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Hans Rosling on Religion, Babies, and Poverty
›“I’m going to talk about religion. But it’s a broad and very delicate subject, so I have to limit myself. Therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality…I will talk on what I remember as the most wonderful – it’s the moment when the young couple whispers, ‘tonight, we are going to make a baby,’” said Hans Rosling, the eclectic Swedish doctor and statistician known for his Gapminder tool, in a TedxSummit presentation in April.
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Taking On Domestic Violence in Post-Conflict Liberia
›Liberia is a case study in post-conflict violence against women, said panelists at the Wilson Center on July 24. “Confined merely to performing household chores and childrearing duties, from early childhood, women and girls have been socialized into subservience and powerlessness and acceptance of domestic abuse as a norm,” Annette Kiawu, deputy minister for research and technical services at the Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development, told the audience. [Video Below]
Kiawu was joined by Pamela Shifman of the Novo Foundation and Esther Karnley and Elisabeth Roesch of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). They discussed the prevalence of domestic violence in Liberia after the 14-year civil war, which ended in 2003.
Violence Stemming from Changing Norms
Kiawu pointed to women’s changing roles in Liberia as a source of household tension. She noted that women are increasingly “demanding a greater role in household decision making,” which some men see as “encroachment on their sphere of influence.”
“According to the LDHS [Liberia Demographic and Health Survey], the persistence of domestic violence is directly linked to the increased status of women on the one hand and men’s [perception] of loss of power and authority on the other,” she said. Some men’s urge to assert dominance is exacerbated by higher levels of alcohol abuse and a tendency towards violence learned during the civil war.
There has been legislation against gender-based violence – including the Rape Amendment Act, also known as the “revised rape law,” the Revised Gender-Based Violence Action Plan, and the African Union Protocol – as well as action plans and community-based groups meant to decrease the rate of domestic violence, like the Gender-Based Violence Network, an initiative designed to increase community ownership of domestic violence issues and improve response at the grassroots level. But despite these advances, Kiawu stressed that there still is a long way to go, saying that increased funding and coordination between domestic and international agencies and the Liberian government is necessary to have a real impact on the lives of the “countless women” whose lives are threatened by domestic violence.
Making Reality Match Rhetoric
Pamela Shifman agreed that domestic violence prevention programs need more funding. “So often in conflict-affected settings we hear that we need to address other issues first…that domestic violence is a back-burner issue,” she said. Domestic violence is often perceived to be “not that serious” when compared to other issues in conflict-prone and post-conflict countries.
But Shifman argued that divorcing domestic violence from other types of violence is problematic. “Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street, normalizes violence in the community, and normalizes violence by the state,” she said.
NoVo is one of the few private organizations which prioritizes domestic violence and gender equity, Shifman said, but she asserted that all humanitarian organizations should devote time and money to these issues, saying that “if we ignore domestic violence, all of the other investments we make to improve the quality of life for communities will suffer.”
Empowering women can have significant results for the whole community. Shifman remarked that “investing in women is smart economics,” citing studies which suggest directing funds towards women “pays off at huge levels” for women’s families and communities. But when women experience violence, “their potential is thwarted,” she said. “They suffer, their families suffer, their community suffers, the entire nation suffers.”
Programs targeting domestic violence need greater awareness, more long-term commitment, and more funding, she said. “We don’t expect that violence is going to end overnight – no deep-seated social problem will be solved that quickly,” she said. “In order to make a dent in improving the lives of girls and women and ending violence against girls and women, we need more direct funding” from private and public sources.
“To put it bluntly, I think the reality needs to match the rhetoric,” Shifman concluded.
Perspectives from the Field: Social Isolation
Esther Karnley described the results of interviews conducted with Liberian women, both survivors of domestic violence and fellow community members. She found that a key reason women stay in abusive relationships is financial dependence. “Most of them said, ‘it’s because we depend on the men for everything… we don’t have any money, we are not empowered financially, we depend on the men for everything. Because of that, we remain in that relationship and we get killed.’”
