that people can really connect with, she said; “most women, most men too…understand why it’s an important issue and they’ve understood it in their own life and they have [a] very strong response to it.”
When we approach the linkages between environment and population, said Sheppard, it is important to recognize the role of empowering language – language about access to services, education, and resources for women.
The aim of the Americans for UNFPA survey was to find out whether environmentalists can be engaged in discussions of population issues such as family planning and international voluntary contraception, and if so, how?
The results show that “environmentalists are ready to talk about population, they’re ready to listen – it’s not toxic,” said Belden. She outlined three key findings:
First, environmentalists prioritize the environment but they also give a high priority to empowering women, said Belden. “Population pressures are seen as an environmental problem…they don’t dismiss it,” yet the “strongest framework that we could come up with…for engaging people on the issues around voluntary family planning and contraception focuses on women.”
Second, the environmental community is relatively optimistic about the potential outcomes of family planning programs and of foreign aid in general. When queried, half of the environmentalists strongly supported the idea of U.S. contributions to UN programs that provide voluntary access to contraception in developing countries, said Belden.
When asked to mark their top priority among a list of possible outcomes of providing voluntary access to contraception, 47 percent of the environmentalists selected either “improving living conditions for women and their families” or “ensuring women have options and can make reproductive decisions” as their top priority. While a significant number are also concerned about stalling population growth, this integrative focus on improving the lives of women and their families is heartening, said Belden.
In the Run-Up to Rio+20, More Than Pop
One point that all three speakers stressed is the need to integrate consumption into the integrated population message. In her survey work, Belden found that “if you don’t talk about consumption in the same breath, [environmentalists] start wanting to put it in there because otherwise…this is someone blaming others.”
Lovell similarly highlighted that “if we’re working to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations to come, we have to think about consumption and population.” For instance, “the United States makes up five percent of the world’s population but consumes 25 percent of the world’s resources,” she said.
Said Sheppard: “It’s not simply a problem that the numbers of people here on the Earth are going up, it’s a problem of how people, especially here in the U.S., live.”
It is imperative – especially from a sustainable development standpoint – that while working towards integrating environment and population we remain focused on a message that includes “using less but still having a high quality of life” here at home, said Sheppard.
Event ResourcesSources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo Credit: “Timorese Traditional Home,” courtesy of United Nations Photo. -
Assigning Value to Biodiversity, and the 2011 Human Development Report
›New research in the journal BioScience reports the aggregate economic benefits of conserving high priority biodiversity areas outweigh the opportunity costs of alternative land uses by a multiple of three (where priority is assigned according to a global index of the mapped distributions of 4,388 threatened terrestrial species). The authors of “Global Biodiversity Conservation and the Alleviation of Poverty,” led by Will Turner, estimate the value of highly diverse habitats to the global poor in terms of direct benefits and potential external payments for ecosystem services. They find these environmental flows in excess of $1 per person, per day, for 331 million of the world’s poorest individuals and conclude by arguing that, “although trade-offs remain…results show win-win synergies…and suggest biodiversity conservation as a fundamental component of sustainable economic development.” (For further discussion of development around biodiversity hotspots, see Population Action International’s work on population growth.)The 2011 UNDP Human Development Report, Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All, builds from the understanding that a “failure to reduce…grave environmental risks and deepening social inequalities threatens to slow decades of sustained progress by the world’s poor majority.” A resilient thread in the report highlights the importance of working to ensure women’s equality and reproductive rights for sustainability, claiming that “meeting unmet need for family planning by 2050 would lower the world’s carbon emissions an estimated 17 percent below what they are today.” The report closes with a wide range of policy suggestions that work towards the goal of equating sustainability and equity, including a supportive discussion of a currency transaction tax as a novel and feasible method of providing climate financing.
These pieces address contradictions between environmentally sustainable behavior and the development imperative. Though both acknowledge that the traditional development model of high intensity economic growth has imperiled the environment upon which the livelihoods of many hundreds of millions depend, they suggest practical ways forward. The Human Development Report in particular adopts some of the strongest language yet, claiming that, “the message is clear: our development model is bumping up against concrete limits.” This honest attempt to work through, rather than around, the tension between development and sustainability is perhaps an indication that we are at last beginning to take seriously the concept of sustainable development. -
Water and Population: Limits to Growth?