She added that social isolation means that many women lack the resources to leave a relationship. “We are isolated socially, we don’t have access to services, we are all by ourselves,” they told her. Without support from friends, relatives, or organizations, it can be difficult to find the means to relocate.
Part of the problem in Liberia is the prevalence of informal education, especially Sande bush schools – schools run by a traditional women’s society designed to prepare girls for marriage, teaching them traditional housekeeping methods and culminating in female circumcision. Girls leave home to attend these traditional schools for several months, which severely curtails their access to formal education. Kiawu reported that “over 60 percent of girls attending Sande school drop out of regular school.” This means that “successive generations of young children, especially young girls, are expected to forgo formal education in favor of attending the Sande school.”
In addition to formal education, Karnley said financial empowerment and legislation holding perpetrators of domestic violence accountable for their actions would enable more women to leave abusive relationships.
Reaching Both Women and Men
Each of the panelists recognized that working against domestic violence requires comprehensive societal reforms. Karnley stressed that the impetus to begin working with men came from Liberian women. “Initially when we started working on GBV issues, we talked to women, and then the women came and said, ‘OK, you talk to us every day, and when we go home, we go and meet fire. Can you also talk to our men?’” In response, the IRC developed a 16-week program designed to change men’s behavior and views about violence and relationships. Karnley also mentioned a desire to reach out to the religious community to change the constant focus on the man as the head of a relationship to one based on love.
The Liberian government is also working with churches and mosques to change norms that encourage the subjugation of women, including work with a network of religious leaders known as Christian/Muslim United against SGBV (sexual and gender based violence). Kiawu said this organization emphasizes partnership within a marriage and teaching equality to children in the home. The panelists also mentioned additional efforts to increase the responsiveness and sensitivity of the police and judicial system to domestic violence issues, as well as the need for resources like safe houses to provide relief to survivors.
“The family, far from being off limits, has to be a priority for us in the humanitarian community as we help to rebuild nations where peace not only exists between nations, and among nations, and among communities, but among families,” Shifman contended. Kiawu agreed, adding that without interventions, violence and isolation prevent women “from taking advantage of opportunities that peace presents.”
Event Resources: Photo Credit: A woman prays during a Sunday morning service in Monrovia, courtesy of Bruce Strong/Newhouse School. -
U.S. Drought, Climate Change Could Lead to Global Food Riots, Political Instability
›August 15, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodIt’s been a difficult year for U.S. agriculture. Record high temperatures and the country’s worst drought since 1956 have combined to decimate crops across the nation, and some forecasters are predicting more heat and dryness in the months ahead. Things have been so bad that many experts fear a recurrence of the food riots and instability that shook the world in 2007-8, and again in 2010-11. Others point to this year’s unusual weather in the United States and elsewhere as a harbinger of how climate change might impact humanity in the 21st century.
Things started out well enough earlier this year, as America’s farmers took advantage of the warmest March weather on record by planting the largest corn crop in 75 years. As late as May 10, the USDA was projecting that previous corn production and yield records would be shattered. “We’re looking at the potential for just a true bin-buster of a crop [this year],” grain expert and Iowa State University economics professor Chad Hart told The Huffington Post at the time. “There’s going to be a lot of corn flying around here.”
But those predictions came before a historic drought descended upon the country’s heartland, accompanied by soaring summer temperatures. In July, the USDA slashed its estimate for corn production by 12 percent, the largest such adjustment in a quarter century. The organization released an even bleaker update last Friday. Meanwhile, many commodity traders, believing the worst may still be yet to come, have reduced their own projections even further. Soybeans, which are frequently intercropped with corn, have also struggled with this summer’s conditions.
As optimism for the corn and soybean harvests has faded, commodity prices have surged. Corn futures have reached record highs, and soybeans have also seen dramatic price increases. Both commodities have now surpassed their peaks from the 2007-8 crisis that led to riots in more than two dozen countries across the world.
Even wheat, which is primarily a winter crop, has experienced a price increase of about 50 percent over the past two months. “If the price of corn rises high enough, it also pulls up the price of wheat,” Robert Thompson, a food security expert at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told The Guardian. Wheat has not yet outpaced its high from the 2007-8 crisis, but it is trading higher than after the Russian wheat export ban that helped lead to another crisis in 2010-11 (and ultimately, some analysts say, to the Arab Spring).
Crisis Catalysts Beyond the U.S. Drought
The United States is vital to the global food market, being the world’s largest exporter of corn, soybeans, and wheat. However, several other key grain-producing regions have been affected by abnormal weather this year as well.
Summer heat waves in southern Europe have adversely impacted corn crops from Italy to Ukraine – a region that produces 16 percent of the world’s exports, according to Bloomberg. Below average rainfalls in parts of South America and Australia threaten other strategically important production areas.
And that’s not all. Spain suffered its worst drought in 70 years this past winter, leading analysts to reduce projections for Europe’s wheat crop. Flooding in Japan, India and Bangladesh has jeopardized rice crops. And an unusually cold winter in the Himalayas has dramatically slowed glacial melting, leaving farmers to cope with a greatly reduced Indus River and as much as an 80 percent reduction in available water for irrigation.
Add to all this the fact that world grain stocks are reportedly headed for a five-year low, and it isn’t difficult to see why there is such concern about the global food market.
Causes for Concern
Rising grain prices are expected to lift overall food costs throughout the world over the next six months. That spike is unlikely to have much of an impact in the United States, where consumers spend on average just 13 percent of their household budgets on food. However, in less developed countries – where the portion of household income used for purchasing food is often 50 percent or higher – there is cause for concern that a new round of food riots may be in the offing.
Kaitlin Shilling on climate conflict and export crops in sub-Saharan Africa “Large numbers of people live very close to the edge,” Save the Children’s Justin Forsyth recently told The Financial Times. “Failed rains and high food prices have tipped lots of people over the edge from being able to cope to not being able to cope.”
“Based on my research on the natural disasters-food prices-social unrest nexus, I think we will observe increased social unrest in the next 6 to 12 months,” warned Duke University professor and agricultural economist Marc Bellemare in an email exchange, stressing the distinction between social unrest (i.e., food riots) and civil war or intra-state conflict.
“The similarity between now, 2007-8, and 2010-11 is that they are all episodes of high food prices caused by a series of natural disasters,” he continued. “The difference is that this time around, the natural disasters in question – episodes of extreme temperature and drought – are taking place in our backyard instead of halfway around the world, which makes this all the more salient in American minds.”
Some Reasons for Optimism
Still, there are a number of reasons to believe the present situation will not lead to the kind of instability and conflict that characterized the last two food crises. One key difference between 2007-8 and today’s situation is the price of oil.
In July of 2008, oil rushed to an all-time high of $147 per barrel; today, it’s around $90 a barrel. This means that consumers can buy relatively more food now than in 2008, making food riots less likely.
Moreover, any reduction in the possibility of riots and other political instability has a multiplying effect, according to a recent Chatham House article:
And because riots are less likely, governments are less inclined to impose export controls, reducing the chance of a collapse in confidence, as one country after another bans exports, pushing up international prices further and encouraging others to do the same. This dynamic was a major factor in both the 2007-8 crisis and the 2010-11 spike.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that the crops in the worst shape this year – chiefly corn and soybeans – are less fundamental to the diets of many in the less developed world than rice or wheat. “[Rice] is very important for [the] food security of millions of people around the world,” Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist and grain expert at the FAO, recently told Reuters. “We do not see any production or supply problems with rice.”
Meanwhile, USDA Chief Economist Joseph Glauber has downplayed fears of an imminent food crisis because of a relative abundance of wheat. “Prices are higher [right now], and there’s no question about that, but we really had an extreme shortage of wheat in 2007-2008 and I don’t see that at this point,” he recently told The Financial Times.
Unlike rice and wheat, corn is seldom consumed directly. Rather, it is far more commonly used for ethanol production (roughly 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce biofuels), food processing, and especially animal feed. This means that a rise in corn prices won’t have as direct and deleterious effect on people in the developing world as did the acute rice and wheat shortages that triggered previous crises. Higher corn prices will certainly increase the costs of meat and dairy products, processed foods, and other comestibles, but these price increases are unlikely to have much of an effect in less developed countries, where such products are seldom prominent in the daily diet.