›February 3, 2012 // By Laurie MazurWater – essential, finite, and increasingly scarce – has been dubbed “the new oil.” Experts debate whether human societies are approaching “peak water,” beyond which lies a bleak future of diminishing supplies and soaring demand. Others observe that, for many, the water crisis has already arrived.
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Do High Food Prices Cause Social Unrest?
›In March 2011, a senior Brookings Institution official wrote that “the crux of the food price challenge is about price volatility, rather than high prices per se” and that “[i]t is the rapid and unpredictable changes in food prices that wreak havoc on markets, politics, and social stability.”
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Seven Ways Seven Billion People Affect the Planet
›October 31, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoSeven billion people now live on earth, only a dozen years after global population hit six billion. But the seven billion milestone is not about sheer numbers: Demographic trends will significantly impact the planet’s resources and peoples’ security.
Growing populations stress dwindling natural resource supplies while high levels of consumption in both developed countries and emerging economies drive up carbon emissions and deplete the planet’s resources. And neglected “youth bulges” could bolster extremism in fragile states like Somalia and destabilize nascent democracies like Egypt.
Here are seven ways seven billion people affect the planet, according to recent research:
Security: Nearly 90 percent of countries with very young and youthful populations had undemocratic governments at the end of the 20th century. Eighty percent of all new civil conflicts between 1970 and 2007 occurred in countries where at least 60 percent of the population is under age 30, says demographer Elizabeth Leahy Madsen. According to research by demographer Richard Cincotta, these countries may achieve democracy, but are less likely to sustain it.- Richard Cincotta: Tunisia Predicted: Demography and the Probability of Liberal Democracy in the Greater Middle East
- Elizabeth Leahy Madsen: Demographic Security 101
Water: By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries with water scarcity, and fully two-thirds will be living in conditions of water stress. People are using groundwater faster than it can be naturally replenished, putting us in danger of “peak water,” says MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Peter Gleick. “We cannot talk about water without also understanding the enormously important role of population dynamics and population growth.”- Peter Gleick: Population Dynamics Key to Sustainable Water Solutions
Forests: The growing demand for energy has helped devastate tropical forests, as more than two billion people depend on wood for cooking and heating, particularly in developing countries. Projects in Indonesia, Nepal, and Uganda are fighting deforestation by providing alternative energy and incomes along with health and family planning services.- Indonesia: Health in Harmony
- Nepal: Forests for the Future
- Uganda: Sharing the Forest
Future Growth: By 2050, the UN says global population could range anywhere from 8 billion to 11 billion – and where it ends up depends in large part on the status of women in developing countries. “Even if fertility rates remain constant at current levels (which is unlikely), developing regions would grow from 5.7 billion in 2010 to 9.7 billion in 2050, but the total population of developed countries would remain essentially unchanged,” writes Madsen.- Elizabeth Leahy Madsen: How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion – and Where Do We Go From Here? [Part One] [Part Two]
There are no quick solutions to these seven problems. But meeting the unmet need for contraception of more than 200 million women is an effective and inexpensive way to start.
Sources: Population Action International, UN, World Health Organization.
Image Credit: Used with permission courtesy of Scott Woods, The University of Western Ontario. -
Watch: Understanding Peak Water Can Help Us “Avoid the Worst Disasters,” Says Peter Gleick
›October 26, 2011 // By Kate Diamond“The advantage of the idea of peak water is that it lets us think differently about the limits that face us,” said MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick in this short interview with ECSP. Gleick, who launched the latest edition of The World’s Water at the Wilson Center last week, has been talking about peak water since 2009 when he and Pacific Institute colleague Meena Palaniappan first wrote about the concept in that year’s water report (see our interview from then too).
Renewable vs. Non-Renewable
Peak water is “the idea that we are effectively running into constraints and limits on our water use,” said Gleick, in part because of population growth. “It lets us think differently about the limits to the water that’s available for us to use, and about the water that it’s appropriate for us to use, and about the policies to put in place to avoid the bad things that happen when we reach or exceed peak constraints.”
Gleick breaks the concept into three categories:- Peak renewable water: “Where we can no longer increase the amount of water we’re taking out of rivers – when we take all of it.”