“[This] is a serious situation which has to be monitored closely, but it is too early to refer to it as a food crisis situation,” said Abbassian.
The Role of Climate Change
Whether or not this summer’s troubles blossom into the kinds of food riots and political instability seen in previous food crises remains an open question, but there is another unresolved issue with even greater potential long-term impact. With so many extreme weather events playing a role in this year’s high prices, many are wondering: To what extent is climate change a factor? And what might continued warming and increased CO2 mean for the long-term prospects of global food security? Are this summer’s stifling conditions “the new normal,” as the blog G-FEED has asked here and here?
One of the most significant recent developments in climate research is that scientists have begun linking individual extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. A groundbreaking 2011 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the UK Met Office, and others explained:
In the past it was often stated that it simply was not possible to make an attribution statement about an individual weather or climate event. However, scientific thinking on this issue has moved on and now it is widely accepted that attribution statements about individual weather or climate events are possible, provided proper account is taken of the probabilistic nature of attribution.
The report goes on to apply this principal to several extreme weather events from last year, including a devastating drought in Texas it claims was made 20 times more likely to occur by man-made climate change.
While no such study has yet examined the 2012 U.S. drought or other recent extreme weather events, most scientists believe that climate change is playing at least some role in this year’s freak weather episodes. “I think what we’re seeing is largely a naturally occurring event [influenced by La Niña weather patterns], but it’s occurring against the background of a warming environment,” Richard Seager, a professor and drought specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told Climate Central.
The idea of naturally occurring droughts playing out across a backdrop of global warming is a sobering one, because of the unique interactions between precipitation and hot weather. One timely study published last month describes how dry conditions increase the likelihood of abnormally hot weather: During droughts, less of the sun’s heat energy is used to evaporate moisture in vegetation and the soil, meaning that more energy can go into heating the air directly. Thus, “the occurrence probability of an above-average number of hot days is high after dry conditions and low after wet conditions.”
The study suggested that this phenomenon played an important role in exacerbating the 2011 Texas drought. Moreover, lead author Brigitte Mueller noted in an email conversation with Climate Central that precipitation in the 2012 U.S. drought was within the range where the drought/heat feedback would be expected to occur, “which implies an even higher likelihood for an above-average [number of hot days] to occur.”
With the planet expected to continue warming due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and with reports from IPCC and National Center for Atmospheric Research predicting increasingly frequent droughts in the decades ahead, the heat/drought feedback loop is still more bad news for a global agricultural sector already tasked with the formidable job of feeding a world population expected to reach nine billion by mid-century.
Research on the effects that heat and drought have on crop yields and food production is beginning to emerge. One recent paper conservatively estimated that U.S. farm production could drop 4 to 13 percent over the next two decades or so. Another study, which considered “worst-case scenarios,” projected that average U.S. crop yields could plummet 63 to 82 percent by the end of the century if global warming is particularly rapid.
Such an outcome would necessitate fundamental changes in how the world is fed, and would obviously make global food security an issue of paramount importance. Even in the present, however, it seems clear that climate change is already an integral part of the food security issue. This summer’s freakish weather, in the United States and elsewhere around the globe, has brought the world closer to another round of food riots and political instability.
Although there are reasons to be optimistic that such a crisis may yet be averted in the short term, it appears that maintaining and improving global food security will remain a major challenge into the foreseeable future.
Sources: Bloomberg, Chatham House, Climate Central, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Resources for the Future, Reuters, USDA.
Map Credit: U.S. Drought Monitor, courtesy of Mark Svoboda/National Drought Mitigation Center. Drought stricken corn on a farm in Iowa, which President Barack Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visited on Monday, courtesy of the USDA. Future drought conditions, courtesy of Aiguo Dai/Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews.
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Population and Sustainability in an Unequal World
›August 13, 2012 // By Laurie MazurJune’s Rio + 20 Conference on Sustainable Development left environmentalists little to cheer about. Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, called the meeting “a failure of epic proportions.” And Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin said the conference “may produce one lasting legacy: convincing people it’s not worth holding global summits.”