- Peak nonrenewable water: “Where, very much like oil, we’re over-pumping a non-renewable ground water supply – a nonrenewable aquifer – and it becomes more and more expensive and more and more damaging and more and more difficult to pump ground water.”
- Peak ecological water: “Where the use of additional water causes more ecological harm than it provides economic benefit.”
Across all three categories, said Gleick, we are very bad at understanding limits. “We don’t measure peak water carefully, we don’t collect the data necessary to understand when we’re approaching or exceeding peak water limits.”
“But without a doubt we are exceeding peak water limits in more and more regions of the world,” he said. “And that’s going to have implications for our economies. It’s going to have implications for our environment.”
“Understanding and applying the idea of peak water is the first step toward developing strategies and institutions to avoid the worst disasters associated with overuse and inappropriate use of our water resources.” -
Robert Engelman, Yale Environment 360
The World at 7 Billion: Can We Stop Growing Now?
›August 11, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Robert Engelman, appeared on Yale Environment 360.
Demographers aren’t known for their sense of humor, but the ones who work for the United Nations recently announced that the world’s human population will hit seven billion on Halloween this year. Since censuses and other surveys can scarcely justify such a precise calculation, it’s tempting to imagine that the UN Population Division, the data shop that pinpointed the Day of 7 Billion, is hinting that we should all be afraid, be very afraid.
We have reason to be. The 21st century is not yet a dozen years old, and there are already one billion more people than in October 1999 – with the outlook for future energy and food supplies looking bleaker than it has for decades. It took humanity until the early 19th century to gain its first billion people; then another 1.5 billion followed over the next century and a half. In just the last 60 years the world’s population has gained yet another 4.5 billion. Never before have so many animals of one species anything like our size inhabited the planet.
And this species interacts with its surroundings far more intensely than any other ever has. Planet Earth has become Planet Humanity, as we co-opt its carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles so completely that no other force can compare. For the first time in life’s 3-billion-plus-year history, one form of life – ours – condemns to extinction significant proportions of the plants and animals that are our only known companions in the universe.
Did someone just remark that these impacts don’t stem from our population, but from our consumption? Probably, as this assertion emerges often from journals, books, and the blogosphere. It’s as though a geometry text were to propound the axiom that it is not length that determines the area of a rectangle, but width. Would we worry about our individual consumption of energy and natural resources if humanity still had the stable population of roughly 300 million people – less than today’s U.S. number – that the species maintained throughout the first millennium of the current era?
Continue reading on Yale Environment 360.
Robert Engelman is executive director of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C.
Photo Credit: “Daybreak,” courtesy of flickr user Undertow851. Dawn breaks over California in the United States April 17, 2011 in this photo by NASA astronaut Ron Garan from the International Space Station. The lights of Los Angeles appear in the foreground while San Francisco appears in the back near the horizon. -
Water, Energy, and the U.S. Department of Defense
›Energy for the War Fighter is the U.S. Department of Defense’s first operational energy strategy, mandated by congress last year. Energy security for the department means having assured access to reliable supplies of energy and the ability to protect and deliver energy to meet operational (non-facilities-related) needs. The report is divided into three main parts, which address reducing current demand for energy in military operations; expanding and securing the supply of energy for military operations; and building consideration of energy security into future force decisions. The strategy is designed to both support current military operations and to focus future energy investments accordingly. Previous federal energy mandates exempted the military’s field operations, which account for three-quarters of the department’s energy consumption. The department as a whole makes up 80 percent of the federal government’s annual energy use.The Water Energy Nexus: Adding Water to the Energy Agenda, by Diana Glassman, Michele Wucker, Tanushree Isaacman, and Corinne Champilouis of the World Policy Institute, attempts to show the correlation between energy and water to motivate policy makers to consider the implications of their dual consumption. “Nations around the world are evaluating their energy options and developing policies that apply appropriate financial carrots and sticks to various technologies to encourage sustainable energy production, including cost, carbon, and security considerations,” write the authors. “Water needs to be a part of this debate, particularly how communities will manage the trade-offs between water and energy at the local, national, and cross-border levels.” The study provides the context needed to evaluate key tradeoffs between water and energy by providing “the most credible available data about water consumption per unit of energy produced across a wide spectrum of traditional energy technologies,” they write.
Sources: U.S. Department of Defense.