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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. -
Is This What Climate Change Feels Like? Geoff Dabelko on ‘CONTEXT’
›“I think that the conditions that we’re experience now are ones that track with what we expect to see more of; so dry places getting drier, wet places getting wetter, and more extremes in terms of variability of the weather,” said ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in the latest installment of CONTEXT, a weekly Wilson Center interview series. While it’s difficult to link the current drought – or any one weather or climate event – directly to man-made climate change, Dabelko said that “the warming trends that we’re seeing and anticipating with climate change suggests that this is a preview of what may be to come.”
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From Youth Bulge to Food and Family Planning, Los Angeles Times’ ‘Beyond 7 Billion’ Series Synthesizes Population Challenges
›Over the next 40 years, the world is set to add 2.3 billion people. Millions more will join the middle class, pushing consumption upwards and further straining the world’s natural resources. Variables like climate change and political instability will exacerbate that strain and complicate efforts to bolster peaceful and stable development. Los Angeles Times correspondent Kenneth Weiss and photographer Rick Loomis examine these numerous and interconnected challenges in a five-part series on population growth and consumption dynamics.
Speaking to demographic and health experts (including a number of New Security Beat regulars, like Richard Cincotta, Jon Foley, and Dr. Joan Castro), Weiss provides a thorough, astute, and compelling assessment of population dynamics in a rapidly changing world. The series starts with a basic introduction to population, climate, and consumption dynamics and progresses through to discuss political demography, global food security, and detailed looks at two important case studies, China and the Philippines.
Part One: A Population Primer
Population growth alone poses a number of challenges as cities become more crowded and demand for basic resources like water and food outpaces supply. Climate change and the unpredictable and sometimes extreme weather that is its hallmark “will make all of these challenges more daunting,” writes Weiss. And “population will rise most rapidly in places least able to handle it.” Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, already expected to bear the brunt of climate change with rising sea levels, shorter growing seasons, and increasingly variable weather patterns, will also have to support the bulk of the world’s population growth by mid-century. Populations in Europe, North America, and East Asia are expected to stay stable or decline in numbers.
The magnitude of growth in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, however, is uncertain. What happens from here “hinges on the cumulative decisions of hundreds of millions of young people around the globe,” Weiss writes. And yet, “population growth has all but vanished from public discourse.” Family planning in particular remains hamstrung by “erratic funding and unpredictable crosscurrents.” The result, he writes, is that even “under the best conditions, it’s hard to get contraceptives into the hands of impoverished women who want them.”
Part Two: The Arc of Instability
Drawing on work from demographer Richard Cincotta, George Mason University’s Jack Goldstone, Population Action International, and others, part two of Weiss’ series examines youth bulges and the so-called “arc of instability,” stretching across the disproportionately youthful countries of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
When a large youth population is mixed with other societal conditions, like “religious and ethnic friction, political rivalries, economic disparities, or food shortages,” youth can be “the kindling” for a spark that ignites simmering tensions, writes Weiss. Afghanistan is a case in point, where unemployed young men are often turning to the Taliban not out of extremist fervor, but out of a desperate need to support themselves and their families. “It’s too hard to employ this many people and too easy to recruit them into violence,” Cincotta told Weiss.
And Afghanistan is just the beginning, according to Goldstone. “We are literally going to see one billion young people come into the populations in the arc of instability over the next two decades,” he said. “We can’t fight them. We have to figure a better way to help them.”
Part Three: Feeding a Growing Population
As the world’s population continues to grow, and as more families join the middle class, world food production will have to double by mid-century in order to meet future demand. “What that actually means,” says World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay, an agriculture specialist, “is that in the next 40 years we need to produce as much food as we have in the last 8,000.”Jon Foley on how to feed nine billion and keep the planet
Weiss presents the Horn of Africa and Punjab as microcosms of the problems facing global food production in the 21st century. Desertification and urbanization are eating away at potential cropland, while harmful farming techniques leech essential nutrients from soil, rendering it useless for future use. Insufficient infrastructure means that food spoils as it’s shipped from where it’s produced to where it’s needed, while extreme and widespread poverty means that those most in need can’t afford enough to feed their families.
Stuck between growing demand and restricted supply, the University of Minnesota’s Jonathan Foley said the challenge of the century is straightforward: “How will we feed nine billion people without destroying the planet?”
Part Four: Population and Consumption in China
China has “a greater collective appetite – and a greater ecological impact – than any other country,” writes Weiss, making it a prime example of “how rising consumption and even modest rates of population growth magnify each other’s impact on the planet.”
The country’s one-child policy slowed population growth rapidly, cutting fertility almost in half in less than a decade. Over time, a large working-age cohort with few dependents emerged, and helped China reap a demographic dividend. The resulting economic prosperity has come at a cost, however, as rising incomes and increasing consumption, spread across 1.3 billion people, have wreaked havoc on the country’s environment on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world.
Because of that scale, what happens in China will have global repercussions. Climate scientists “say that in order to avoid a potentially catastrophic rise in global temperatures, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions must be cut in half by 2050,” Weiss writes. “For that to happen, China’s emissions would have to peak by 2020” – 15 years earlier than official government projections. The government remains opposed to further limits on emissions, arguing that such limits would “cripple” economic growth – an unfair impediment considering that developed countries were able to “pollute their way to prosperity, their argument goes.”
Part Five: Family Planning in the Philippines
Weiss ends the series with an in-depth look at family planning in the Philippines – a country at the forefront of the global debate over access to contraception. Lawmakers in the 80-percent-Catholic country have steadfastly refused to fund family planning services, while support from the international community all but vanished when USAID, “the major donor of contraceptives to the Philippines,” said in 2008 that it would end its contraceptive program.
Today, half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended. Lawmakers are considering a “reproductive health bill…call[ing] for public education about contraceptives and government subsidies to make them available to everyone,” but a powerful opposition, including Church leadership, has stalled the bill for 14 years, Weiss writes.Joan Castro on population-environment programing in the Philippines
Public officials, including the former Manila mayor who ended the city’s contraceptive program 12 years ago, portray unbridled population growth as an economic asset, saying that “when you have more people, you have a bigger labor force.” For the millions of Filipinos who live in poverty, however, the lack of affordable family planning services leaves them with little control over family size and puts the Philippines on track to grow from 96.4 million people today to 154.9 million by mid-century. At that rate, the Philippines would be Asia’s third fastest growing country, behind Timor Leste and Afghanistan.
Not everything in the series is dire – there are side columns highlighting population, health, and environment programming in Uganda, Iran’s successful family planning program, and Dr. Joan Castro’s family planning and marine conservation work in the Philippines. But Weiss is not naïve about the challenges ahead. Under any of the United Nation’s population projections, “living conditions are likely to be bleak for much of humanity,” he writes. “Water, food, and arable land will be more scarce, cities more crowded, and hunger more widespread.”
“Even under optimistic assumptions, the toll on people and the planet will be severe.”
But while the population challenges facing the world are many, Weiss, like many before him, makes one argument clear: providing family planning services to the 222 million women who want to control the number of children they have but cannot would go a long way towards minimizing future strain.
Be sure to check out the photo and video features accompanying the “Beyond 7 Billion” series on the feature site.
Note: The sentence beginning with “When a large youth population…” was corrected.
Sources: Los Angeles Times, UN Population Division.
Video Credit: “The Challenge Ahead,” used with permission courtesy of the Los Angeles Times; Photo: “Dharavi,” used with permission courtesy of Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times; Jon Foley video: TEDx. -
Urbanization and the Global Climate Dilemma
›Urbanization and climate change may be the two most important trends to shape global development in the decades ahead. On the one hand, urban cities have the potential to serve as engines of change, driving economic growth in some of the world’s least developed countries and pulling more people out of poverty than at any other time in history. On the other hand, climate change could undercut all of this by exacerbating resource scarcity and putting vulnerable communities at risk from sea level rise and more frequent and intense storms.
Showing posts from category video.
“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 
